You’d think that watching Trent Lott shoot himself in the foot would make an impact on people. Apparently that’s not the case for North Carolina congressman Howard Coble, who sees no problem with WWII-era Japanese-American internment camps.
A congressman who heads a homeland security subcommittee said on a radio call-in program that he agreed with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., made the remark Tuesday on WKZL-FM when a caller suggested Arabs in the United States should be confined. Another congressman who was interned as a child criticized Coble for the comment, as did advocacy groups.
Coble, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, said he didn’t agree with the caller but did agree with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who established the internment camps.
“We were at war. They (Japanese-Americans) were an endangered species,” Coble said. “For many of these Japanese-Americans, it wasn’t safe for them to be on the street.”
When pressed for an apology by groups rightly surprised and outraged over this remark, Coble said he didn’t feel that he needed to apologize.
Coble said Thursday he intended no offense, but still believes he was right.
“I apologize if I offended anybody,” he said. \”I certainly did not intend to offend anybody.
“I certainly intended no harm or ill will toward anybody. I still stand by what I said…that, in no small part, it (internment) was done to protect the Japanese-Americans themselves.”
“I may give a statement (later) further clarifying,” he said, “but I don’t think I said anything that calls for an apology.”
Eric at IsThatLegal? is doing an excellent job of following ‘Coblegate’, with a lengthy rebuttal examining Coble’s statment that the internment was for the protection of the Japanese-Americans.
…the Carter-Munson plan was the only plan for dealing with Japanese Americans that took their security into account in any way. And it never got off the ground.
Why didn’t it get off the ground? For four main reasons. First, by late January 1942, General John DeWitt (the commanding officer of the West Coast Defense Command) and his advisor Karl Bendetsen had become persuaded that mass action to remove all people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast was necessary for military reasons. Their viewpoint was fed largely by outrageous rumors of Japanese American subversion, none of which ever panned out.
Second, by mid-January, a rabidly racist press along the Coast had begun campaigning for the eviction of all “Japs” from the area–not for their protection, but because they could not be trusted.
Third, white farmers in California began lobbying ferociously for the removal of all people of Japanese ancestry–not to protect them, and not even really for national security reasons, but to drive the very successful Japanese farming industry out of business.
And fourth, their lobbying, and the voices of the editorialists, succeeded in pushing most of the congressional delegations of the West Coast states to demand mass exclusion.
Rep. Coble needs to apologize. And the rest of America’s electorate really need to realize that these short-sighted, racist, and inflammatory remarks are neither likely to “slip under the radar” as they did in pre-internet days, nor are the people they affect going to just shrug them off. It’s time to grow up.
(Via Meg Hourihan and Dave Winer)