UPDATE V: "The real lesson of America’s Japanese internment camps is that fear makes us cowardly and vicious."
Read Slate, Refugee-Fearing Mayor Wants to Round Them Up, which notes that the Roanoke mayor must be "learning his constitutional history from one of those Texas textbooks that rewrites epic moral failures as valorous events."
The article also discusses a 1944 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Korematsu. "It involved Fred Korematsu, an American-born citizen of Japanese descent, who was convicted when he refused to leave his home in California in defiance of this order."
Shamefully, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction.
"Only through the long lens of history has the policy come to stand as a cautionary tale of what happens we betray core constitutional principles in times of fear and uncertainty. Today Korematsu is considered one of the court’s most cowardly opinions. A report issued by Congress in 1983 declared that the Supreme Court’s decision in Korematsu was 'overruled in the court of history' and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 contained a formal apology—as well as monetary reparations—to the Japanese Americans interned during the war. Justice Antonin Scalia has ranked Korematsu alongside Dred Scott, the 1857 decision denying citizenship to blacks, as among the court’s most shameful mistakes. In 1998, President Bill Clinton belatedly awarded Korematsu himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
But history also reminds us that the court itself did not speak with one voice when Korematsu came down. Even in the heat of the moment the three dissenting justices warned that the nation would someday regret the xenophobia and the recklessness the court itself had approved. . .
[One of those dissents was] penned by Justice Frank Murphy, who wrote that the exclusion of both alien and nonalien Japanese 'goes over 'the very brink of constitutional power,' and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.' Noting that the internment order 'deprives all those within its scope of the equal protection of the laws as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.' He contends that “no reasonable relation to an ‘immediate, imminent, and impending’ public danger is evident to support this racial restriction, which is one of the most sweeping and complete deprivations of constitutional rights in the history of this nation in the absence of martial law.”
And then Murphy arrives at the analysis that still today offers a clarion call to [the Roanoke mayor] David Bowers and the many, many David Bowers across the land who have used the events in Paris to call for vicious callousness to the plight of Syrian refugees: 'To infer that examples of individual disloyalty prove group disloyalty and justify discriminatory action against the entire group is to deny that, under our system of law, individual guilt is the sole basis for deprivation of rights. Moreover, this inference ... has been used in support of the abhorrent and despicable treatment of minority groups by the dictatorial tyrannies which this nation is now pledged to destroy. To give constitutional sanction to that inference in this case ... is to adopt one of the cruelest of the rationales used by our enemies to destroy the dignity of the individual and to encourage and open the door to discriminatory actions against other minority groups in the passions of tomorrow.”
Bowers’ statement about Syrian refugees ends with the caution that 'at least for awhile into the future, it seems to me to be better safe than sorry.' But maybe before he calls for group reprisals and racial stereotyping, he should reread these words from Murphy’s Korematsu dissent as a cautionary tale. They are as resonant today as they were in 1944: 'I dissent ... from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States.'"
Emphasis added, in the hope that even pissing-in-their-pants hysterical and cowardly Republi-cons might understand.
UPDATE IV: "In the name of one true Christianity or another, Catholics slaughtered Protestants and Protestants slaughtered Catholics with an energy and a ferocity that are impossible for us now to appreciate. Jews were always a tempting target. A pious czarist Russia countenanced 660 pogroms in 1905 alone — a statistic gleaned from Ferguson’s book 'The War of the World.'
Nazi Germany’s Catholic and Protestant clergy were largely mute as the nation’s Protestant and Catholic soldiers murdered with abandon. 'Protestants welcomed the Nazis' 'national revolution' with an enthusiasm and hope for spiritual revival comparable only to the fervor with which they had endorsed war in 1914,' writes Nicholas Stargardt in his new book, 'The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939-1945.'
Last month, Hindus in India allegedly murdered a Muslim man for killing a sacred cow. The placid Japanese of today were yesterday’s rapists and murderers of Nanking and performed hideous medical experiments on prisoners of war. Stalin, a former seminarian, killed millions; Mao did the same. Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jews — you name it — have at times been the barbarians Ferguson alludes to. As recently as 1995, Serbian Christians massacred about 8,000 Muslim men and boys at the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. . .
We all have the same enemy. It is not Islam. It is intolerance.
Read the Washington Post, In the wake of Paris, our common enemy is intolerance.
UPDATE III: Now the mayor of Roanoke, Virginia is citing the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII to justify public 'paranoia and ethnic' and religious bigotry.
The only thing that surprises me is that one of the Republi-con presidential candidates didn't think of it first.
