Japanese Americans: House hearings on radical Islam ‘sinister’
During the chaotic days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Basim Elkarra was passing by an Islamic school in Sacramento when he did a double-take: The windows were covered with thousands of origami cranes – peace symbols that had been created and donated by Japanese Americans.
Amid the anger and suspicions being aimed at Muslims at that time, the show of support “was a powerful symbol that no one will ever forget,” said Elkarra, a Muslim American community leader in California.
It was also the beginning of a bond between the two groups that has intensified as House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) prepares to launch a series of controversial hearings Thursday on radical Islam in the United States.
Spurred by memories of the World War II-era roundup and internment of 110,000 of their own people, Japanese Americans – especially those on the West Coast – have been among the most vocal and passionate supporters of embattled Muslims. They’ve rallied public support against hate crimes at mosques, signed on to legal briefs opposing the government’s indefinite detention of Muslims, organized cross-cultural trips to the Manzanar internment camp memorial near the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, and held “Bridging Communities” workshops in Islamic schools and on college campuses.
Last week, Rep. Michael M. Honda (D-Calif.), who as a child spent several wartime years living behind barbed wire at Camp Amache in southeastern Colorado, denounced King’s hearings as “something similarly sinister.”
“Rep. King’s intent seems clear: To cast suspicion upon all Muslim Americans and to stoke the fires of anti-Muslim prejudice and Islamophobia,” Honda wrote in an op-ed published by the San Francisco Chronicle.
King has defended the hearings by arguing that the Muslim American community has not always been cooperative with the FBI and other law enforcement authorities in countering the growth of radical Islam. And he rejects accusations that he is demonizing Muslims and ignoring threats from other extremists.
In an interview Sunday on CNN, King noted that U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. “is not saying he’s staying awake at night because of what’s coming from antiabortion demonstrators or coming from environmental extremists or from neo-Nazis. It’s the radicalization right now in the Muslim community.”
But Honda compared King’s position not only to the wartime roundup of the Japanese, but also to the anti-Communist hearings staged by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to stay quiet and not say something,” Honda said in an interview this week. “We have to show people that as Americans, we’re not going to put up with this kind of nonsense.”
Although the youngest who were interned are in their late 60s, Japanese Americans remember what it means to be targeted during wartime because of their nationality.
After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered that all ethnic Japanese along the Pacific Coast be sent to one of 10 isolated internment camps in seven states. Of those imprisoned, 62 percent were second- or third-generation Japanese Americans born in the United States. Most lost their property to the government.
In 1988, Congress approved legislation that apologized and distributed $1.6 billion in reparations, blaming the roundup on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”
It was the memory of the camps that led the Japanese to reach out to their Muslim counterparts, said Kathy Masaoka, a high school teacher who co-chairs the Los Angeles chapter of Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress.
“It dawned on us that this is really something that could escalate among Muslims, the same things our parents faced,” she said. “They were being scapegoated.”
What followed was a candlelight vigil in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo and the “Bridging Communities” program, aimed at educating Muslim and Japanese high school students on diversity. Last year, 40 students participated in five seminars, sharing stories of challenges they face related to race, religion and ethnicity.
“They see clearly that they have similar experiences,” said Affad Shaikh, civil rights manager for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Even though the target group of the discrimination is different, the purpose of that harassment is the same.”
In Sacramento, CAIR and the Japanese American Citizens League sponsor an annual 350-mile bus trip to the Manzanar internment camp. More than 10,000 Japanese were interned there, an ordeal recounted in “Farewell to Manzanar,” the well-known 1983 memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston.
“When we met with the former internees, they told us how they coped,” said Elkarra, president of CAIR’s Sacramento Valley chapter. “The challenges they faced were a lot more difficult than anything we faced.”
Although the alliance between the two groups is rooted on the West Coast, it has also been on display in Washington, where the Japanese American Citizens League is headquartered. The league has worked with Arab American groups about racial profiling, meeting with the Department of Justice to urge officials not to detain people on the basis of race or religion, said Floyd Mori, the league’s national executive director.
