Americans are xenophobic

Whenever I hear Trump start bloviating on TV, the thought springs to mind, “Simple minds! Simple minds!” There is no better example than the things he is saying about the Muslims now. Trump realizes that Americans are xenophobic, and his Muslim-bashing is an easy sell to people who must only be able to comprehend simple ideas. Xenophobia is a simple idea.

Merriam-Webster defines xenophobia (noun, ze-nə-ˈfō-bē-ə) as a “fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign.”

Jumping to a simple-minded solution is the way Bush 43 got us into this mess. He convinced enough of us that all we had to do was replace the government of Iraq. Their oil money would pay for the war! The oppressed people would welcome us! Our way of life would uplift their entire culture!

We know now that it was a lot more complicated than that.

There’s another example of a simple-minded solution that didn’t work: American Japanese during World War II.

In January, the Springdale Library Book Club will be reading “The Colonel and the Pacifist,” by Utah author Klancy de Nevers, about that shameful part of our history. During World War II, America herded thousands of loyal Japanese citizens into remote desert camps. They surrounded the camps with barbed wire fences and guard towers manned by armed soldiers. Japanese who owned farms and businesses lost them, because they were just uprooted and suddenly moved to a camp. One of the camps was right here in Utah, in the west desert near Delta. If you’ve ever been there, then you know what a lovely garden spot it is.

The book was inspired by one of those incredible coincidences of history that continues to make reality even stranger than fiction. Klancy grew up in the same community as the principal architect of the Japanese internment, Karl Bendetsen. Perry Saito, a Japanese American who spent the war years in a camp, also grew up there not far from Bendetsen. Klancy’s father printed the local newspaper. Contrasting the two stories of Bendetsen and Saito gives you a perspective that no ordinary history could.

One of the most interesting elements of this entire event is the difference between the way we treated the Japanese and the way we treated the Germans and Italians in America during World War II. There were no camps for German and Italian Americans. They weren’t automatically considered to be traitors. And, in fact, they weren’t. Americans of German and Italian ancestry helped win the war. But the Japanese may have helped even more. The all-Japanese 442nd Infantry Regiment fought in Italy and Germany.

According to Wikipedia, “The 442nd Regiment was the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of American warfare. The 4,000 men who initially made up the unit in April 1943 had to be replaced nearly 2.5 times. In total, about 14,000 men served, earning 9,486 Purple Hearts. The unit was awarded eight Presidential Unit Citations (5 earned in one month). Twenty-one of its members were awarded Medals of Honor.”

All this while, the relatives of the men of the 442^nd were being held in prison camps back in America. According to Nicholas Kristof writing in the New York Times, “a 1944 poll found that 13 percent of Americans favored ‘killing all Japanese,’ and that the head of a United States government commission in 1945 urged ‘the extermination of the Japanese in toto.’”

The question is, “Why were the Japanese singled out for such persecution?” The answer is ”Americans are xenophobic.”

The Japanese were herded into camps because they didn’t look like “us.” Their homes smelled funny, and most of them weren’t even Christians. Germans and Italians looked and acted like “we” looked and acted, so we left them alone.

The fact that Muslims don’t look like us seems to be the main thing that Trumpeters have against them. A good case can be made that the fundamental theology of Islam is less violent than Christianity. According to Kristof again, “analysts who have tallied the number of violent or cruel passages in the Quran and the Bible count more than twice as many in the Bible.” According to the Voice of America website, “The Muslim community at the largest mosque in San Bernardino County held a multifaith prayer vigil for the victims of the shootings and condemned what happened.”

Although murderous groups like ISIS and al-Qaida get the headlines, about a quarter of the world’s Muslims live in Asia. And they’re on our side. According to Channel News Asia, “Indonesia’s largest Muslim organization, Nahdatul Ulama (NU), has joined the global battle against radical ideology, producing a documentary film to draw the line between moderate and radical Islam.” The simple-minded Trump proposals lump these Muslims with ISIS, and that’s not right. If we keep this up, we will mainly succeed in driving Muslims like those in the NU into the arms of ISIS and al-Qaida.

One way to think about it is to realize that we’re as foreign and strange to them as they are to us. We can either act like ISIS and reject anybody who doesn’t look like us, or we can expand our thinking and work for mutual understanding.

Which one do you think will work best?