Japanese American leaders and allies have called out former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump after he compared the imprisonment of Jan. 6 rioters to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII.
In a podcast interview with conservative commentator Daniel Bongino, Trump said that the prosecution of the insurrectionists who participated in the attack on the Capitol to the nearly 112,000 Japanese Americans who were forcibly relocated to prison camps in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“Nobody’s ever been treated like this”, said Trump. “Nobody’s ever — maybe the Japanese during the Second World War, frankly. But you know, they were held too.”
“It’s flat-out offensive. It’s a night-and-day difference what happened,” said Japanese American Citizens League executive director David Inoue in an interview with the Washington Post. “Japanese Americans’ whole families were incarcerated without any sort of trial — their only crime was they were of Japanese descent. For these January 6 people, they have had their day in court, they’ve either been indicted or convicted of crimes, and that is why they’re being incarcerated.”
Ann Burroughs, President and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum, said that Trump’s comments were “an egregiously inaccurate and flawed historical analogy.”
“There is no comparison between the treatment received by the January 6 rioters and Japanese Americans who were denied due process when they were forcibly removed from their homes, systematically dispossessed and incarcerated for the duration of the war,” said Boroughs in a press release. “Now more than ever, the lessons from the Japanese American incarceration must never be forgotten, ignored, minimized, or erased. As long as diversity, individual dignity, and social justice continue to be undermined, they will continue to be urgent and relevant today.”
As mentioned by NBC News, Trump’s newest comments come after his description of Jan 6. as a “day of love,” at a Univision event, and falsely stated that the insurrectionists stormed the capitol unarmed.
“There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say we, these are people that walked down — this was a tiny percentage of the overall which nobody sees and nobody, nobody shows. But that was a day of love.”
As mentioned by the Washington Post, six people were arrested on Jan. 6 while having guns in the Capitol’s vicinity, while one more was arrested the day after. Police officers also testified to observing more weapons they didn’t end up confiscating because their focus was on protecting the capitol. More than a dozen have since been charged with bringing weapons to D.C., and participants said they stashed theirs in hotels and other locations.
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