japanese internment
=<div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/from-ghettos-to-concentration-camps-the-battle-over-words/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/from-ghettos-to-concentration-camps-the-battle-over-words/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">HNN</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What’s in a name?,” Juliet famously asks in Act II of Shakespeare’s </span><em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Romeo and Juliet</em><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. For Juliet, the answer is perfectly obvious: nothing. It should not matter that her sweetheart Romeo is a Montague and she a Capulet, feuding families in the strife-riven city of medieval Verona. “Tis but thy name that is my enemy,” Juliet assures Romeo. He could cease to be a Montague, he could cease even to be Romeo, and he would remain her beloved. “O! Be some other name: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”</span></font></div><div class="p1_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Juliet’s answer is difficult to square not only with the ultimate fate of the star-crossed lovers in Shakespeare’s play but also with the controversies that frequently attend the application to someone or some thing of a highly charged label. We tend to think we have minimized the scope of disagreement when we boil a debate down to semantics. The reality is that so many of our cultural arguments manifest as arguments over words, over what they mean, how they are used, and who gets to define them.</font></p><div class="p2_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><div class="alt_ad_block story-page-in-content-graph-2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /></div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The past week has offered yet another reminder of this truth. On Tuesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fiery left-wing freshman Democrat from New York, blasted the Trump administration on Twitter for creating “concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.” Her description of immigration detention centers as “concentration camps” precipitated a riposte from Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, who, likewise in a tweet, scolded Ocasio-Cortez for betraying the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust with her choice of words. The days since have seen further sharp exchanges on this issue, as politicians from opposing sides of the aisle, op-ed columnists, Jewish organizations, cable news journalists, and, of course, the Twitterati on the right and the left have weighed in on whether the “concentration camp” designation is appropriate or misplaced.</font></p><div class="p3_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is far from the first time the usage of a term with Holocaust associations has provoked a backlash. Some of the same arguments that are now being made to rebut the labeling of detention facilities as “concentration camps” were trotted out in the past to resist the naming of segregated African American neighborhoods as “ghettos.” In 1964, the American Jewish intellectual Marie Syrkin wrote, “In the immediate as well as historic experience of the Jews the ghetto is not a metaphor; it is a concrete entity with walls, stormtroopers, and no exit save the gas chamber.” Syrkin penned this jab at the transference of the word “ghetto” from Jews to African Americans at a time when the black referent for the term was only beginning to become mainstream. Yet, nearly three decades later, the American Jewish author Melvin Jules Bukiet expressed the same pique. In April 1993, on the eve of the gala opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Bukiet published an editorial in the <em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Washington Post </em>that was bitingly critical of the museum, which he judged a well-intentioned but insidious attempt to absorb the Holocaust melting-pot style into a vocabulary of American politics and culture and to sap it of its Jewish specificity. “Something similar,” he wrote, “has also begun to happen with other elements of the Jewish tradition. Take the word ‘ghetto,’ which is commonly used as a synonym for slum. A ghetto is a an enclosed, preferably walled-in, domain within a city, and despite the invisible walls around Harlem, there is no barbed wire across 125th Street and there are no guard towers.”</font></p><div class="p4_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Both of these attempts to limit the word “ghetto” to its Holocaust meaning skipped over the fact that, prior to the Holocaust, the term had a long history of being used to refer to both coercive and non-coercive Jewish quarters. Its early uses centered on two cities: Venice, where it referred to the segregation of the Jews in 1516, and Rome, where the ghetto survived until the fall of the Papal States in 1870, long after it had ceased to exist elsewhere. The ghettos of the early modern Italian peninsula were compulsory, segregated, and enclosed Jewish spaces, and while they were kept under round-the-clock surveillance, there was no “barbed wire,” which had yet to be invented; nor were there “guard towers” (which may have been a feature of some Nazi concentration camps, but were likewise absent in Nazi ghettos). Even after the original mandatory ghettos disappeared with the legal emancipation of Western and Central European Jews, the term “ghetto” was resurrected near the turn of the twentieth century to refer to densely packed but voluntary Jewish immigrant neighborhoods such as London’s East End, New York’s Lower East Side, and Chicago’s Near West Side. Moreover, over the course of the nineteenth century, “ghetto” came increasingly to be used especially by Jews as a metaphor for an old-world, traditional Jewish society and mentality believed to be disappearing.