10/13/16

Weekly Featured Profile – Mike Murase

KeyWiki.org

Mike Murase

Mike Murase is a Los Angeles activist and has been active in the Japanese national movement since 1968. He is a leader of the movement seeking reparations for Japanese-Americans interned during WW2.

A former leading member of the pro-China League of Revolutionary Struggle (M-L), Mike Murase has been involved in human services, social change, education, government and politics for over 40 years. As an undergraduate at University of California at Los Angeles, he was a co-founder of the Asian American Studies Center and later taught ethnic studies at UCLA, University of Southern California and California State University at Long Beach.

Mike Murase was a part of the core group who founded Little Tokyo Service Center, a social service and community economic development agency serving Little Tokyo and the greater Japanese American community throughout Los Angeles. Murase served as the board president for the first 5 years. He also advocated for members of the Japanese Welfare Rights Organization, Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization and the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations,

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, Mike Murase was one of several Maoists holding leading positions in Jesse Jackson‘s RainbowPUSH Coalition.

In the early 1990’s, League of Revolutionary Struggle split, leading to the formation of theUnity Organizing Committee, which was specifically designed to infiltrate the Democratic Party. Mike Murase became co-chair of Unity Los Angeles. He also became a District Director for far left California Congresswoman Maxine Waters.

Mike Murase was chair of the Los Angeles Free South Africa Movement in 1986-88 and was an observer for the South African Communist Party controlled African National Congress conference in South Africa in 1991.

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National Coalition for Redress/Reparations leaders in 2016 included radicals Mike Murase,Steve Nagano, Tony Osumi, Alan Nishio, Kimi Maru, Jan Tokumaru, June Hibino (also exLeague of Revolutionary Struggle), Michael Yanagita, Kay Ochi, Glenn Sanada and Janice Yen.

(Mike Murase|more…)

09/8/16

Weekly Featured Profile – Masao Suzuki

KeyWiki.org

Masao Suzuki

Masao Suzuki is chair of the Joint Nationalities Commission, Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack!, which is the body charged with increasing racial antagonism by the Maoist/Stalinist grouping.

He is a Professor of Economics at Skyline College in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Masao Suzuki is a former member of I Wor Kuen, an Asian American revolutionary organization. It was founded in 1969 in New York City and inspired by theBlack Panther Party. In 1979, IWK merged with theAugust 29th Movement, which “grew out of the struggles of the Chicano people” to form the pro-China League of Revolutionary Struggle.

Later, many former League of Revolutionary Struggle members joined Freedom Road Socialist Organization and some like Masao Suzuki split off into the hardline Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack! faction in 1999.

Masao Suzuki worked with other League of Revolutionary Struggle members on the Japanese reparations movement, which aimed to seek government compensation for Japanese internment during WW2.

Suzuki is a 20-year member of San Jose’s Nihonmachi Outreach Committee, whose mission is “educating the public about the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.” In 2008, representing NOC, Suzuki joined a coalition of peace organizations who demonstrated at the September 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn.

A flier promoting the protest, which proclaims “U.S. Out of Iraq Now!,” named Suzuki as the contact and included his cell phone number. This flier lists the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee and dozens of other participating organizations including CODEPINK,Veterans for Peace, the War Resisters League and dozens of Midwestern student groups, labor unions and peace centers.

This activity prompted a visit from the FBI. Suzuki says he warned his neighbors, his students and the vice president of his union — the American Federation of Teachers — that the FBI might be calling on them. He also contacted an attorney, Dan Mayfield ofSan Jose.

Mayfield is a member of the National Lawyers Guild, a pro-communist advocacy group that, along with the ACLU, works to counter the FBI’s counter-terror activities at every opportunity.

On Dec. 2nd, Suzuki and representatives from the South Bay Labor Council, American Federation of Teachers, the Muslim Brotherhood front Council on American-Islamic Relations and the San Jose Peace Center met with far left Rep. Mike Honda’s aides. They had Honda send a letter of inquiry to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Suzuki and Mayfield organized the South Bay Committee Against Political Repressionto counter the FBI.

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Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack! table at the US Social Forum – Another World is Possible in San Jose, California. — with Masao Suzuki, Chrisley Carpio, Jared Tony Hamil, Steff Yorek and Gregory Lucero.

(Masao Suzuki|more…)

07/20/15

Wesley Clark Calls for Internment Camps for “Radicalized” Americans

By: Terresa Monroe-Hamilton

This is a horrific idea. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hunting down and dispatching terrorists and bad guys on our turf. But internment camps? Let’s just stop for a minute and wonder why Wesley Clark has done an about face so suddenly. Anything they can use in the name of national defense like internment camps can also be used against everyday Americans at their discretion. The internment camps in WWII were shameful and wrong. The same would be true here. If you have to deport people or prosecute them, that is one thing. But to round up everyone you deem ‘radicalized’ is quite another. What does that even mean to Clark? Color me highly suspicious of this and shocked that it is being floated out there.

From The Intercept:

Retired general and former Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark on Friday called for World War II-style internment camps to be revived for “disloyal Americans.” In an interview with MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts in the wake of the mass shooting in Chatanooga, Tennessee, Clark said that during World War II, “if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn’t say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.”

He called for a revival of internment camps to help combat Muslim extremism, saying, “If these people are radicalized and they don’t support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It’s their right and it’s our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict.”

The comments were shockingly out of character for Clark, who after serving as supreme allied commander of NATO made a name for himself in progressive political circles. In 2004, his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination was highly critical of the Bush administration’s excessive response to the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then, he has been a critic of policies that violate the Geneva Convention, saying in 2006 that policies such as torture violate “the very values that [we] espouse.”

In a memoir written the following year, he also famously alleged that the White House under Bush had developed a massively imperialistic plan for the Middle East, which would see the administration attempt to “take out seven countries in five years,” beginning with the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Earlier this year I spoke with Clark at the annual Lewis and Clark University Symposium on International Affairs in Portland, Oregon. The subject of our discussion was how to deal with the potential threat of foreign fighters returning from armed conflicts abroad. At the time, Clark spoke out strongly against “the politics of fear” and eroding democratic institutions and norms, while reiterating his criticism of the excesses committed by Bush-era neoconservatives under the banner of fighting terrorism.

But on Friday, he was advocating the revival of a policy widely considered to be among the most shameful chapters in American history: World War II domestic internment camps. Aside from the inherent problems in criminalizing people for their beliefs, Clark’s proposal (which his MSNBC interlocutor did not challenge him on) also appears to be based on the concept of targeting people for government scrutiny who are not even “radicalized,” but who the government decides may be subject to radicalization in the future. That radicalization itself is a highly amorphous and politically malleable concept only makes this proposal more troubling.

“We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We’ve got to cut this off at the beginning,” Clark said. “I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists.” And he added that “not only the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.”

Despite an outcry about his comments on social media, Clark has not responded publicly. As of Monday morning, his latest tweet was from Friday, encouraging his followers to watch his interview.

Wesley Clark is a political hack. His suggestion here should chill every American right to the bone. He’s not just suggesting it for America either… he’s suggesting it be done globally. Listen to the video closely. He’s suggesting people who are likely to be radicalized should be imprisoned. This is unconstitutional and barbaric. He’s suggesting here that we suspend the Constitution (even more than they already have) and build and populate gulags. I can’t believe what I’m hearing and seeing. Things are hurtling out of control in America. Americans better stand up and stop this or we are going to see a fascist tyranny take hold here and fast. Internment camps? What scares me the most is that people on both sides of the political sphere are cheering this on. Unfreaking believable.

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