The CBC did a story on the “no yoga for you!” situation at the University of Ottawa, so we no longer have to rely on the right-wing tabloid the Ottawa Sun.

Jen Scharf said she’s been teaching a free yoga class for the university’s Centre for Students with Disabilities, which is run by the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa, for the last seven years.

It’s free, and it’s for students with disabilities…so you’d think it would be an all-around good thing, wouldn’t you?

When she checked back in with the centre in September, she said she was told by them the class wouldn’t be happening because some students and volunteers were uncomfortable with the “cultural issues” involved.

“I guess it was this cultural appropriation issue because yoga originally comes from India,” she said on Sunday. “I told them, ‘Why don’t we just change the name of the course?’ It’s simple enough, just call it mindful stretching.… We’re not going through the finer points of scripture. We’re talking about basic physical awareness and how to stretch so that you feel good.

“That went back and forth… The higher-ups at the student federation got involved, finally we got an email routed through the student federation basically saying they couldn’t get a French name and nobody wants to do it, so we’re going to cancel it for now.”

Well great. Let’s just cancel everything, to be on the safe side. If there’s ever any doubt or ambiguity, just err on the side of cancellation. Cancel all the talks, all the books, all the lectures, all the movies, all the conversations, all the ideas. They all have the potential to go wrong, so it’s better to do nothing. Nothing at all.

Cultural appropriation is when a culture that’s seen as an oppressor borrows or steals elements of a culture they’re oppressing. Scharf said there is also concern over yoga instructors who claim to be experts in the more spiritual aspects of yoga, but aren’t.

“I’m not claiming it’s anything more than a physical practice within that class,” she said. “There’s been so much positivity and so many people positively helped by this, and that’s part of the reason why I’m fighting so hard to keep it.”

She clearly doesn’t understand the “when in doubt, cancel it” principle. She thinks that because it was helping people, it should continue. We’d all better shun her.

In a French-language interview with Radio-Canada, student federation president Roméo Ahimakin said there were no direct complaints about the class, more general questions about the issues and ideas around it.

Ahimakin said they suspended the class as part of a review of all their programs to make them more interesting, accessible, inclusive and responsive to the needs of students.

Good thinking. He gets the principle. Cancel everything in order to make it more good things.

[A]t the Hindu Temple of Ottawa-Carleton, one husband and wife said they didn’t have an issue with what they’ve seen around the community and didn’t agree with the idea that non-Hindus teaching yoga is culturally insensitive.

“In Hindi ‘yog’ means to unite. To unite with who? With your true self. That’s what yoga is. Here we tend to relate it with the postures but it’s not just postures… and it has nothing to do with religion,” said Girija Waghray, who’s been teaching yoga around Ottawa for more than 10 years.

“It’s basically focusing on our health. By calming our mind, our mind becomes positive.”

Dilip Waghray said he’s been practising yoga for 50 years and while he’s uncomfortable with how it’s been commercialized in the West, he chooses to focus on the benefits it’s having.

Ah no, that’s the shortsighted “don’t cancel everything” view, which ignores the need for safety and mental purity. Benefits are just grubby material things, what we’re after is perfection and purity, which can be attained only through 100% cancellation.

Frank Bruni talks about how hard it’s been to make religion as accountable as other human institutions.

James Porter was convicted of sexually abusing 28 children in the 1960s, when he was in the Catholic priesthood. He was believed to have abused about 100 boys and girls in all, most of them in Massachusetts.

Major newspapers and television networks covered the Porter story, noting a growing number of cases of abuse by priests. Porter’s sentencing in December 1993 was preceded by two books that traced the staggering dimensions of such behavior. The first was “Lead Us Not Into Temptation,” by Jason Berry. The second was “A Gospel of Shame,” with which I’m even more familiar. I’m one of its two authors.

But despite all of that attention, Americans kept being shocked whenever a fresh tally of abusive priests was done or new predators were exposed. They clung to disbelief.

