Originally posted on Medium.
“The internment of the individuals of Japanese ancestry was caused by racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” —Civil Liberties Act, U.S. Congress, 1980
Seventy-four years ago today, Japanese pilots attacked the Pearl Harbor military base on the island of Oahu in the territory of Hawai’i. The unexpected attacks, which were intended by the Japanese to cripple the United States’s military capacity in the Pacific, would have many more unexpected consequences. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress calling December 7th, 1941 “a date which will live in infamy.” Within an hour, Congress voted to declare war against Japan—and brought the United States into World War II. It’s impossible to begin to list all of the ways in which the world we live in might be remarkably different had Japan not attacked the United States or had the United States chosen not to declare war, but we do know that the U.S. entry into the war would ultimately result in the allies’ victory and Japan’s defeat. The Pearl Harbor attacks also catalyzed an intense anti-Japanese fervor across America, prompting the imprisonment of over 100,000 people of Japanese descent in internment camps across the western United States whose only crime was, allegedly, their ethnicity.
I grew up in Hawai’i on the island of Oahu, just an hour drive away from Pearl Harbor.
I’ve been to the Arizona Memorial—a memorial to those lost in the Pearl Harbor attacks, built with the remnants of the USS Arizona—many times. Every time I go, I’m still moved to tears when I try to wrap my head around the senseless tragedy and everything it precipitated. I’ve felt similarly overwhelmed with thoughts and emotions after visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, where I live now. How could it be that an entire nation stood idly by and let people of my heritage be rounded up and exterminated? As a Jew who grew up in Hawai’i, I feel a deep personal connection to the history of the WWII era and a deep conviction to not see the mistakes of our past replayed.
Learning these histories as a child, I could never understand how a country that went to war against the Nazis to liberate Jews and others from the concentration camps could simultaneously lock up tens of thousands of its own citizens. Clearly this was the height of hypocrisy. How could the people of our nation could let such a thing occur? Even in Hawai’i where Japanese were the largest ethnic group by population, over 1,000 innocent Japanese were interned. Who were the millions that supported these fascist and xenophobic policies—that made a mockery of human dignity and so violated the tenents of liberty our nation was supposedly founded upon? Who were the millions that remained silent and allowed their political leaders to carry out this injustice? Would I have been one of them?
Now, I have an answer.
Since the horrific attacks that took place in Paris on November 13th, the anti-Arab/Islam0phobic rhetoric in this country has reached an all-time high. When I visit the Holocaust Museum, I consider how grateful I am not to be a Jew in Germany in the 1940s. When I visit the Arizona Memorial, I’m grateful to have not been Japanese in California during that same period.
When I log onto Facebook, pick up a newspaper, or turn on the TV, I am grateful I am not Arab in America today.
We have seen Governors in over 30 of our states vow to close their doors to
refugees fleeing the same terror that we fear.
We have seen elected officials—and candidates for the highest office in the land—propose registering and creating a database for all Muslims (just as they did to Jews in Nazi Germany) and placing Muslim Americans in internment camps (just as they did to the Japanese in WWII America).
This has now escalated to the point where today—December 7th, 2015—the frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of our two major political parties, Donald Trump, has called for a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. This announcement was followed by intense cheers from the thousands of people at his campaign rally. That is what truly scares me.
The Americans who supported Japanese internments and the Germans who supported Jewish concentration camps were simply the people who let their fear for their own safety override their care for the protection of all people—regardless of their race, ethnicity, color, or religion. They were the people that believed terror came only from certain cultures and peoples, and did not recognize the terror they themselves were capable of inflicting. These are the same people—millions of them—who, in response to terrorist attacks, are supporting the xhenophobic and fascist policy proposals of Trump and others in the United States today. When a white man kills 9 innocent black people in a church and claims affiliation to the KKK and the Confederacy, we do not blame “white culture” writ large—we condemn violence, extremism, and hatred. When Arab-Muslims commit similar acts of terror, we condemn an entire people to our own violence, extremism, and hatred.
The video of Trump saying he would ban our Muslim brothers and sisters from this country appeared in my Facebook timeline right next to a post commemorating the attacks on Pearl Harbor, and I felt compelled to write this, because I refuse to let December 7th, 2015 be “a date which will live in infamy.” Those of us who have studied and have learned from the mistakes of the past cannot remain silent while hateful rhetoric continues to stir fear across our nation. If we are capable of locking up Japanese Americans because of the actions of a foreign army—even while fighting against a similar evil being perpetrated against American Jews abroad—I have every belief that we are capable of doing horrible, horrible things to Arab and Muslim Americans in “retaliation” for the Paris and San Bernadino attacks. Let’s not be so foolish or naïve to believe that our species has evolved so dramatically in the course of a few generations that we are not capable of committing societal atrocities. If we allow this vitriol to remain unchecked, it will continue to spread like a cancer and devour this nation. If you have ever loved a human being, then you are capable of loving all human beings. As Cornel West says, “Justice is love made public.” That is the only cure for this cancer that I know of.
I do not know whether I would have been one of the millions of Americans that remained silent and allowed my Japanese brothers and sisters to be taken away to America’s concentration camps after the Pearl Harbor attacks, but I will not be one of the Americans that remains silent and lets history repeat itself…seventy-four years later.
Update, December 8th, 2015: In response to a line of questioning from Good Morning America host George Stephanopoulos, Trump has now endorsed (at about 4:30 into this clip) the full suite of the United States’ oppressive policies targeting Japanese, Italians, and Germans under FDR during World War II for Muslim-Americans—everything short of internment.