As King’s congressional hearings have drawn near, Japanese American groups have condemned him. Last week, Mori co-authored a commentary with Deepa Iyer, executive director of South Asian Americans Leading Together, that said the hearings “will do nothing but perpetuate an atmosphere of alienation, suspicion and fear.”
Mori plans to send a staff member to the hearing. Honda, too, will be monitoring it, although he has not asked to testify and has not spoken with King about his concerns.
“We just feel very strongly that it does kind of point back to the time when just because we were of Japanese ancestry, people looked upon us with hate and terror,” Mori said. “This kind of hearing simply flames that kind of fire today.”
Written FOR
Desertpeace 
David Rosser Owen said,
March 9, 2011 at 16:51
The hypocrisy of Mr King is quite startling. He was quite happy to support, encourage, and endorse the actual terrorism of PIRA in the UK that caused the deaths of 3,312 British civilians, but now is turning on Muslims on the specious grounds that they were all responsible for the September 11, 2001, atrocities in New York – let alone the probability that none of them was.
Jan said,
March 9, 2011 at 19:45
I live in the NL.
I’m amazed on the hate in the USA on different subjects..
Why doesn’t the inhabitants of the USA accept their constitution? What is going on in education?
Questions, your country has to answer.
One day I will visit it – also knowing that no-one can be stigmatized. But know I have to work in the EU, in order to prevent the export of hate.
RoHa said,
March 10, 2011 at 01:12
“Japanese Americans remember what it means to be targeted during wartime because of their nationality.”
They were targeted because of their ancestry, not their nationality. They were American citizens, so their nationality was American.
bubajones said,
March 10, 2011 at 04:45
This is how our government always responds to tragedy–it’s almost formulaic:
* Step 1 – wait for tragedy to occur, or actually create the tragedy.
* Step 2 – spread propaganda through the media, so everyone believes your story about the tragedy
* Step 3 – pass laws, or institute policies, that take away people’s freedoms.
* Step 4 – justify the increased Tyranny by citing the propaganda in step 2.
911Israel said,
March 10, 2011 at 04:46
There is plenty of factual evidence compiled over the last ten years which prove the Muslims are an innocent victim of a false-flag accusation.
However, there are tons of evidence proving that ISRAEL DID 911.
http://theinfounderground.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=5367&start=0
bubajones said,
March 10, 2011 at 04:55
(snip)
‘May your noses always be cold and wet!’
We’re still a week away from the Ides of March, so Henry Kissinger will have to wait a little longer. That’s no reason why we can’t celebrate his un(soul)ed brother, Larry, ‘the rat’ Silverstein.
Larry looks like the kind of guy that gets arrested near a playground in a trench coat with a Hebrew National wiener strapped to his own. The reason for that is he is working the whole street’s worth of moms and kids. It’s not like there’s enough force in his own to make the Hebrew National salute. No amount of exposure is going to accomplish that. He has to be able to kill the women and children to get hard and I suppose the only positive result we get from that is the premature ejaculation.
Larry looks like a rat. He looks just like one of those NYC dumpster rats outside a Chinese Restaurant on Canal Street, dressed up in a three piece suit. I’m not singling the Chinese out for this. It might have something to do with Canal Street. I shouldn’t go on without giving you a picture of Larry along with some bio. I don’t think I have to use another link for the Ratster (who will be known from now on as Ratso Silverstein), because the Aussie who wrote this, and who I think may be connected to that Wake From your Slumber crowd, has said it all.
funny, but true…(more) :
http://profilesinevil.blogspot.com/2011/03/larry-silverstein-gives-shithouse-rats.html
Doug said,
March 10, 2011 at 05:54
Let’s not forget that King is an Israel-First Zionist Jew, who uses his position in Congress to manipulate this country to the betterment of Israel, at the cost of US security. The real threat to American security is in fact the Zionist, both Jew and Christian, who make the welfare of Israel their first and only concern.
America needs people in Congress who put America first, second, third, etc. all the way down to last, people who would be willing to sell Israel into bondage if it improved American security or the American economy. Unfortunately, almost all the Congresscritters have been blackmailed into supporting Israel first.
If anyone was responsible for 9/11, it was Zionists like King who enabled the Jewish state and allowed their agents unfettered access to the US, so that they could carry out their false-flag attack.
They should all be hung or deported or both.