The Saddening, Dangerous Remarks of Franklin Graham

5. Graham is evoking one of the darker pages from our national history and somehow designating it a positive example.

In an article on the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History website, Steven Mintz writes:

The day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt suspended naturalization proceedings for Italian, German, and Japanese immigrants, required them to register, restricted their mobility, and prohibited them from owning items that might be used for sabotage, such as cameras and shortwave radios. …

Mintz goes on to say that Italian and German aliens and U.S. citizens owing their heritage to Italy and Germany, as well as some Bulgarians, Czechs, Hungarians and Romanians were placed in internment camps. Furthermore, anti-Semitism within the United States itself was at such a height that the United States sought to bar even Jewish refugee children from coming to the United States. Mintz writes:

Reflecting a nasty strain of anti-Semitism, Congress in 1939 refused to raise immigration quotas to admit 20,000 Jewish children fleeing Nazi oppression. As the wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration remarked at a cocktail party, “20,000 children would all too soon grow up to be 20,000 ugly adults.”

Following the invasion of Pearl Harbor, xenophobia reached such a height that President Franklin Roosevelt actually issued Executive Order 9066 in 1942, an order that allowed over 100,000 Japanese people (many of whom had been born in this country) to be sent to internment camps. Many were also unjustly deprived of property. Justice was finally brought about when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. A press release from 2013, found on the National Archives website reports:

The law, which was preceded by a detailed historical study by a Congressional commission, judged the incarceration “a grave injustice” that was “motivated largely by racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” It offered an apology and $20,000 in restitution to each survivor.

One would think the lessons of history would reveal that this was a fundamental violation of Constitutional rights–the deprivation of liberty without being charged with a crime. But why let the Constitution rule when you can have fear instead?

Instead of learning from history, Franklin Graham seems to be pushing us in a direction where we are doomed to repeat it. To be fair, Graham does not advocate internment camps as such, but if one is to so distrust all Muslims and view every one as a ticking time bomb, it’s a pretty easy step to make to move to internment camps and the deprivation of Constitutional rights.