“Spotlight” is admirably blunt on this point, suggesting that the Globe staff — which, in the end, did the definitive reporting on church leaders’ complicity in the abuse — long ignored an epidemic right before their eyes.

Why? For some of the same reasons that others did. Many journalists, parents, police officers and lawyers didn’t want to think ill of men of the cloth, or they weren’t eager to get on the bad side of the church, with its fearsome authority and supposed pipeline to God. (After the coverage of the Porter case, Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston announced, “We call down God’s power on the media, particularly the Globe.”)

Deference to religion is built in in most places. It’s ingrained, it’s automatic and thus unconscious. You just don’t mess with religion; priests are good by definition; oh look a squirrel.

“Spotlight” lays out the many ways in which deference to religion protected abusers and their abettors. At one point in the movie, a man who was molested as a boy tells a Globe reporter about a visit his mother got from the bishop, who was asking her not to press charges.

“What did your mother do?” the reporter asks.

“She put out freakin’ cookies,” the man says.

When the cookies finally went away, many Catholic leaders insisted that the church was being persecuted, and the crimes of priests exaggerated, by spiteful secularists.

But if anything, the church had been coddled, benefiting from the American way of giving religion a free pass and excusing religious institutions not just from taxes but from rules that apply to other organizations.

A 2006 series in The Times, “In God’s Name,” noted that since 1989, “more than 200 special arrangements, protections or exemptions for religious groups or their adherents were tucked into congressional legislation, covering topics ranging from pensions to immigration to land use.” That was before the Supreme Court, in its Hobby Lobby decision, allowed some employers to claim religion as grounds to disobey certain heath insurance mandates.

Religion is the boss of us, and don’t you forget it.

Shock-horror, Bette Midler is unimpressed by Caitlyn Jenner.

Bette Midler ‏@BetteMidler Nov 19
People, #CaitlynJenner says she is STILL voting GOP in 2016. Regardless of gender identity, I guess she identifies most as “uninformed.”

Pink News has more.

This week, Jenner revealed she still plans to vote for a Republican Presidential candidate – despite most of the contenders being staunch opponents of trans and LGB rights.

Speaking to the LA Times after the Democratic Presidential debate, she said: “They didn’t convince me.”

The frontrunners for the Republican nomination are currently billionaire Donald Trump and Dr Ben Carson – a former Fox News pundit who thinks gay weddings are a Marxist plot and never wants to pee next to a transgender person.

But if one of them is nominated, Jenner will vote for him.

Seems pretty uninformed to me.

Don’t miss #ExMuslimBecause on Twitter.

A sample…

Professor Food ‏@hossain_food Nov 19
#ExMuslimBecause I was tired of trying to fit inside a box that was never made for me.

Aliyah Saleem ‏@Ali_Jones89 Nov 19
#ExMuslimBecause I don’t believe that there is any evidence for God’s existence. Can’t be a Muslim if you don’t believe in a creator…

Milad Jama ‏@MiladJama Nov 19
#ExMuslimBecause I can’t believe in a God who roasts humanity bc they don’t believe he whispered to a guy by proxy 1400 years ago

#ExMuslimBecause As a Black African I cannot support a prophet who actively took slaves of any color.

Yazeed ‏@DudeInDistress Nov 19
#ExMuslimBecause I can’t follow a “prophet” who raped a Jewish girl the same day he killed her husband, father and brother in front of her.

Ani J. Sharmin ‏@AniSharmin Nov 19
#ExMuslimBecause I didn’t want to follow a religion that told me I have to read the holy book in a language I don’t know.

Imran Said ‏@MalayBoy97 Nov 19
#ExMuslimBecause there’s a scary amount of people out there who think punishing people for apostasy and blasphemer is perfectly acceptable.

Muhammad Syed ‏@MoTheAtheist Nov 21
#ExMuslimBecause Mohammed was an atheist and blasphemer to Allat, Hubal, Mannat etc. I’m just extending his practice to one more god Allah

Yet again – one keeps checking to make sure it’s not The Onion. It’s not, though, it’s a respectable Ottawa newspaper. [Updating to add: actually a right-wing rag, which sounds like that Sun across the pond.]

Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of “cultural appropriation.”

Sorry, white people, you no longer get to stretch. White people have always been stiff and it’s colonialist to try to change that.

Staff at the Centre for Students with Disabilities believe that “while yoga is a really great idea and accessible and great for students … there are cultural issues of implication involved in the practice,” according to an email from the centre.

Of implication? Do they mean complicity? Or appropriation? Do they think “implication” is a portmanteau word that means both together?

The centre goes on to say, “Yoga has been under a lot of controversy lately due to how it is being practiced,” and which cultures those practices “are being taken from.”

The centre official argues since many of those cultures “have experienced oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and western supremacy … we need to be mindful of this and how we express ourselves while practising yoga.”

And therefore we have to stop practicing yoga, and we have to stop everyone else practicing yoga.

Never mind that practicing yoga actually reverses the colonialist relationship. Never mind that the sharing of cultures can be a way of uniting people. Never mind that interactions with other cultures are generally good things. Never mind any kind of detail or complexity – just look at yoga and go “Ooooooh, from South Asia!” and put a stop to it.

Acting student federation president Romeo Ahimakin denied the decision resulted from a complaint.

Ahimakin said the student federation put the yoga session on hiatus while they consult with students “to make it better, more accessible and more inclusive to certain groups of people that feel left out in yoga-like spaces. … We are trying to have those sessions done in a way in which students are aware of where the spiritual and cultural aspects come from, so that these sessions are done in a respectful manner.”

Scharf offered a compromise, suggesting she change the name from yoga to “mindful stretching,” since that would reflect the content of the program and would “literally change nothing about the course.”

Thinky bending? Contemplative reaching? Attentive pretzeling?

What am I thinking, pretzels are German and contemplation is…what, Japanese? Still South Asian? I forget, but it’s certainly not white people.

“I’m not pretending to be some enlightened yogi master, and the point (of the program) isn’t to educate people on the finer points of the ancient yogi scripture,” she told the Sun.

“The point is to get people to have higher physical awareness for their own physical health and enjoyment.”

According to email correspondence between Scharf and the centre, student leaders debated rebranding the program, but stumbled over how the French translation for “mindful stretching” would appear on a promotional poster, and eventually decided to suspend the program.

Ahhhhh yes, you always want to be careful about how the French translation will look on the poster. Naughty people, the French.

And more news from Kashif Chaudhry:

So after burning down a factory owned by an Ahmadi last night, an extremist Sunni mob ransacked an Ahmadi Mosque in Kala Gojran (Jehlum), cleansed it by burning its property in the streets and then offered Asar prayer inside. Now it’s a Sunni Mosque.

Kashif tells me the employees of the factory did escape, through a back door at the last minute, so that’s a relief. But Pakistan is clearly hell on earth for them, just as it is for atheists and apostates and every other kind of religious non-conformist.

Kashif Chaudhry is a doctor and blogger in Massachusetts, originally from Pakistan. He’s also an Ahmadi, and he posts a good deal about their persecution in Pakistan.

I just learned via a public Facebook post of his that Muslims applying for a passport or national ID card in Pakistan have to sign this:

I was staggered and incredulous, so I did a Google search for “I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Quadiani to be an imposter nabi” – and got passport applications. It’s right there. At the bottom of the second (and last) page, it says exactly what’s in that image.

(i) I am Muslim and believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of the prophethood of Muhammad (peace be upon him) the last of the prophets.

(ii) I do not recognise any person who claims to be a prophet in any sense of the word or any description whatsoever after Muhammad (peace be upon him) or recognise such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer as a Muslim.

(iii) I consider Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Quadiani to be an imposter nabi and also consider his followers whether belonging to the Lahori or Qadiani group to be non-Muslim.

It’s mind-numbing…in every sense.

The New York Times on the slaughter in Bamako:

The gunmen barreled past the hotel’s light security early in the morning, confusing guards with fake diplomatic license plates, and then burst into its glass-door lobby with their guns blazing.

“They started firing everywhere,” said a receptionist at the hotel who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “They were shouting, ‘Allahu akbar.’ They cut someone’s throat, a white man.”

“I hid in my office,” he said. “I saw four of them, armed to the teeth.”

At least 19 hostages killed as well as two or three of the allahu-akbarists.

The gunmen took “about 100 hostages” at the beginning of the attack, said Gen. Didier Dacko of the Malian Army, before soldiers sealed the perimeter and stormed inside, “looking for the terrorists.”

From early on, dozens of guests, including women, children and older people, streamed out of the hotel after hiding in their rooms, many of them crying and barely clothed.

The attack unfolded with 125 guests and 13 employees inside, according to the operators of the hotel. The visitors had come from far and wide, including Europe, India, China, Turkey and Algeria. They included diplomats, business people, pilots and flight attendants.

And Allah “the Great” thought it would be fabulous to kill a lot of them.

A peace accord was signed in June between the government and several rebel factions. But the truce has been broken several times, growing lawlessness has driven out civilians from the north of the country, and the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali is proving to be one of the deadliest in the world. So far 40 peacekeepers have been killed.

United Nations officials said they were worried that the attacks could have been intended, at least in part, to undermine the halting steps toward peace. Some of the people at the hotel were diplomats in town for a meeting to monitor those efforts.

Well we can’t have peace. That wouldn’t do at all.

A new horror in Pakistan:

An angry mob set ablaze a factory owned by members of the Ahmadiyya community in Jhelum on Friday.

According to sources, the mob attacked the factory after accusing one person who worked there of committing blasphemy.

There were people trapped inside.

Many workers fled the factory complex, which contains a residential area, with their families, sources said. But some workers were reportedly still inside the factory when it was set on fire.

The mob, meanwhile, continued to block GT Road in protest. Police were unable to disperse the protesters despite using tear gas and Rangers had to be called in for support.

Because of a claim that someone committed “blasphemy” – for that it’s worth torching a factory with people inside.

Talking to The Express Tribune, a Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya spokesperson said three Ahmadis were arrested without reason. The spokesman added that he wasn’t sure as to whether those trapped inside the factory had been rescued.

I would like to know if those people got out alive and unhurt.

Hmm.

It starts with a written announcement or explanation or declaration.

Menstruation is something natural that is constantly associated with being a “woman”, therefore it is completely normal for all women to want to experience this sensation and I hope you can all appreciate that.

One – why the scare quotes on “woman”? Why any scare quotes? Why the claim that menstruation is “constantly associated with being a ‘woman'” as opposed to something that happens to girls and women or something that girls and women do? Menstruation isn’t something that’s foolishly attributed to women, it’s a tiresome and unpleasant aspect of being a woman.

And two – are you serious? It’s completely normal for all women to want to experience menstruation? It’s completely normal for all women to hate menstruation. You might as well say all women want to be kicked in the abdomen for a day or two every month along with leaking clumpy messy blood for a few days every month. Menstruation is not a fun fabulous perk of being a woman!

Three – it’s not a “sensation.” It includes sensations, all of them nasty, but a sensation is far from the total of what it is.

Four, to the extent that it is a sensation, it’s a nasty sensation.

Also? It’s something that women tend to want to keep as covert as possible, so there really isn’t any need for trans women to pretend to menstruate. It’s not a detectable bit of dimorphism, generally speaking, so my advice would be to SKIP IT. Just skip the fuck out of that particular bit of the Womanly Experience. Double up on the dangly earrings or lacy frocks, instead; that’s my advice.

I only watched as far as 1:43, but by then the deeply sincere bozo who made this vid has said she’s going to show us how to make some fake menstrual blood to put on a pad, or if you’re post-op you can try putting it in a cup.

Perhaps she goes on to butcher a pig, I don’t know.

A Saudi court has sentenced a Palestinian poet to death for apostasy.

The religious police first detained Fayadh in August 2013 after receiving a complaint that he was cursing against Allah and the prophet Muhammad, insulting Saudi Arabia and distributing a book of his poems that promoted atheism. Fayadh said the complaint arose from a personal dispute with another artist during a discussion about contemporary art in a cafe in Abha.

He was released on bail after one day but the police arrested him again on 1 January 2014, confiscating his ID and detaining him at a police station until he was transferred to the local prison 27 days later. According to Fayadh’s friends, when the police failed to prove that his poetry was atheist propaganda, they began berating him for smoking and having long hair.

“They accused me [of] atheism and spreading some destructive thoughts into society,” said Fayadh. He added that the book, Instructions Within, published in 2008, was “just about me being [a] Palestinian refugee … about cultural and philosophical issues. But the religious extremists explained it as destructive ideas against God.”

The case went to trial in February 2014 when the complainant and two members of the religious police told the court that Fayadh had publicly blasphemed, promoted atheism to young people and conducted illicit relationships with women and stored some of their photographs on his mobile phone.

Not bad for the 11th century.

The New York Times has more on the racist incident at Harvard Law School yesterday.

In a statement, the school’s dean, Martha Minow, said that the portraits, which appeared on walls inside the building, had been “defaced” and that the Harvard University Police Department was investigating the incident as a hate crime.

…

An investigation is “active and ongoing,” the Harvard police said of the episode that had raised the specter of a hate crime at an institution that educated Barack Obama, as well as six current Supreme Court justices. That includes Justice Elena Kagan, who was dean of the law school, and who also has her portrait on the wall.

…

Seeking an immediate discussion about the issues, about two dozen students interrupted Ms. Minow’s constitutional law class. All students asked then, said Dami Animashaun, a third-year student, that “we talk about this,” adding that the school had reached a “tipping point.”

Shortly after noon, hundreds of students — as well as faculty members and administrators, including Ms. Minow — gathered for what the law school called a community meeting, filling one large room and much of another.

It’s complicated. So much of US law over its history has been an arm of white supremacy.

Today it’s Bamako’s turn.

Malian special forces have entered the Radisson Blu Hotel in Mali’s capital, Bamako, to end a siege by gunmen. The hotel says 138 people remain inside.

The gunmen stormed the US-owned hotel, which is popular with foreign businesses and airline crews, shooting and shouting “God is great!” in Arabic.

Malian officials said 30 hostages have been freed. State TV earlier put the figure at 80.

Three people have been shot dead and two soldiers wounded, officials say.

…

Air France says 12 of its crew have been successfully freed in the rescue operation; Turkish Airlines says five of its crew are out, but two remain in the hotel.

Twenty Indian nationals are in part of the hotel but are safe, according [to] the Indian embassy in Mali, while Chinese state TV reported four of 10 Chinese citizens caught up in the attack had been rescued.

The BBC is live updating.

We’re slowly getting more information about who was there this morning:

• 30 were hotel staff
• 20 were Indians
• 10 were Chinese
• Seven Algerians, six of whom were diplomats
• Six were Turkish airline staff
• Two were Moroccans
• Two were Russians working for Ulyanovsk airline
• Guinean singer Sekouba Bambino was there
• An unknown number of French, including 12 Air France crew
• US citizens are suspected to have been in the hotel

Some of the above have managed to escape but 138 people are still trapped in the building as security forces move floor to floor.

God is not great.

Update:

The BBC reports that all the hostages are out.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and its offshoot al-Murabitoun said they carried out the attack, according to an agency used by jihadists in the region.

At least 18 people have died and two soldiers wounded.

One of those killed was Geoffrey Dieudonne, a member of parliament in Belgium’s Wallonia region.

Germaine Greer gave that lecture at Cardiff. Nobody melted or imploded or spontaneously combusted or turned into a pillar of salt.

Uniformed police officers stood guard outside the lecture theatre and security officials guarded the doors inside, but in the end only about a dozen people turned up to protest peacefully. Greer told the audience that campaigners had been “trying to frighten me off”, but added: “Here I am.”

She did not mention the issue during her lecture, entitled Women & Power: the Lessons of the 20th Century, but during questions was asked about the controversy. Greer said: “They [trans people] are not my issue. It should be perfectly clear why not. I think 51% of the world’s population is enough for me to be going on with. I do agree that calling people names may add to their misery but it happens to old women every day.”

…

Protesters outside included present and former Cardiff University students who criticised the institution for paying Greer for the lecture. Mair Macey, a former Cardiff University student who now works for HMRC, said: “I really care about transgender people. Having Greer here reflects badly on the values of the university. There is no way she should be invited to give a distinguished lecture.”

Author Elwyn Way said: “We don’t think she should be given a platform like this and go unchallenged.” Way said trans people were suffering emotional and physical violence and needed to be protected rather than vilified.

But her lecture wasn’t about trans people. Preventing her from giving the lecture she was invited to give wouldn’t have made trans people better off in any way. It’s all just performance – “look at me, look at how much I care.”

The saga has caused a fierce debate about free speech and the practice of “no-platforming” speakers whose views might make them unpopular. Quinn said she was frustrated that the free speech issue was overshadowing what she saw as the more salient problem: Greer’s views.

Well look at it this way – suppose you forcibly locked Greer up somewhere to keep her from expressing her views. It would not be surprising is that overshadowed your opinion of her views. The bullying of her for her views overshadowed your worthless opinion on her views – that’s often how that works out.

Harvard Crimson reports a very bad thing:

Law School students and faculty members who walked into Wasserstein Hall on Thursday morning found that pieces of black tape had been placed over the faces of portraits of black professors that hang on walls inside the building. The tape has since been removed.

The incident prompted outrage from Law School affiliates, including second-year Law School student Michele D. Hall, who posted photographs of the vandalized portraits in a post on the website Blavity. “This morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime,” she wrote.

Law Professor Ronald S Sullivan tweeted about it:

Ronald S. Sullivan ‏@ProfRonSullivan 7h
This is my portrait at the Harvard Law School. All faculty of color woke up to the same thing this morning.

What the hell is wrong with people?

The National Archives have photos from Manzanar.

Click to embiggen.

To see more go to the archive and search for Manzanar then select “images.”

Another church horror, this one in a suburb of Melbourne.

From the 1970s to the late 1990s, a string of priests abused children in the Australian outer eastern Melbourne suburb of Doveton.

Father Thomas O’Keeffe was a violent offender who tortured some of his altar boys in his time in charge of the Holy Family Parish in the 1970s, Ms Last said.

The article doesn’t use the word “Catholic” until more than halfway through, and then only twice. These are Catholic priests, protected by the Vatican.

Father Peter Searson liked to walk around the Holy Family Primary School playground carrying a revolver and dressed in army fatigues.

…

Broken Rites also believes the independent commissioner for the archdiocese’s Melbourne Response has abuse complaints against Searson from his earlier parishes in the 1960s. His only conviction was for physically assaulting an altar boy, for which he received a six-month good behaviour bond in 1997.

Searson had a fetish for confessional, former Holy Family Primary School principal Graeme Sleeman told Victoria’s child abuse parliamentary inquiry.

Some of the children would say “Father’s creepy”.

They were frightened of Searson. They did not want to go into the church when he was there. They did not want to go to confession with him.

Parents complained regularly about the priest’s treatment of the children, Mr Sleeman said.

And nothing happened. Nothing at all.

Sixty parents and parishioners petitioned for the priest to be removed, yet nothing happened.

Mr Sleeman resigned in frustration in 1986, hoping it would force the church authorities to take action. Instead he was cast aside.

A later teacher, Carmel Rafferty, was told when she started at the school that children were not safe around the priest and staff must be vigilant.

Children reported being abused by Searson, begging for safety.

Ms Rafferty told the Victorian inquiry she felt her career was jeopardised after she raised Searson’s behaviour with senior Catholic Church representatives.

All of them male.

