The campaign against Arun Gandhi: Time to support him

Two countries in the world have developed a media and propaganda power to transform every criticism of their policies into a sentiment of being victimised as a nation - the United States and Israel. Think tanks, media, blog monitors etc will come out saying that we are just “anti-American” and “anti-semite” the moment we criticise their wars, weapons – including nuclear weapons - and their occupations.

I for one have criticised the foreign policies of, say, Denmark or Sweden, but I have never been accused of being anti-Danish or anti-Swedish. These countries don’t have such opportunistic self-victimizing justification as legitimising force under-lying their policies. And they don’t have the propaganda machinery needed to influence world public opinion.

There are many reasons why these two countries tell us that we are racist rather than react matter-of-factly to what we say. One is that they are both super powers, the US worldwide. Israel is the only superpower in the Middle East with its 200-300 nuclear weapons and occupation policies since 1967 which is perceived as threatening by everyone else in the region and thus serve as major peace prevention.

Arun Gandhi was born in South Africa in 1935 and is the fifth grandson of Mohandas K. Gandhi. More important, he is co-founder and, until a few days ago, president of the M K Gandhi Institute of Nonviolence at the University of Rochester in New York. “Until a few days ago” I write because he has felt forced by the circles operating the opinion-manipulating system mentioned above to hand in his resignation from the institute that he co-founded in 1991.

The reason is this column of his in the Washington Post’s On Faith blog “Jewish Identity Can’t Depend on Violence”

Read it yourself and you’ll see that his message is about reaching out to your enemy and his urging the Jewish people will have peace, not violence, as an integral part of their identity.

Then read also his express and very precise apology for what could be perceived as a careless formulation. Here it is:

Should this very decent apology not be accepted by the offended people? No, they go the whole way no forgiveness there! If you bother, browse the attacking comments on that blog, including the university’s President Seligman – in about the same intellectual calibre as President Bollinger at Columbia when he introduced Iranian President Ahmedinejad.

Then compare for a moment with the ways the Serb as a people and Muslims as a whole have been demonized for years virtually without much lifting of eyebrows in the democratic West. Freedom of the press includes the freedom to demonize ad libitum – and it is being repeated these very days about Iran – and Serbs who don’t understand that it is in their own best interest to give away Kosovo, their civilisation’s cradle.

It’s time to look up! The Israeli-US lobby – so well described by Uri Avneri in his review of the most solid analysis of this lobby – will keep on bombing any criticism of the arrogant exceptionalist policies of their countries.

See also former CIA analyst Ray McGovern’s article on the Israel-US lobby's fear-based influence.


Three things we can do

1. Read more about Arun Gandhi. TFF Board member Vicky Samantha Rossi has travelled with him in India and did this interview with him last year.

There is also this one about the scandal from Associated Press.

2. You may then want to send a supportive e-mail to Arun Gandhi at arun@totalnonviolence.org


3. Finally let’s keep on speaking the larger truth about the Middle East, including the aspects we are not supposed to discuss. Some messengers will be silenced or even killed, but if we are more and more telling it in a balanced way - who knows? - diversity, free media and peace may become a reality one day in the – perhaps distant – future.

Empires, super power status and arrogance won’t last forever. Neither will the suppression of truth.

Ahimsa!

Jan Oberg