Read the Washington Post, Before people start invoking Japanese American internment, they should remember what it was like, which notes that "[d]eclassified military documents show that the nation’s leaders embarked
on this vast incarceration project [of Japanese-Americans] mostly to quell the fears of the
the public."
The terrorist are winning the war of fear.
UPDATE II: "All our efforts are undermined by declaring Islam itself to be the enemy, and by treating Muslims in the United States, or Muslims in Europe, or Muslims fleeing Islamic State oppression, as a class of suspicious potential jihadists. Instead of blaming refugees, we need to make sure our counterterrorism and intelligence policies give us a chance to screen and stop any threat (which means keeping the post-9/11 structures of surveillance in place). But if U.S. politicians define Islam as the problem and cast aspersions on Muslim populations in the West, they are feeding the Islamic State narrative. They are materially undermining the war against terrorism and complicating the United States’ (already complicated) task in the Middle East. Rejecting a blanket condemnation of Islam is not a matter of political correctness. It is the requirement of an effective war against terrorism, which means an effective war against the terrorist kingdom in Syria and western Iraq.
As of now, that war is not being won."
Read the Washington Post, America’s politicians are feeding the Islamic State narrative.
Read also the Washington Post, Obama’s critics should stop playing political games over the Islamic State. which concludes: "Critics should offer viable alternatives. Or they should stop playing their games."
And read Slate, It Took All of Three Days for This Political Attack Ad to Air Demonizing Syrian Refugees.
UPDATE: "The attacks in Paris have inspired a xenophobic bidding war among Republican presidential candidates.
Gov. Bobby Jindal on Monday signed an order trying to get his state of Louisiana to block the settlement of any Syrian refugee, while Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, proposed we 'wake up and smell the falafel' and said House Speaker Paul Ryan should resign if he can’t block the refugees’ arrival. Candidates Ben Carson, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and John Kasich also joined the jingoistic bid to block Syrian refugees.
In a particularly pernicious twist, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz both floated the notion Sunday of admitting Christian refugees from Syria but not Muslims."
Read the Washington Post, Republicans’ xenophobic bidding war., which notes that "[t]his growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to
mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939. It’s perhaps the ugliest moment in a primary fight that has been sullied by bigotry from the start. It’s no exaggeration to call this un-American." It is also nu-Christian.
Listen to talk radio, the Republi-cons are pissing-in-their-pants hysterical.
"After the terrorist attacks Friday night in Paris, it did not take long for anti-Muslim forces to lash out around the world.
A mosque in Canada was deliberately set on fire Saturday, Ontario police say. In Oregon, anti-Muslim protesters held a rally outside the Portland Rizwan Mosque, one of them with a shirt that said 'Proud to be an infidel. Islam is a LIE.' In Florida, the Islamic Center of St. Petersburg received a bomb threat over voice mail: 'We are tired of your [expletive] and I [expletive] personally have a militia that is going to come down to your Islamic Society of Pinellas County and firebomb you and shoot whoever is there in the head,' the caller said, according to News 13. . .
This is what the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, wants.
'This is precisely what ISIS was aiming for — to provoke communities to commit actions against Muslims,' said Arie Kruglanski, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland who studies how people become terrorists. 'Then ISIS will be able to say, ‘I told you so. These are your enemies, and the enemies of Islam.'' . .
Extremist groups feed off of alienation, some counterterrorism experts say, and Islamist militants deliberately aim to make Muslims in the West feel isolated and turn against their own communities.
According to this line of thinking, acts of terrorism widen the cultural divide by provoking hate crimes against Muslims in the West. This strategy gained traction in the early 2000s after al-Qaeda was sent into hiding by Western military action. Abu Musab al-Suri, an influential jihadi thinker whom the Wall Street Journal called 'the new mastermind of jihad,' argued for a distributed network of terrorist cells recruited from the Islamic diaspora, carrying out terrorist strikes in their own communities. These attacks, and the backlash they generated, would inspire other to radicalize.
'What the Islamic State wants to do is to start a civil war,' political scientist Gilles Kepel said Saturday in an interview with French newspaper Le Monde. Kepel, a professor at Sciences Po and an Islamic State expert, has extensively studied the ideology and strategies of modern-day jihadis."
Read the Washington Post,
Hating Muslims plays right into the Islamic State’s hands.
Actually ISIS wants a religious war, and
Republi-cons are the terrorist's
useful idiots.
See also
Vote Republi-CON, the Party of Fear, Anger, and Hatred in 2016!
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