Rep. Howard Coble (R-NC) (already one of my favorite Congresspeople for his support of allowing copyright owners to hack into suspected pirates’ PCs) has just made another brilliant statement.
According to an AP report in the Charlotte Observer, during an interview on a radio call-in show, Coble was asked whether he believed all Arabs in America should be put into prison camps.
“We were at war. They were an endangered species,” Coble said. “For many of these Japanese-Americans, it wasn’t safe for them to be on the street.”
The US government has officially apologized to the Japanese-Americans who were interned, offered them restitution, and passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which acknowledged “the fundamental injustice of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of United States citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese ancestry during World War II.” But, according to Coble, it wasn’t really wrong because we interred a group of American citizens for their own safety.
Haven’t our Congresspeople learned anything from the Trent Lott affair: the policies of the past are dead and gone. Racism directed against any group is unacceptable. Expressing admiration for prison camps, Jim Crow or Hitler demonstrates the unfitness for service of someone who is supposed to represent the people. I don’t know how many Arab-Americans and Japanese-Americans live in Coble’s district, but I hope they — and anyone else with a shred of sensitivity — will remember this idiocy come November, 2004. (Of course I have no great faith in the racial sensitivity of a state which repeatedly elected the racist Jesse Helms to the US Senate.)
What makes this statement particularly dangerous is that this idiot has recently been chosen to chair the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security. This is the Congressional overseer of, among other agencies, “… [the] Bureau of Prisons and administrative aspects of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.” Handy place to be if you want to start some new internments.
