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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (89775)	11/27/2004 3:43:04 PM
From: E	Respond to of 108807

<the one good side of the assassinations is that they have not noticeably slowed the lines of Iraqis wanting to be Nat'l Guard, policemen, members of gov't, etc....To me this is a very inspiring indication ...>> Excerpts from the al jazeera link below: Iraqi unemployment reaches 70% [note: most sources give the figure as "exceeding 50%."] ...Dilemma Ala al-Qaisi, 56, a father of three who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, expressed disappointment with the fact that all the jobs seemed to be in the hands of the US authorities. "I cannot accept a job with the US authorities or a company which supplies them. I care about my image in the eyes of my children. After defending Iraq for eight years, how can I accept work with a country that is militarily occupying the country I fought for?" Lamya al-Tahir, a 48-year-old engineer, offered a different perspective. She said working with the foreigners to earn a living did not necessarily mean treason. "My husband's salary covers less than half of our needs. How can we feed our children? I cannot see my children starve. If those who are claiming to be patriotic really care for us, let them pay us salaries and we will not go to work with the US occupation," she said. english.aljazeera.net

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (89775)	11/27/2004 9:53:34 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I'm going ahead and pasting here the posts I mistakenly placed on GWB. Message 20805437 I am not familiar with the "methodology" of the Munson study, only that it was specifically to determine the loyalty of Japanese American citizens, took place over several years, determined that they demonstrated a "high degree of loyalty," and their findings were corroborated by Naval Intelligence. I'll guess though: They spied on them, and when they looked at the intelligence gathered over years, wrote the report. Since the study was corroborated by Naval Intelligence, I conclude that they'd gather some intelligence of their own on that community. "Results so explosive as to be hidden from sight"? How explosive is the news to a population in a "A Jap is a Jap" / "Yellow Peril" mood that a multi-year study of JA citizens showed them to have a "high degree of loyalty," and that the study was corroborated by Naval Intelligence? It sounds, in fact, calming, to me. Perhaps if the citizens who were so scared of their farmer and grocer neighbors (and pleased enough to buy their vacant homes and farms and goods for pennies on the dollar) had been allowed to see that report, their hatred and depredations would have been mitigated. (If mitigation was desired.) Army Intelligence, the FBI, and the Justice Department did see it, and they all opposed the internments. Even in retrospect, you don't. JC, you asked me a question about the victims of Karla Faye Tucker. This offers me an opportunity. I'm proposing that we trade answers! You've written that you used to teach, and didn't like reading the papers of your students, and made little comment on them. I've wondered why it is that you routinely decline to answer questions I ask of you, and wondered to myself whether such condescension might represent an extension of your self-described professorial mode. I've also observed, with frustration, that a change of subject is a routine response on your part to a question posed to you about a position you have taken. Or, I may post several points to you and have you ignore all but one, leaving me wondering why I bothered. I'll post my question, the one I'd really like to get an answer to, next, separately. Then I'll post for discussion by the thread your interesting analogy of the Japanese American situation in some respects to that of Iraqi Americans. (continued...)

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (89775)	11/27/2004 9:53:45 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Okay, continuation: You and I have discussed ad infinitum the issue of American internment of Japanese American citizens. I find it and the vicious racist rhetoric accompanying it in our media and from many government officials a shameful episode in our history. You have, I believe, (but I mix you up with JDB sometimes, I know; if I do that, or did it above, correct me) offered your theory that the reason they didn't commit treason was that they were incarcerated, and that their incarceration was reasonable. (You never responded to my query about why the Hawaiian JA's who were not interred didn't iyo engage in treasonous behavior.) You've expressed no regrets, no shame, for what our country did, unconstitutionally, to those of its citizens. (Though I believe you have moved recently to at least acknowledging that "the execution" of the internment of those citizens was less than perfect.) I'd like to get from you a direct answer to this question, and then maybe from the thread at large a discussion of the interesting question you raise in analogizing it in some respects to a situation that might exist with Iraqi Americans today, or impendingly. I'll post that question separately. This is a question I'd very much appreciate a direct, responsive reply to: Why weren't the assets of these American citizens who had never been charged with any crime protected? Their homes, their livelihoods, If it was felt (albeit not by the FBI, Army Intelligence, or the Justic Department) to be necessary for "security" to imprison thousands of innocent families? Was it an appalling injustice in your opinion for them to be impoverished as well as imprisoned? Do you suspect racism to be at the root, based on the rampant racist rhetoric so widespread at the time, and on the fact that it was known that there were hundreds of thousands of Nazi Bund members (the had rallies in Madison Square Garden, for example) and only the tiniest percentage of German Americans, all of them actual suspects, not merely citizens of German descent, were detained? Do you see the treatment of Japanese Americans, the incarceration itself, the harshness of the conditions imposed, and the impoverishment inevitably visited on those families, as shameful and unjust? Message 20805439

To: J. C. Dithers who wrote (89775)	11/27/2004 10:27:18 PM
From: E	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

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.