Below is part of a post by Dithers analogizing Iraqi Americans of today (wrt how you would conduct a loyalty-study of them) with the Japanese Americans during WWII, who, Dithers believes, were justifiably, and to the benefit to our country, thrown wholesale, on the basis of race, into the camps.
I'd be interested in seeing what others have to say about that. I suspect that that analogy (Japanese-Americans to Arab-Americans) is what makes some on the GWB thread so anxious to defend the shameful (to me) JA internments, but that's simply an intuition.
JC, have I fairly stated your position on the Japanese American internments above? If not, please modify. You might also want to expand your query to relate not only to Iraqis, which seems a quite arbitrary limitation except to make the analogy neater and the numbers smaller, but to all American Muslims of Arab descent.
Here's the question as posed by JC:
How would you conduct such a study? [He refers to the several-years study of JA Americans that had, before Pearl Harbor, "demonstrated a high degree of loyalty of Japanese American citizens," (a conclusion corroborated by Naval Intelligence.)] I mean you, E. Don't even constrain yourself to a wartime emergency situation or the primitive technology of the 1940's.
How would you do it today? Say 100,000 people of Iraqi descent are living in the USA. Your mission is to demonstrate whether, in the event of a conflict with Iraq, they would be loyal to the U.S. or to their land of heritage.
How would you go about conducting this study? Don't bother with the details, just give us a general idea of what your methodology would be to achieve a valid result.
I'd really be interested in the thoughts of anyone here about the standards for (a study? intelligence gathered on individuals, what?), rationale for, methods of, constitutionality of, morality of, interning Iraqi American citizens on the basis of their being Iraqis, or American Muslims on the basis of their being Muslims.
Japanese American citizens were interned (and impoverished, etc.) en masse solely on the basis of their being of Japanese descent.
If someone thinks Iraqi Americans should be distinguished from American Muslims from other Arab states, or possibly from Palestine, I'd be really interested to hear that discussed, too. |
