Mayor David Bowers (Photo: YouTube/U.S. Conference of Mayors)



A Virginia mayor joined a majority of U.S. governors refusing to accept any refugees from Syria in the wake of last week’s deadly terror attacks in Paris. But that mayor, David Bowers of Roanoke, Va., quickly came under fire for comments he made in a statement explaining his decision.

“Roanoke is a welcoming city, and America is a melting pot of the world,“ Bowers, a 63-year-old Democrat, wrote in a letter to his constituents Wednesday. "However, since the recent terrorist bombing of the Russian airliner, the attacks in Paris and now with the murderous threats to our nation’s capital, I am convinced that it is presently imprudent to assist in the relocation of Syrian refugees to our part of Virginia.”

Bowers continued: “I’m reminded that President Franklin D. Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and it appears that the threat of harm to America from ISIS now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then.”

The Hillary Clinton campaign quickly distanced itself from Bowers, who was a member of the Democratic frontrunner’s Virginia Leadership Council and one of 137 U.S. mayors who have endorsed her for president.

“The internment of people of Japanese descent is a dark cloud on our nation’s history,” Clinton campaign spokesman Josh Schwerin said in a statement. “To suggest that it is anything but a horrible moment in our past is outrageous.”

George Takei, the Japanese-American actor best known for his role in Star Trek, responded in a letter of his own:





Mayor Bowers, there are a few key points of history you seem to have missed:



1) The internment (not a “sequester”) was not of Japanese “foreign nationals,” but of Japanese-Americans, two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens. I was one of them, and my family and I spent four years in prison camps because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It is my life’s mission to never let such a thing happen again in America.

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2) There never was any proven incident of espionage or sabotage from the suspected “enemies” then, just as there has been no act of terrorism from any of the 1,854 Syrian refugees the U.S. already has accepted. We were judged based on who we looked like, and that is about as un-American as it gets.

3) If you are attempting to compare the actual threat of harm from the 120,000 of us who were interned then to the Syrian situation now, the simple answer is this: There was no threat. We loved America. We were decent, honest, hard-working folks. Tens of thousands of lives were ruined, over nothing.

Mayor Bowers, one of the reasons I am telling our story on Broadway eight times a week in Allegiance is because of people like you. You who hold a position of authority and power, but you demonstrably have failed to learn the most basic of American civics or history lessons. So, Mayor Bowers, I am officially inviting you to come see our show, as my personal guest. Perhaps you too will come away with more compassion and understanding.







George Takei, left, seen during a performance of Allegiance on Broadway earlier this month. (Photo: AP)



In an interview with NPR earlier Wednesday, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee — one of 15 U.S. governors publicly backing the Obama administration’s plan to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees into the country next year — cited Japanese internment camps as a reason not to give in to fear.

“I live on Bainbridge Island, it’s an island just west of Seattle,” Inslee explained. And it was the first place we succumbed to fear in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. And we locked up Washington citizens and we sent them to camps. So my neighbors were locked up by the federal government and sent to camps for years while their sons fought in the army. … We regret that. We regret that we succumbed to fear. We regret we lost [sight of] who we were as a country. We shouldn’t do that right now.”

Inslee was asked if he considered the possibility he might come to regret his accept Syrian refugees if one of them commits an act of terror.

“You bet,” he said. “And that’s the price of leadership. Maybe Franklin Roosevelt was thinking about that when he locked up the Japanese-American citizens, who were good neighbors, and put them in camps. It was a bad decision, and it wasn’t consistent with who we are. We look back at that now and we say, ‘You know what? We lost our way.’ And it’s really easy to lose your way in moments like this, when we are so fearful.”