UCLA Welcomes First Academic Chair on WW II Internment Camps

Admittedly my blog and site have been much neglected over the last few months. Now that summer is well over and we are back into fall I expect to devote more time here. In fact the site and blog are due for a complete overhaul so look for some significant improvements and updates over the winter.

In the meantime here is the latest atrocity. Rich people with an agenda lobbying universitites to adopt a politically motivated agenda. Very sad and pathetic.

UCLA Welcomes First Academic Chair on WW II Internment Camps

LOS ANGELES, October 8, 2006 - The University of California, Los Angeles, celebrated the arrival of the nation's first scholar to hold an academic chair dedicated to studying the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

A large group of prominent scholars, artists, business and political leaders gathered Saturday at a university reception for Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, whose family was detained in the wartime camps.

Hirabayashi will hold the Aratani chair, funded with $500,000 from George and Sakaye Aratani, at the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.

Professors holding the chair must teach at least one course on issues related to the internment program that relocated 120,000 people, and organize or aid public education programs on the subject.

The Aratanis are among the largest donors to Japanese-American educational and cultural causes.

For Hirabayashi, a 53-year-old anthropologist, this critical piece of Japanese-American history is tied to his own family's past.

"To me, I feel that this is a family obligation," Hirabayashi said during Saturday's event.

His parents and grandparents were moved from their home south of Seattle to a camp at Tule Lake in Northern California.

As a child, Hirabayashi heard family stories of his uncle Gordon Hirabayashi's imprisonment in 1942 for refusing to obey a curfew imposed on Japanese-Americans. Decades later, this act of defiance helped prompt a congressional apology.

"In the height of the hysteria, I think Gordon was very, very brave," Hirabayashi said.
Lane Hirabayashi has been a faculty member at California State University, San Francisco, the University of Colorado and the University of California, Riverside, and he has written three books, including two on the wartime camps. He will teach his first course in the next term.

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Of course the article failed to mention some important quotes from the Supreme Court Decision such as:

“THE ALTERNATIVE WHICH APPELLANT INSISTS MUST BE ACCEPTED IS FOR THE MILITARY AUTHORITIES TO IMPOSE THE CURFEW ON ALL CITIZENS WITHIN THE MILITARY AREA, OR ON NONE. IN A CASE OF THREATENED DANGER REQUIRING PROMPT ACTION, IT IS A CHOICE BETWEEN INFLICTING OBVIOUSLY NEEDLESS HARDSHIP ON THE MANY, OR SITTING PASSIVE AND UNRESISTING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE THREAT. WE THINK THAT CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT, IN TIME OF WAR, IS NOT SO POWERLESS AND DOES NOT COMPEL SO HARD A CHOICE IF THOSE CHARGED WITH THE RESPONSIBILITY OF OUR NATIONAL DEFENSE HAVE REASONABLE GROUND FOR BELIEVING THAT THE THREAT IS REAL.”

Chief Justice StoneHirabayashi vs. United States