[Vision2020] Pearl Harbor and September 11: Japanese Internment and Islamophobia

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Good Morning Visionaries:

Thanks, Deb, for alerting this list to our event this morning at the Farmer's Market.  My assignment was to write a column about the Task Force's topic.  The full version (attached) will appear on the front page of the Idaho State Journal's "Insight" section tomorrow.

I usually append the 780-word version of my columns below, but I will use a longer one today in honor of those who were lost and to urge sympathy for those who are still persecuted because of a very small minority of their faith committed a heinous act.

You can read my other essays on Islam at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/IslamPage.htm.

The longer version summarizes the history of religious and ethnic persecution in this country.  Will we ever learn? Why don't those who read their Bibles so carefully not heed the injunction in Exodus: "Don't oppress the alien because we were once aliens in Egypt" (23:9).

Let's work together to make sure that this never happens again,

Nick

PEARL HARBOR AND SEPTEMBER 11: JAPANESE INTERNMENT AND ISLAMOPHOBIA

When young people are indoctrinated into the Muslim ideal, how much 
are they willing to carry it out? It's no different than the Japanese kamikazes.
~2010 GOP congressional candidate Marvin Scott

I'm for catching every Japanese and putting them in concentration camps. 
This is a race war and the white man's civilization has come into conflict 
with Japanese barbarism. One of them must be destroyed.
~Mississippi Rep. John Rankin, December 14, 1941

At the turn of the 20th Century conjured threats of the Yellow Peril led to restrictions on immigration and denial of citizenship for all Asians already in the country. Earlier many believed that the Irish were a separate race and of course inferior to them, but racist Americans reserved their most hateful rhetoric for blacks and Asians. During World War I Germans were depicted as human monsters, but later the Japanese were pictured as apes or insects. 

In his book Cultures of War John Dower proposes the racism led to the U.S. lowering its guard before the Pearl Harbor and the September 11 attacks.  Even though we now know that there were clearing warnings that a Japanese attack was imminent, the commanding officer in Hawaii finally admitted that “I never thought those little yellow sons of bitches could pull off such an attack so far from Japan.”  

In early August 2001, while cutting brush at his Texas ranch, President George Bush received and then ignored an intelligence brief warning of terrorist attacks. Dower quotes a CIA agent who said that he could not believe that “a polyglot bunch of Arabs wearing robes, sporting scraggly beards, and squatting around campfires in Afghanistan could pose a mortal threat to the U.S.”  In two major attacks on the nation American racism came back on us with a vengeance.

The internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans—two thirds of whom were American citizens—was a major violation of basic human rights.  President Roosevelt caved into bigotry and hysteria even after receiving a report that confirmed what the FBI had known for years: Japanese Americans had “an extraordinary degree of loyalty to the U.S.” and “did not pose a threat to national security in the event of war with Japan.”

The man who oversaw the internment was evidently not satisfied with these assurances. Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt declared that “racial affinities are not severed by migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many Japanese born on United States have become Americanized, the racial strains are undiluted.”

The Congress was also complicit in this stain on America’s character.  A week after Pearl Harbor Mississippi Congressman John Rankin ranted: “I'm for catching every Japanese and putting them in concentration camps. This is a race war and the white man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism. One of them must be destroyed.” In 1944 the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the action ruling that it was a “military necessity.”

Calling the “relocation camps” what they really were—“concentration camps” —Harry Truman and many others spoke out against the evil deed. Forty-six long years later the critics were vindicated when President Reagan apologized to the Japanese American community and authorized the payment of $20,000 to each survivor.  Reagan was guided by the recommendations of a presidential commission, which concluded that the internment was based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership."

The principal reason given for internment was that there were spies among these hard-working innocent people. There were German, Italian, and Russian spies in the country during World Wars I & II and the Cold War, but no Russian was every imprisoned without due process and only a few resident alien Germans and Italians were interned at a camp in Crystal City, Texas. 

During World War II there were about 4,000 high level Nazi detainees outside Washington, D. C. at Fort Hunt Park. Instead of putting them in stress positions and water boarding them, American interrogators played tennis and rode horses with the prisoners, and some were even invited off base to dinners at local restaurants. Some of the detainees were scientists with knowledge of the German atomic bomb project, but no coercive techniques were ever used and the Geneva Conventions were strictly followed. 

Nazi Germany threatened Western civilization far more than Al Qaeda, so there must be deeper and darker reasons for the total disrespect shown to Muslim detainees. There was no question about the German prisoners’ participation in the war, but in Afghanistan most detainees were captured off the battlefield, rendered to the U.S. authorities for $5,000 bounties, bound, gagged, and hooded, flown half way around the world, and then subjected to the most gruesome interrogation techniques.  

In the aftermath of 9/11 the Japanese American Citizens League was the first to speak out against the blanket condemnation of Muslims.  Their families knew very well the humiliation and suffering caused by blaming every member of a religious or ethnic group for the crimes of a few. 

Today Japanese and Muslim Americans share many achievements in common.  They have higher incomes than the average 
American and they both value education very much.  Muslim American women have more college degrees than their male peers, and Japanese American students have the best showing in advanced placement than any other ethnic group.
We Idahoans are most familiar with the internment camp in Jerome County where 9,000 Japanese were imprisoned from 1942-45. After their release some residents of the camp went on to be become notable writers, composers, artists, attorneys, athletes, and businessmen. 

Less known even for those of us who live in Northern Idaho is the Kooskia Work Camp where 256 Japanese men were housed and helped construct parts of State Highway 12.  These men volunteered for this assignment and received wages for their work. State highway officials were impressed with the engineering prowess of their Asian workers. 

The Kooskia prisoners were the only Japanese Americans who were governed by the 1929 Geneva Convention, which gave them more rights than their compatriots in the other camps.  University of Idaho archaeologists have uncovered hundreds of artifacts from their daily lives, and there is evidence that people in the surrounding communities came to respect the peaceful, hard-working Asians in their midst.

The Council on American Islamic Relations and the Nikkei for Civil Rights and Redress currently sponsors special classes for 70 Japanese and Muslim students in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Spokeswoman Patty Wada said that the discrimination against Muslims is “sad and disappointing. This mentality just keeps repeating itself.”

Nick Gier taught philosophy at the University of Idaho for 31 years. Read his other essays on Islam at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/IslamPage.htm.
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