The parish appears to have became something of a dumping ground for problem priests, Dr Chamley said.

“There was a series of problem priests and they all seemed to end up down there. These priests were dropped in there and it was hoped that the problem was going to go away and unfortunately it didn’t,” he said.

Another Doveton priest sexually abused women, Ms Last said.

The number of offending priests in Doveton could be six in a row over 35 years according to Ms Rafferty’s inquiry evidence: the four pedophiles and two who abused women.

Why use Doveton, home to many battlers and factory workers, as a dumping ground? Ms Rafferty had a theory.

“For the archdiocesan people who do the placing I suppose they figured out it was a community of people who would not wake up too quickly, if they had a problem priest in their midst, and a community of people who would be brought up to believe in obedience and loyalty, and the mystique and aura of the priesthood.”

Sure. They don’t put priests like that in neighborhoods where people with power and clout live – that would be silly!

The Manzanar Committee puts out a statement written by Gann Matsuda.

(Manzanar is the name of one of the horrible “camps” in which Japanese-Americans were interned – aka imprisoned – after Pearl Harbor.)

On November 18, the Manzanar Committee repudiated statements by David Bowers, Mayor, Roanoke, Virginia, in which he used the unjust incarceration of over 110,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry as justification for his demand that Syrian refugees be denied asylum in the Roanoke area.

In an official statement, Bowers said, “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

That’s one of the most bizarrely wrong-headed uses of a historical analogy I’ve ever seen. Yes, Roosevelt “felt compelled” to do that – compelled by the racist xenophobia of a segment of the population, which he didn’t have enough moral courage to rebuke and reject.

The whole thing is based on a ludicrous notion of nationality or ethnic identity, as if all ethnically Japanese people were somehow ethnically loyal to the contemporary government of Japan and the emperor of Japan and the expansionist military policy of Japan. It’s mind-blowingly racist given the fact that Americans with German ancestry were not arrested and imprisoned in camps*.

On top of all that it gets the facts wrong: it was American citizens of Japanese ancestry who were put in camps.

Is it too much to expect of politicians, even mayors, that they have some knowledge of their country’s history before running for office?

Manzanar Committee Co-Chair Bruce Embrey rejected Bowers’ remarks out of hand.

“Mayor Bowers may be just one of many who are using the despicable terrorist acts in Paris for political gain, but his outrageous statement exposes the dangers of unbridled xenophobia, racism and racial profiling during times of crisis,” he said. “How anyone, much less a public official, can cite the World War II incarceration of the Japanese American community as rationale for any policy in this day and age is simply outrageous.”

“Apparently, Mayor Bowers never bothered to learn that President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 was repealed by President Gerald Ford, that the United States Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to redress the fundamental unconstitutional nature of the forced removal, and that Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush apologized to those incarcerated without charges, without due process, simply because they looked like the enemy.”

Embrey emphasized that Bowers is not alone, in terms of his ignorance of our nation’s history, as well as his blatant political opportunism.

“While it took decades of struggle, Congressional hearings, and intense lobbying by many to win the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, there are some in our country who fail to understand the illegal and unconstitutional nature of Executive Order 9066,” Embrey lamented. “The text of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 cites racism, wartime hysteria, and the failure of political leadership as the driving forces behind the incarceration of the Japanese American community. Unfortunately, these words can easily describe what is going on today.”

No more Manzanars, thank you very much.

H/t Chris Clarke

*Correction – according to History Matters, some German and Italian resident aliens were interned, and a small number of citizens were.

Although it is not well known, the same executive order (and other war-time orders and restrictions) were also applied to smaller numbers of residents of the United States who were of Italian or German descent. For example, 3,200 resident aliens of Italian background were arrested and more than 300 of them were interned. About 11,000 German residents—including some naturalized citizens—were arrested and more than 5000 were interned.

But given the fact that more were arrested than were interned, there must have been some winnowing process, which means there must have been some criterion in addition to ancestry. That’s just what there wasn’t in the case of the Japanese internments.