Why the Japanese Internment Still Matters

Submitted by Andy (United Kingdom), Dec 28, 2004 at 08:53

BBC Radio 4 this morning interviewed a German Jew , who has written a a book called "I wore a yellow star".The book is being adapted for the theatre in Berlin, where this lady now lives, again. In the Nazi era, she was one of just a few thousand Jews who survived because fellow non-Jewish Germans hid them. She survived to go to the UK arfter the war was over, where her father had immigrated just before the war broke out.

She said that on entry to the UK, she was treated as a German alien, even though her father had been well established in England.
In both world wars German Jews were interned in the Isle of Man.

The resort to checking all people of a specific religion and/or ethnic group because a few, proporting to be of the same faith, have resorted to murder to promote their views, is simply laziness. If due effort was made to check the details of all Muslim Americans or recent Muslim immigrants, there would be no need to think about focusing on all Muslims in order to detect Islamist terrorists.

The long term-effects of this type of lazy, grape-shot method of filtering the population for terrorists or sleepers will probably far out-weigh the advantages of using the proper method: keeping full records on all people of Muslim faith resident in the States.

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