Search This Blog

Translate

Blog Archive

Middleboro Review 2

NEW CONTENT MOVED TO MIDDLEBORO REVIEW 2

Toyota

Since the Dilly, Dally, Delay & Stall Law Firms are adding their billable hours, the Toyota U.S.A. and Route 44 Toyota posts have been separated here:

Route 44 Toyota Sold Me A Lemon



Friday, November 18, 2016

George Takei: They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims



George Takei: They interned my family. Don’t let them do it to Muslims.

The United States apologized for locking up Japanese Americans. Have we learned nothing?

 

There is dangerous talk these days by those who have the ear of some at the highest levels of government. Earlier this week, Carl Higbie, an outspoken Trump surrogate and co-chair of Great America PAC, gave an interview with Megyn Kelly of Fox News. They were discussing the notion of a national Muslim registry, a controversial part of the Trump administration’s national security plans, when Higbie dropped a bombshell: “We did it during World War II with Japanese, which, you know, call it what you will,” he said. Was he really citing the Japanese American internment, Kelly wanted to know, as grounds for treating Muslims the same way today? Higbie responded that he wasn’t saying we should return to putting people in camps. But then he added, “There is precedent for it.”
Stop and consider these words. The internment was a dark chapter of American history, in which 120,000 people, including me and my family, lost our homes, our livelihoods, and our freedoms because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. Higbie speaks of the internment in the abstract, as a “precedent” or a policy, ignoring the true human tragedy that occurred.
I was just a child of 5 when we were forced at gunpoint from our home and sent first to live in a horse stable at a local race track, a family of five crammed into a single smelly stall. It was a devastating blow to my parents, who had worked so hard to buy a house and raise a family in Los Angeles. After several weeks, they sent us much farther away, 1,000 miles to the east by rail car, the blinds of our train cars pulled for our own protection, they said. We disembarked in the fetid swamps of Arkansas at the Rohwer Relocation Center. Really, it was a prison: Armed guards looked down upon us from sentry towers; their guns pointed inward at us; searchlights lit pathways at night. We understood. We were not to leave.






Questions over the idea of creating a database of Muslim immigrants are coming up as President-elect Donald Trump forms his new administration. A Trump surrogate defended the idea on Fox News, saying the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII was "precedent." (The Washington Post)

Higbie similarly has kept open the specter of the camps, in one breath stating that he does not favor the idea, but in the very next noting, “We have to protect America first.” Indeed, in a follow-up interview with the New York Times, Higbie doubled down on the unthinkable: “There is historical, factual precedent to do things [that] are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security.”
Let us all be clear: “National security” must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than our enemies.
Let us also agree that ethnic or religious discrimination cannot be justified by calls for greater security. During World War II, the government argued that military authorities could not distinguish between alleged enemy elements and peaceful, patriotic Japanese Americans. It concluded, therefore, that all those of Japanese descent, including American citizens, should be presumed guilty and held without charge, trial or legal recourse, in many cases for years. The very same arguments echo today, on the assumption that a handful of presumed radical elements within the Muslim community necessitates draconian measures against the whole, all in the name of national security.
It begins with profiling and with registries, but as Trump and Higbie have made clear, once the safety of the country is at stake, all safeguards are off. In their world, national security justifies actions that are “sometimes not right,” and no one really can guarantee where it will end.
We cannot permit this invidious thinking, discredited by history at the cost of so much misery and suffering by innocents, to take root once again in America, let alone in the White House. The stigmatization, separation and labeling of our fellow humans based on race or religion has never led to a more secure world. But it has too often led to one where the most vulnerable pay the highest price.
The Constitution and the government exist in large measure to protect against the excesses of democracies. This is particularly salient when, in an atmosphere of fear or mistrust, one group is singled out and vilified, as Japanese Americans were during World War II and as Muslim Americans are today. How terrible it is to contemplate, once again, that the government itself might once more be the very instrument of terror and division. That cannot happen again. We cannot allow it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/11/18/george-takei-they-interned-my-family-dont-let-them-do-it-to-muslims/?utm_term=.56e62b19e18b


"First they came for the Muslims..."
We must all answer, in one voice, "not on our watch, M**therf**kers!"
"Higbie similarly has kept open the specter of the camps, in one breath stating that the does not favor the idea, but in the very next noting, “We have to protect America first.” Indeed, in a follow-up interview with the New York Times, Higbie doubled down on the unthinkable: “There is historical, factual precedent to do things [that] are not politically popular and sometimes not right, in the interest of national security.”
Let us all be clear: “National security” must never again be permitted to justify wholesale denial of constitutional rights and protections. If it is freedom and our way of life that we fight for, our first obligation is to ensure that our own government adheres to those principles. Without that, we are no better than our enemies.
Let us also agree that ethnic or religious discrimination cannot be justified by calls for greater security. During World War II, the government argued that military authorities could not distinguish between alleged enemy elements and peaceful, patriotic Japanese Americans. It concluded, therefore, that all those of Japanese descent, including American citizens, should be presumed guilty and held without charge, trial or legal recourse, in many cases for years. The very same arguments echo today, on the assumption that a handful of presumed radical elements within the Muslim community necessitates draconian measures against the whole, all in the name of national security.
It begins with profiling and with registries, but as Trump and Higbie have made clear, once the safety of the country is at stake, all safeguards are off. In their world, national security justifies actions that are “sometimes not right,” and no one really can guarantee where it will end."

 link.

Shredding democratic traditions, one image at a time.

THINKPROGRESS.ORG|BY JUDD LEGUM

Trump's first meeting with a foreign leader looks like the kind of pictures you would get if the Japanese Prime Minister visited the Sheikh of Qatar, not the President of the United States. He and his daughter, who is also managing his business interests, hold court in their private, gilded palace. Bear in mind, Trump has been unprecedentedly ducking the press since he was elected. This photo was released by the transition team. He wants the world to see this image, and know that America is now a kleptocracy, that his family, not government officials, are the route to his favor, and that he is using the presidency to enrich himself, and cares not a whit for American democracy. The last time America had a ruler like this, his name was King George III. We declared our Independence from George.

No comments: