by Congressman Mike Honda
Click here to read the Statement which MRFF formally submitted to the King Hearings
Selected Article Excerpts:
- Last week, on the 70th Anniversary of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Representative Peter King once again sought the spotlight with a congressional hearing claiming to explore ‘homegrown terrorism’s threat to military communities inside the United States.’
King used the anniversary of Pearl Harbor to claim that America faces an imminent threat from a religious ‘enemy within.’ The hearing continued a dangerous trend of using tragic but isolated crimes and unnamed sources to proclaim that one group — Muslims— are the source of all homegrown terrorist threats to the military. Sadly, this line of thinking is a direct parallel to World War II, where conjecture and hyped-up discrimination, dressed-up to look like fact, branded the Japanese American community as an imminent threat to America.
What came next? Executive Order 9066. A 1942 Presidential order that forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, my family included, to evacuate the West Coast. My family and I were soon herded like cattle into the Amache internment camp in Colorado. I was less than a year old. - King once again refused to condemn the words of Rep. Rick Womick of the Tennessee Assembly. This past Veteran’s Day, Womick declared that Muslims should be purged from the military and that Muslims pray to a false God. Womick’s words are detrimental to homeland security and antithetical to the American values of religious freedom and regard for ethnic diversity.
Womick’s words and King’s silence ignore the expert service of over 4,000 Muslim Americans in today’s military – a record of service that traces back to World War I. Muslim Americans are invaluable in today’s military. Since that other day of infamy, September 11, 2001, the military has actively recruited Muslim-Americans – keen to find soldiers, sailors and Marines with linguistic skills and a cultural understanding of strategic communities.
