By Scott Wong

Fred Korematsu said when the U.S. government came to take him away to the internment camps during World War II more than 60 years ago, he refused to go.

“I had nothing to do with Japan,” said the 84-year-old Japanese American, who was imprisoned for resisting forced evacuation and took his civil liberties case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1944. “I am an American, and they called me a Jap spy.”

Korematsu, whose case faltered when high-ranking U.S. military officials suppressed evidence and doctored surveillance reports, spoke on a panel to approximately 100 students and staff at De Anza College last Thursday to mark President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066.

Today marks the 61st anniversary of the order, which authorized the removal and detention of 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast for the sake of national security during World War II.

The internment of these American citizens is relevant in today’s political mind-set as the current U.S. president executes his war on terrorism, including the detainment of immigrants without trial and the surveillance of Arab and Muslim Americans, according to panelists.

Panelist Maha ElGenaidi, president of San Jose-based Islamic Networks Group, said like Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Muslim Americans today have been vilified by U.S. popular culture and deprived of basic rights.

“Muslims are portrayed as terrorists, extremists, oppressive toward women and religiously intolerant,” she said. “There is a direct comparison or similarity (with Japanese Americans) in domestic policies that strip Muslims of their civil and human rights.”

ElGenaidi also said many domestic policies are based on racial profiling.

For example, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s raising the terror alert to a heightened state earlier this month was directly tied to one of Islam’s holiest events, the Hajj, ElGenaidi said.

“Equating religious holidays with the heightened terror alert — that’s a concern,” she said.