George Takei's Response to Donald Trump Deserves an A+
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Actor and activist George Takei became the latest to criticize GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump and his proposed ban on all Muslims entering the U.S. in an interview with MSNBC.
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"What Donald Trump is talking about is something that is going to make his logo, 'America disgraced again,'" Takei said.
"It's all over again," Takei explained. "We don't know our history, and when we don't know that, we don't learn the lesson from our history."
Takei referenced the time he and his family were forced into Japanese internment camps during World War II, and said this new wave of discrimination against Muslims by Trump has an eerie connection to the prejudice he faced back then.
"Well, it's ironic that he made that comments on December 7, Pearl Harbor Day--the event that put us in those internment camps," Takei said.
Takei explained how fear fuels Trump's campaign, just how fear drove Congress to unjustly imprison Japanese Americans.
"In the 1980s Congress organized a commission that looked into the reasons why that internment happened--and I did testified at one of those hearings--and they found that it was three things that brought that about: one, was racial was racial hysteria, second was war hysteria and third, was failure of political leadership. Donald Trump is a perfect example of that failure."
Trump has suggested making a database for Muslims to register and now is in favor of banning all Muslims including Muslim American abroad. But Trump is well on his way of securing the GOP presidential nomination by continually remaining at the top of the polls which Takei urges people to take heed.
"It was because political leadership could not educate the hysteria that was sweeping across this country. 'Get rid of the Japs' was most popular political issue of the time and they didn't recognized the fact that two-thirds of us were American citizens. My mother was born in Sacramento. My father was a San Franciscan--we were children then--but we were born in Los Angeles. We were Americans and yet they thought that we had an organic, genetic loyalty to the Emperor and we were all imprisoned--for no charges. It was the most unconstitutional act."
Although Trump and other politicians have expressed support for legally keeping tabs on Muslims, Takei says that this is just another way for America to end up making the same mistakes as before, causing a great injustice yet again.
"It's because we don't know that history, the mayor or Roanoke , Virginia is used that to justify the same kind of thing that Donald Trump is taking about but he got even that information wrong. He said we sequestered Japanese nationals, no, that wasn't it. We were imprisoned, incarcerated in barbed wire prison camps, concentration camps--and we were American citizens. We don't know our history and we are about to repeat it once again. "
