Because Gandhi Was Right

An Op Ed for The Santa Cruz Sentinel

Two summers ago, I spent a long day walking the crowded hallways of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust Memorial in West Jerusalem. It’s an overwhelming place that seems to beat like a broken heart. Stories and pictures, old movies and names. There’s no let-up. There’s no sweet resolution to the tortured story. And at the end of the day: a huge, dark room rippling with the reflections of a million thin lights. A memorial to the children murdered, stolen, taken so young.

I think of that day as I see the faces of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Nadal Malik Hasan, fixed now to the front page of my morning paper. One masterminded the horrific events of September 11, 2001; the other killed 13 and wounded dozens more at Fort Hood last week. It may be unfair to link their destructive choices with the Holocaust; just the same, their faces now recall the cruelty of German Nazis who calculated the cost of bigotry and genocide and found it worth their effort and spirit. What drives men to such lunacy?


Just the same, in my morning prayers this week, I’ve been saying their names out loud and praying for them: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Nadal Malik Hasan. I abhor what they’ve done, and there’s no way I can possibly understand it. I ache for the blood they’ve spilt and the families they’ve torn to pieces. Still, I find myself half-whispering their strange names, synonymous now with murder and even evil. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.

I don’t claim to be a historian, but it seems to me that fear and ignorance breed bigotry and genocide. We’d do well to explore that evolutionary process: how fear morphs into something so brutal and wretched. Executing Mohammed and Hasan does nothing to alleviate fear; it does nothing to overcome ignorance and bigotry. On the contrary, I think, retribution of that sort stirs bloodlust while healing nobody’s wounds. “An eye for an eye,” Gandhi said, “makes the whole world blind.”

I suppose it’s easy to think that we can rid ourselves of men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Nadal Malik Hasan. But I wonder if it’s really that easy. The human task is more demanding, more complex. Ultimately, it requires soul-searching on all sides. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. It’s too much to think we’ll ever learn much from Mohammed or Hasan. But we have so much to learn from one another: about our fears, about ignorance, about the madness that exalts violence as some kind of courage or truth. In the meantime, I pray for Mohammed and Hasan everyday. And I beg my country to resist every urge to kill them, execute them, martyr them. We simply must do better. Because Gandhi was right.