Relatives of Interned Japanese-Americans Side With Muslims

[kskiska]

Source: NYT

Holly Yasui was far away when a federal judge in Brooklyn ruled last June that the government had wide latitude to detain noncitizens indefinitely on the basis of race, religion or national origin. The ruling came in a class-action lawsuit by Muslim immigrants held after 9/11. But Ms. Yasui, an American citizen of Japanese ancestry, had reason to take it personally.

Her grandparents were among thousands of Japanese immigrants in the United States who were wrongfully detained as enemy aliens during World War II. And her father was one of three Japanese-Americans who challenged the government’s racial detention and curfew programs in litigation that reached the Supreme Court in the 1940s.

Now, Ms. Yasui, along with Jay Hirabayashi and Karen Korematsu-Haigh, a son and a daughter of the two other Japanese-American litigants, is urging an appeals court in Manhattan to overturn the sweeping language of the judge’s ruling last year.

The ruling “painfully resurrects the long-discredited legal theory” that was used to put their grandparents behind barbed wire, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Japanese alien population, the three contend in an unusual friends-of-the-court brief to be filed today in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

“Their interest is in avoiding the repetition of a tragic episode in American history that is also, for them, painful family history,” the brief states.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/03/nyregion/03detain.html

[EFerrari]

1. A ton of respect for these good people.

[The Sushi Bandit]

2. K&R

[Benhurst]

3. Good for them. Recommended #3

[Hekate]

4. R#4. Of all the people who should speak up, these are at the top of the list.I'm SO glad they are.

The internment of resident Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII was a shameful episode in our history, the repetition of which should appall every American.

Hekate

[Solly Mack]

5. Seems to be a running theme and not so much an episode

Sadly

I'm grateful to Holly Yasui, Jay Hirabayashi, and Karen Korematsu-Haigh

[ThomCat]

6. Wonderful!

This may wake some people up and get them to look beyond their anti-muslim prejudices to see what's really going on. No matter who gets detained indefinitely, without rights, it's still wrong.

[LiberalFighter]

7. I would support this judge and all others with like minded opinion to be detained indefinitely

[treestar]

8. Good for them

for opposing collective punishment based on race/religion.

[semillama]

9. These folks are heroes

In fact, they made me think that we need a "top ten progressive heroes" list every monday as a counterpart to the top ten conservative idiots.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. It wasn't just "the Japanese alien population"

It was anyone of Japanese ancestry.

[Lisa]

11. my parents were interned -- recently I took on a freeper in an argument

The guy was mouthing off about how he thought all Muslims should be subject to security screening. He even said he hoped that Maher Arar (the Canadian who was accused of being a terrorist) would be found to be guilty, and that all the "stupid liberals" who had come forward to defend him would be made to look foolish.

When I reminded him that not everyone who is accused of such things is guilty, citing my family's experience ... he blustered that "they probably deserved to be detained because they might have". (Oh, really? A public health nurse and an schoolteacher, who haven't as much as run a red light in all their 80-something years alive?)

I paused for dramatic effect, and said, "I hardly think so, sir ... they were barely 16 at the time."

He went bright red and slunk away.


p.s. remember the compensation money from the government? I confess that I've been spending my cut of it (I told my folks I didn't want any but they insisted) -- I've been giving it to organizations like Peaceful Tomorrows, the Crawford Peace House, and other groups which are speaking out against racial profiling.

And what Lydia said? She's absolutely right. My parents were both born here. I've heard that the cut-off was 1/8 Japanese ancestry (though there weren't a whole lot of mixed marriages, and even if there had been, most of the Japanese community in North America at the time wouldn't have been established long enough to have become great-grandparents). It freaks me out to think that if they ever try a similar measure in the future, a great-grandchild I had never even met would be locked up BECAUSE OF ME -- s/he could be Jamaican, Irish, Cherokee, Italian, Norwegian, Egyptian, and Sri Lankan at the same time, but the authorities would zoom in on the Japanese part.

So I consider it my duty to jump in anytime anybody starts talking about ethnic profiling, let alone mass relocations and internment camps.