And yet another face….

Recently I started to post about some of the faces of the people who were profoundly affected by 9-11.  And in this post, I am going to talk about yet another face. The face of hate.  The face of intolerance.  Alive and well 60 years after the Japanese Internment Camps…. 

Televangelist Pat Robertson said the following about Muslims on his television program: “They want to coexist until they can control, dominate, and then, if need be, destroy.”

“The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil possessed of U.S. citizenship have become “Americanized” the racial strains are undiluted. It then follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112,000 potential enemies, of Japanese extraction, are at large today. There are indications that these were organized and ready for concerted action at a favorable opportunity. The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken...” — DeWitt’s Final Report: Japanese Evacuation from the West Coast, 1942, and the government’s brief to the Supreme Court defending Ex. Order 9066.

                                                                                                                                                              

 Political commentators have repeatedly pointed fingers at Muslims in America. William S. Lind, with the Free Congress Foundation, said: “There is no such thing as a peaceful Islam... Islamics [sic] cannot fit into an America in which the first loyalty is to the American Constitution. They should be encouraged to leave. They are a fifth column in this country.”

Syndicated columnist Ann Coulter said America “should invade their [Muslim] countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Coulter also called for the “mass deportation of Muslims.”

 

 

“I am for the immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep in the interior. Let ’em be pinched, hurt, hungry, and dead up against it. Let us have no patience with anyone whose veins carry his blood. Personally, I hate the Japanese and that goes for all of them.” — Columnist Henry McLemore, Sacramento Union, Jan. 30, 1942.

When that idea was raised on a radio show after the World Trade Center attacks, Kim Ima says, U.S Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., chairman of the House Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security Subcommittee, defended the 1942 incarceration of Japanese Americans. "Some (Japanese Americans) probably were intent on doing harm to us," Coble claimed, "just as some of these Arab Americans are probably intent on doing harm to us."

“We are so considerate of the minute constitutional rights and even of the political feelings and influence of people whom we have every reason to anticipate with preventive action!... The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over...”
— Westbrook Pegler, February 15, 1942.

Kirsanow raised the possibility of internment, for camps for the mass detention of Arab Americans, at a Commission hearing in Detroit on July 19. He did not condemn this idea, but raised it as a serious and reasonable possibility in the event of future terrorist attacks against the United States. He also stated that if the perpetrators of any such attack ‘come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights,’ and that ‘not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops, more profiling; there will be a groundswell of public opinion to banish civil rights.’” — Reference made to remarks by Commissioner Peter Kirsanow of the United States Commission on Human Rights at a Commission hearing in Detroit, Michigan on July 19, 2002.

From these circumstances has been forced that whatever the personal exceptions, Japanese loyalty is primarily to Japan... It is a principle that persons of Japanese blood who are loyal to Japan... It is a principle that persons of Japanese blood who are loyal to the U.S. and its ideals can show that loyalty by recognizing necessity. This is a fight for survival. In this fighting we cannot pussyfoot. We have to be tough, even if civil rights do take a beating for a time.” SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE February 21, 1942  “Facts Force America to Stop Pussyfooting”

“If I see someone [who] comes in that’s got a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over,” said Congressman Cooksey, a Republican member from Louisiana who sits on the International Relations Subcommittee for the Middle East and South Asia.

“Their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even Citizen Japanese.” — Henry L. Stinson, Secretary of War, l942.

Los Angeles, CA: Sign in the elevator at the Hall of Records says, “Kill all towel heads.”  September 13.01