World War II is Not a Sacred Feast on the Liturgical Calendar

A reader writes to comment on my remark that we should be profiling those who express enthusiasm for violence against the innocent, not on the basis of race or ethnicity and manages to be a stupid as possible:

We do not profile. We do not put people in camps because of their race or religion. We search grandma’s at airports while we leave the back door wide open for more terror in hundreds of ways.

Imagine if these rules had been in place during WWII. FDR would never had put Japs or Germans in camps or suspended any of our rights. What would have happened if several Japs had hijacked several planes and flew them into buildings killing thousands of peoople? What would have happened had Nazi’s openly preached hatred detailing that any attack on America was to be honored. With the countries we were then fighting, do you suppose that they would have used these openings to attack our country in every way possible? FDR would never have allowed it. Had he not prempted any of these attacks as he did, he would have been forced to do so after the first attack of any type by a Jap or Nazi sympathiser. As far as I know, we have not had an amendment to the constitutions chaning how we handle this type of thing since his day.

Teddy Rosevelt said in 1907 that immigrants that come here must become americans, not german americans or african americans or Japanese Americans or muslim americans. they need to come here to become part of our country, its culture, and its language. The more we have grown divided by these hyphenated names, but in any way making the illegal entry into our country in any way OK, or making everyone here a victim of some kind, we have harmed our country. Until the muslims can show strong support for America and fight to stop every one of their own from any act of terror or anti american attitude, they should be running the risk of being put away to insure our safety just as FDR did and Lincoln did in suspending rights. We can get back to the policitally correct lifestyle when they stop killing innocent people.

Thanks for that recycled rehash of good old racism, jumbled up with ignorant crap that learned all the wrong lessons from history. As a matter of fact we did not open camps for the indiscriminate internment of German-Americans during the war. Indeed, as the name “Eisenhower” suggests, we had no problem with Americans of German extraction fighting on our side and did not treat them as a fifth column merely on the basis of ethnicity. Why? Well, the fact that we *did* indiscriminately put Japanese in camps suggests that it had something to do with the fact that Germans look like other whites and Japanese do not. And the Japanese who did go to fight for the US fought nobly while their innocent relatives languished in camps. That’s because the problem is not racial, but lies in the heart. Germans who expressed empathy for Hitler were rightly watched by the state, not because they were German, but because they expressed empathy for Hitler. Similarly, Americans of whatever ethnicity who thought Stalin was a great guy were understandably suspect. Cheering for mass murder should be suspect. But merely being Russian should not.

I don’t expect Muslims to “show strong support for America” as a condition of being treated justly. There’s plenty about America that deserves strong condemnation (as all prolifers know) and anybody who loves America should be out front in condemning our nation’s sins, precisely because of our higher allegiance to God. I merely ask that Muslims *not* show strong support for butchers or make it their first priority to complain about persecution, or deflect criticism of Islam, when some Islamic butcher, acting as a pious Muslim, kills somebody in the name of jihad.

However, your notion that we need to stick all Muslims in concentration camps merely because they are Muslim is the sort of idiocy one hears all too often from the Bringin’ the Crazy Right, many of whom seem to believe that if something happened during WWII it is automatically hallowed and sanctified by that very fact. So let’s be clear: FDR’s racist internment of innocent Japanese was wrong. Comprende? Evil begins in the heart, not in the skin or the shape of the eyes. Profile according to ideas and opinions expressed in favor of violence against the innocent, not according to race or ethnicity.