Driving into work on Thursday, J had the radio tuned to WMAL – which is a right of center (at best of times) radio station that carries Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh among their more well known commentators. Fred Thompson was filling in for Paul Harvey at the 8:30 “news” break, and finished his broadcast with this gem:

I feel bad for Nancy Pelosi, AND her neighbors. Anti-war activists from the group Code Pink have been giving her the same treatment the president gets at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. Camping on her San Francisco lawn, they’re demanding she cut off funds to the troops in Iraq.

Besides coolers and mattresses, protesters have brought along a giant paper mache statue of Mahatma Gandhi, who is pretty much the symbol of the anti-war movement. Code Pink was founded on his birthday, and when Saddam Hussein was being given a last chance to open Iraq to U.N. weapons inspectors, posters appeared around America asking “What would Gandhi do?”

And that’s a pretty good question. At what point is it okay to fight dictators like Saddam or the al Qaeda terrorists who want to take his place?

It turns out that the answer, according to Gandhi, is NEVER. During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

The so-called peace movement certainly has the right to make Gandhi’s way their way, but their efforts to make collective suicide American foreign policy just won’t cut it in this country. When American’s think of heroism, we think of the young American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, risking their lives to prevent another Adolph Hitler or Saddam Hussein.

Gandhi probably wouldn’t approve, but I can live with that.

© PAUL HARVEY SHOW, ABC RADIO NETWORKS

Original Audio

Now, having read a few books on Gandhi, this wasn’t news to me. But the red flags were going off in the back of my head. My belief at the time was that Thompson was pulling his most controversial quotes out of context, and sure enough, there is nuance to all three of Gandhi’s quotes. Sure enough, Wikiquote provides some of the key missing context:

I will be the first to admit that Gandhi’s ideas don’t make the most sense, but that’s with the perfect vision of hindsight. But at least someone should point out that Senator Thompson may have left out some of the critical ideas…. especially as he debates running for President in a field where some on the right and more on the far right are looking for a truly conservative candidate.