In response to the article Japanese Internment: Why It Was a Good Idea-- And the Lessons it Offers Today by Daniel Pipes, I am first of all ashamed as a human being and also fearful for the security of our American liberties. As an author of the Middle East Forum, Mr. Pipes defends his view that Americans should have the right to specifically target certain groups based on faith, race, or ethnicity. He applied this concept to Muslim Americans after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then justified it based on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
In this wrongful imprisonment, Executive Order 9066 by President Roosevelt allowed for over 120,000 Japanese decedents in the U.S. (over 2/3 of them being citizens) to be directed to several "concentration camps" scattered across the plains and western coast. This order followed the 1942 attack on Pearl Harbor and the resulting White-Anglo fear of Japanese American espionage in the developing war on Japan. During the war years, Japanese Americans were forced to live in these camps often separated from their families and stripped of their personal liberties. Daniel Pipes believes we should renew this "revisionist interpretation" on national security in light of September 11th, 2001.
Even more disconcerting is the Cornell Study Daniel Pipes cited in the article. Over 44% of the U.S. population agrees with him. Nearly half of our population defends targeting specifically Muslim Americans "either by registering their whereabouts, profiling them, monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating their organizations."
Here's where Mr. Pipes went wrong. Terrorism does not identify with one nationality, faith, or skin color. Radical Christian terrorists have blown up abortion clinics, while radical Muslim terrorists have blown up office buildings in New York City. The identifier here is "radical", but tell me, can you point out a radical Muslim from a non-radical Muslim? If you can pick them from the group of over one million in the United States, then I suppose Daniel Pipe's view on national security is unnecessary. I would also venture to say that not all one million Muslims in the U.S. are radicals, and that all radical Muslims do not attend one mosque. Unless we are willing to sit next to FBI agents in our Baptist churches as well as Jewish synagogues, we cannot allow infiltration of strictly Muslim territories.
When did America become the land of the free and the land of "those people"? Is it justified in our founding documents that Americans can group discriminate against other Americans? Is our country one in which citizenship relies on valid documentation and due process, or is citizenship based solely on the color of our skin, the basis of our faith, or our national origin? If all men were destined by God to be created equally in 1776, then certainly they are still born equal in 2012.
Although Mr. Pipes ended his article with the claim that the Reagan administrations reparations were "premised on faulty scholarship", I find that moral wrongs are still wrong despite any hidden files, transcripts, or records. Ronald Reagan knew that it was morally unjust to strip those 120,000 American citizens of their rights, and that it was deserving of an apology. Furthermore, if Ronald Reagan's administration felt compelled to offer apologies and reparations for the Japanese-American internment of World War II, stripping American citizens of their rights is just as wrong today.