</font></p><div class="p5_10" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One argument that has been made on the left to defend Ocasio-Cortez — which she herself has now adopted — is that the term “concentration camp” also has a history that predates (and coincides with) the Holocaust. It first became prominent during the Second Boer War from 1900 to 1902, when it was applied to the internment camps established by the British in South Africa. Later, in the 1940s, it was widely used in discussing the American internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two. The difficulty with this argument is that it is clear that Ocasio-Cortez intended to mobilize memory of the Holocaust by appropriating a term that, since 1945 at least, has become indelibly associated with the destruction of European Jewry. The day before her tweet that went viral, she posted an Instragram video where, in addition to using the word “concentration camps,” she invoked the slogan “Never Again,” which is commonly used to refer to the importance of remembering the Holocaust. By 1945, the term “ghetto” was sufficiently venerable and versatile in its signifying capacity that efforts to reserve it for the Holocaust were unsuccessful. The label “concentration camp” did not have a similarly long history of changing and contested meanings. While academics may continue to employ the term to designate the general phenomenon of camps in which people not guilty of a crime are interned by the state, in the popular lexicon today, “concentration camps” cannot be used without effectively conjuring the Holocaust.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><p><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p><a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/06/history-shows-why-police-use-facial-recognition-tech-can-threaten-rights"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/06/06/history-shows-why-police-use-facial-recognition-tech-can-threaten-rights</font></a></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>D</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>ebates in the US about whether police should use facial recognition technology are intensifying.</b> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Amazon shareholders recently rejected a <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-facial-recognition/at-amazon-facial-recognition-ban-won-just-2-of-shareholder-vote-idUSKCN1SU2H5" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">proposal</a> to stop, at least temporarily, sales of the company’s <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/24/are-us-police-disclosing-use-amazons-face-recognition-technology" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">Rekognition</a> software to government entities. Washington state, home to Amazon and Microsoft, has seen a <a href="https://www.govtech.com/policy/Why-Did-Washington-States-Privacy-Legislation-Collapse.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">push</a> for regulation. And last month, San Francisco <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/14/us/facial-recognition-ban-san-francisco.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">banned</a> the technology’s use by local agencies.</span></font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto; max-width: 900px; width: 900px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Human Rights Watch and other organizations have <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/15/letter-google-face-surveillance-technology" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">called on</a> <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/22/coalition-letter-amazon-regarding-facial-recognition-system-rekognition" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">US companies</a> <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/01/15/letter-microsoft-face-surveillance-technology" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">not to sell</a> the technology to governments due to rights concerns. Research suggests facial recognition <a href="https://thehill.com/policy/technology/398944-amazon-facial-recognition-misidentifies-members-of-congress-least-accurate" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">may be inaccurate</a>, especially for <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/11/17001218/facial-recognition-software-accuracy-technology-mit-white-men-black-women-error" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">people of color and women</a>. Inaccuracy is not the only potential rights problem, however. Since the technology can track where we go and with whom, its use could discourage people from freely expressing themselves and associating with others. It also creates a pool of information that could be misused in a discriminatory manner.</font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto; max-width: 900px; width: 900px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These last two concerns are highly significant for some Seattle activists who pointed to lessons of the past in interviews with Human Rights Watch.<b> During World War II, the US government applied then-advanced punch-card reading (or <a href="https://www.census.gov/history/www/innovations/technology/the_hollerith_tabulator.html" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">“Hollerith”</a>) machines to non-public census data to <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/12/26/636107892/some-japanese-americans-wrongfully-imprisoned-during-wwii-oppose-census-question" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">target west coast Japanese American communities for incarceration</a>.</b></font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto; max-width: 900px; width: 900px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“We are a community that has been surveilled in the past, and we’re also a community where the latest technological advancements [were] used in our oppression,” said Geoff Froh, deputy director of <a href="https://densho.org/" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">Densho</a>, which documents the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans. “Instead of Hollerith machines, we now have facial recognition technology.”