By Veena Dubal, Staff Attorney
“To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily . . .” –Korematsu v. United States (1944)
“The September 11 attacks were perpetrated by 19 Arab Muslim hijackers who counted themselves members in good standing of al Qaeda, an Islamic fundamentalist group. Al Qaeda was headed by another Arab Muslim – Osama bin Laden – and composed in large part of his Arab Muslim disciples. I should come as no surprise that a legitimate policy directing law enforcement to arrest and detain individuals because of their suspected link to the attacks would produce a disparate, incidental impact on Arab Muslims, even though the policy’s purpose was to target neither Arabs nor Muslims.” –Ashcroft v. Iqbal, (2009)
In 1942, in the midst of World War, 120,000 Japanese Americans were sent by federal order to internment camps. Fred Korematsu resisted and was soon arrested and sent to Topaz, a camp in the Utah desert that was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and watchtowers armed with machine guns. Read the rest of this entry »
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