Of all the people on the Internet, actor and activist George Takei — at least while he was playing his most famous character — has been more places and met more types of living beings than most, or at least the same number as William Shatner. (Takei played Hikaru Sulu to Shatner’s Captain Kirk on the enduring space odyssey, Star Trek.)
But it is his experience growing up in a Japanese internment camp, put there because Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor, that left Takei with a lifelong passion for seeing other beings for who they really are — and not, instead, who they might be mistaken for.
Now as the world rages over the terrorist attacks against Israel by Hamas, Takei is among a small group of voices who are cautioning against destroying innocent lives in response — even though the Hamas terror attacks killed innocent Israelis.
Takei returns to his experience of being swept up in a U.S. revenge plan so broad that it interred Japanese Americans who had no connection to Pearl Harbor and who didn’t support Japan’s war against America.
Takei writes:
In its zeal to exact that revenge, however, the U.S. government overreacted, out of fear and bigotry. They targeted everyone who happened to look like the people who had carried out the attack. Those of us who had done nothing wrong were forced to pay the consequences for the decisions of others far away and disconnected from us. We were interned for years, in open-air prisons, while America went off to fight Japan, Germany and Italy.
Congressman Maxwell Frost, the 26-year-old first term Democrat from Florida, who was just an toddler when 9/11 happened, shared Takei’s heartfelt plea to the world to try to retaliate only against those who committed the atrocities — and not sweep up too many innocents in the revenge.
“It’s so important that we carry the lessons of the past through to today,” Takei writes in the post Frost shared. “Merely because one group commits atrocities and acts with depravity does not mean vast hundreds of thousands or even millions of others should be lumped together with them and made to suffer.”
When I was a little boy, the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor. It was a surprise attack, and thousands of U.S. servicemembers perished. As a nation, we were stunned. And we vowed to strike back. Revenge was understandably on everyone’s mind, including many Americans of…
— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) October 8, 2023
