Media Coverage about ICCF:

JACL Director Honored by Islamic Cultural Center

Posted on Hokubei. com / North America's Japanese News Source: May 8, 2008
 
FRESNO - Floyd Mori, national executive director of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), was recently presented with a surprise award.

Mori had been invited by Judge Dale Ikeda to speak at a Day of Remembrance event held by the JACL in Fresno earlier this year. Ikeda heads a group dedicated to preserving the site of the Pinedale Assembly Center, where local Japanese Americans were held in 1942. Similar events are held throughout the country in remembrance of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

That evening, Mori was presented with an award from the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, whose members come from the local Muslim and Arab American communities. The Voices of Courage Award was given for speaking out against racial profiling of Muslim and Arab Americans following 9/11.

Mori was National JACL president at the time. On Sept. 10, 2001, he had just returned from a trip to Japan, where he represented the JACL in a ceremony marking the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-Japan peace treaty.

Immediately after the attacks on the World Trade Center, Mori felt compelled to speak out in support of Muslim and Arab Americans, who were becoming targets of hate crimes. Mori, National JACL Executive Director John Tateishi and JACL Washington, D.C. representative Kristine Minami issued a press release admonishing America not to retaliate against innocent Muslim and Arab Americans and not to repeat the treatment of Japanese Americans 60 years earlier.

Presenting the award were Kamal Abu-Shamsieh, director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Fresno, and Raafat L. Shahata, President and CEO of ASC Engineers and Associates Inc., also located in Fresno. Also in attendance was National JACL President Larry Oda.

In 2004, JACL spoke out against Michelle Malkin's book "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling'" in World War II and the War on Terror, calling it "a desperate attempt to impugn the loyalty of Japanese Americans during World War II to justify harsher governmental policies today in the treatment of Arab and Muslim Americans."

JACL took similar positions before 9/11. In 1990, the organization raised concerns over the potential for acts of violence against Arab Americans prior to the Gulf War.


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