</font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto; max-width: 900px; width: 900px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In 2000, the Census Bureau <a href="https://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/conmono2.pdf#17" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">acknowledged</a> that its use of census data facilitated the World War II-era abuses.</font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto; max-width: 900px; width: 900px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Facial recognition software can scan photographs or videos to identify people and record their locations – not unlike the earlier census data that was mined and misused.</font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto; max-width: 900px; width: 900px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Stanley Shikuma of Seattle’s <a href="http://seattlejacl.org/" target="blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background: 0px 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition-property: color, background-color; transition-duration: 0.4s;">Japanese American Citizens League</a> noted that today’s monitoring technology is even easier to deploy, and highlighted the rights threats to anyone who might face bias or police harassment.</font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto; max-width: 900px; width: 900px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If you think that the police are watching you … when you go to the bank, or you go to the doctor’s office, or you go to the church or the synagogue or the mosque,” you’ll be less likely to exercise those freedoms,” Shikuma said. “I don’t think that’s the kind of society you want, where people are looking over their shoulder because they don’t know which government agency might be watching them.”</font></p><p style="margin: 1.55556rem auto 0px; max-width: 900px; width: 900px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Human Rights Watch agrees. Congress should impose strong, enforceable limits on this new technology – and in the meantime, companies shouldn’t put it in government hands. </font></p><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</font></div></div><div>
<div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><b>Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes</b></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">
</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a right-wing think tank.</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">In 2004, Pipes supported the widely-repudiated internment of JapaneseAmericans</div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb">writing: "<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Yes, I do support the internment of Japanese Americans</span></div><div style="font-family: " times="Times" new="New" roman="Roman" font-size="font-size" large="large" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">in World War II." 77</span></div><div>
</div><div>=</div><div><a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?424800-2/japanese-american-internment-world-war-ii">https://www.c-span.org/video/?424800-2/japanese-american-internment-world-war-ii</a></div><div>
</div><div><span class="video-page-title" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-weight: 700; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 16px; line-height: inherit; font-family: adelle, Georgia, Times, serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(52, 73, 94); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Japanese American Internment During World War II</span><span style="color: rgb(89, 89, 89); font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Panelists talked about Japanese American internment during World War II. Panelists included Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, author of </span><i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 16px; line-height: inherit; font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(89, 89, 89); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds</i><span style="color: rgb(89, 89, 89); font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">; Richard Reeves, author of </span><i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 16px; line-height: inherit; font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(89, 89, 89); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Infamy: The Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment in World War II</i><span style="color: rgb(89, 89, 89); font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">; and Richard Cahan, co-author of </span><i style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 16px; line-height: inherit; font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(89, 89, 89); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Un-American: The Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II</i><span style="color: rgb(89, 89, 89); font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">.</span></div><div><span style="color: rgb(89, 89, 89); font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font color="#595959" face="proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif"><a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?424800-3/open-phones-richard-reeves">https://www.c-span.org/video/?424800-3/open-phones-richard-reeves</a></font></span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</span></div><div><span class="video-page-title" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-weight: 700; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 16px; line-height: inherit; font-family: adelle, Georgia, Times, serif; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(52, 73, 94); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">open Phones with Richard Reeves</span><span style="color: rgb(89, 89, 89); font-family: proxima-nova, helvetica, arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Richard Reeves talks about Japanese American internment during World War II and responds to viewer phone calls and tweets from the ninth annual Tucson Festival of Books.</span></div><div>
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