This article is dedicated to my Muslim friends, former colleagues and students. The call has gone out for followers of ISIS living abroad to launch \u201clone wolf\u201d terrorist attacks.<\/p>\n
This is certain to cast a net of suspicion over all Muslims and persons from the Middle East, the vast majority of whom are peaceful, productive people. They include many who emigrated to escape the very oppression and violence that ISIS and other terrorist organizations advocate.<\/p>\n
But fear of the enemy within our nation of immigrants is nothing new.<\/p>\n
Most of my ancestors are German, and I grew up in a predominantly German community, hearing German words and phrases the way Cajun children in Louisiana hear French words and phases.<\/p>\n
Today most German\/Americans are fully assimilated into our society. But when my great grandparents arrived in the 1880s, they were outsiders who didn\u2019t speak English and had alien customs. They introduced their new neighbors to Christmas trees, hamburgers, hot dogs and beer … things that are now considered as American as, well, hamburgers, hot dogs and beer.<\/p>\n
But assimilation wasn’t always easy. In the last century, the United States fought two major wars against Germany. When the First World War broke out in 1914, many German\/American youths returned to Germany to fight for \u201cthe Fatherland.\u201d And three years later, there was great dissatisfaction in German communities when President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive who had campaigned on a promise to keep America out of the war in Europe, committed American forces to fight on the side of England and France in order to \u201cmake the world safe for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n
German\/Americans were derogatorily called \u201cHuns\u201d and viewed with suspicion by their neighbors and the government, sometimes with good reason. A picture of the Kaiser hung in many German homes.<\/p>\n
The arrival of American troops tipped the scales on the battlefields of Europe and led to the surrender of Germany. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was required to disarm, make substantial territorial concessions and pay the equivalent of $442 billion dollars in reparations for damage caused by the war.<\/p>\n
This left the German economy in shambles, its currency worthless; and set the stage for the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, who told the people that Germany had been stabbed in the back by international bankers and Jews and vowed to repudiate the treaty.<\/p>\n
In the years leading up to the Second World War, many German\/ Americans saw Hitler as the savior of Germany, and were opposed to further U.S. intervention in European affairs. Although Nazi persecution of the Jews was well known, in segregated America where blacks couldn’t sit at the same lunch counter as whites or use the same restroom, it was easy to overlook or dismiss it as anti-German propaganda. (The full extent of the Holocaust was either unknown or not believed until the final days of the war, when the Nazi death camps and crematoria were revealed.)<\/p>\n
Thus, the United States sat on the sidelines, content to send weapons, but no troops, to England and Russia as Nazi Germany took over one country after another and V-2 rockets rained down on London. And it might have stayed that way had Japan not launched its sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.<\/p>\n
Hitler had signed a mutual defense pact with his ally Japan. Four days after Pearl Harbor, in what some consider Hitler\u2019s biggest mistake, Germany declared war on the United States.<\/p>\n
At the time, more than 1.2 million people in the United States had been born in Germany; 5 million had two native German parents; 6 million had one native German parent; and millions more were of German descent. Despite the prominence and success of German\/Americans, the US government viewed persons of \u201cenemy ancestry,\u201d particularly recent immigrants, as a potential threat. The government used constitutionally questionable methods to control the enemy within, including internment, deportation, \u201calien enemy\u201d registration requirements, travel restrictions and property confiscation.<\/p>\n
While the actions taken against German\/Americans were not as egregious as those taken against Japanese\/Americans, under the Alien Enemy Act, more than 11,000 ethnic Germans and German nationals were held in detention camps, along with an unknown number of \u201cvoluntary internees\u201d who went to the camps to be with their spouses and parents.<\/p>\n
Today, the drumbeat of war grows louder with each new ISIS atrocity. I see no prospect of a peaceful resolution to the threat posed by Islamic fanaticism. We may not want to go to get involved in the affairs of the Middle East, but ISIS has declared war on us just as Hitler did, and we have no choice but to respond.<\/p>\n
We do, however, have a choice about how we treat our citizens and legal residents during time of war.<\/p>\n
In a recent speech at the University of Hawaii, Supreme Court Justice Scalia said the internment of the Japanese during World War II was wrong, then added \u201cYou are kidding yourself if you think the same thing would not happen again.\u201d<\/p>\n
President Roosevelt issued an executive order in 1942 authorizing the military to remove anyone from any area of the country, if the measure was deemed necessary for national security. That order remains on the books and has been enhanced by provisions in the Patriot Act passed after the 9\/11 attack and the National Defense Authorization Act signed into law by President Obama in 2012. These acts allow the indefinite detention without trial of persons suspected of aiding terrorists and give the military the power to carry out domestic anti-terrorism operations against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.<\/p>\n
If you think these measures are aimed exclusively at ISIS-inspired terrorism, you may want to consider statements by Attorney General Holder and reports by the Dept. of Homeland Security suggesting that right-wing \u201csovereign citizen\u201d groups are a greater terrorist threat to America than Islamic radicalism; the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS; and the Southern Poverty Law Center\u2019s recent labeling of Dr. Benjamin Carson as an extremist.<\/p>\n
The Bill of Rights was added to our Constitution to protect minorities from persecution by the government; not to protect the government from its critics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This article is dedicated to my Muslim friends, former colleagues and students. The call has gone out for followers of ISIS living abroad to launch \u201clone wolf\u201d terrorist attacks. This is certain to cast a net of suspicion over all Muslims and persons from the Middle East, the vast majority of whom are peaceful, productive [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":1498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[134,80],"yoast_head":"\n