Fight terror withn non-terror

Ran across this from Mohandas Gandhi, something to think about just days after the Senate gave the president the power to "interpret" the "vague" Geneva Conventions when it speaks of torture. And once again, the silence from our church leadership is deafening. Gandhi, I'm sure, would have much to say about our fight-terror-with-terror approach to extremism. But I'll let him speak for himself.

In reply to photographer Margaret Bourke's question just hours before his assassination in 1947 about what he would do if the atom bomb came to India, Gandhi replied: "I will not go underground. I will not go into a shelter. I will come out in the open and let the pilot see that I have not a trace of ill will against him. The pilot will not see our faces from his great height, I know. But the longing in our hearts that he will not come to harm would reach up to him and his eyes would be opened. If those thousands who were done to death in Hiroshima, if they had died with that prayerful action--died openly with that prayer in their hearts--their sacrifice would not have gone in vain.

"Nonviolence is the only thing the atom bomb cannot destroy. Unless the world adopts nonviolence, the atom bomb will spell certain suicide for mankind. . . . The moral to be legitimately drawn from the supreme tragedy of the bomb is that it will not be destroyed by counter-bombs, even as violence cannot be destroyed by counter-violence. Mankind has to get out of violence only through nonviolence. Hatred can only be overcome by love. We have to make truth and nonviolence not matters for mere individual practice but for practice by groups and communities and nations."

Ceasefire anyone?