Monday, May 29, 2017

Beinart's favourite posturing

From Beinart's feverish pen comes this latest gem:

Why Israel Should Embrace This ‘Palestinian Gandhi’ — Not Jail Him

"Unfortunately, the Israeli government does not yearn for Palestinian Gandhis." he laments later in the article.

No, no Israeli or Jew should yearn for any Gandhi.  As a Jew who likes to adorn himself with his pristine Jewishness, Beinart should know his people's history, as it actually unfolded, not as he arranges it in his imagination.

In what role can Gandhi, possibly, serve as a moral model for Jews, or anybody?

Never mind that Gandhi implacably stated:

"The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me."

Never mind that he openly admitted knowing that

 "the German persecution of the Jews seems to have no parallel in history."

What was his humanistic solution? Denial of national home on the one hand and German genocidal threats fully perceived as real on the other, what were the Jews to do?

But never fear. He had a solution. The saintly Mahatma calmly proposed in 1938:

" If I were a Jew and were born in Germany.. as the tallest gentile German may, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this, I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance but would have confidence that in the end the rest are bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can... But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep."

When asked by his biographer Louis Fischer,

“You mean that the Jews should have committed collective suicide?” 

Gandhi answered


“Yes, that would have been heroism.”

In 1946, he said

“Hitler killed five million Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs. As it is, they succumbed anyway in their millions.” 

Gandhi was severely disappointed in the Jews for the Holocaust.

There is no winning with this guy, no survival, no life, no future for the Jews. This is the moral model that Beinart raises his gaze to, in utter cringe.