Manzanar 2001

Here on Bainbridge Island, the contraversy over the Japanese internment during World War II continues to this day. A curriculum given in schools is criticized by some as making inapropiate comparisons to more recent events.

Tonight, we saw a documentary on the Sundance channel called "Persons of Interest." The film of a series of interviews of some of the several hundred Arabs in this country who in the weeks following 9/11 were randomly arrested and detained for weeks or months until investigators could determine that they were not terrorists. Ironically, many of them came to America to escape the kind of persecuition.

While the post-9/11 Arab internment was less organized and shorter lived than the one experienced by the Japanese, there is certainly a parallel worth discussing.