"We stand by our belief that the entire Muslim community cannot be held responsible for the actions of Osama bin Laden and the Al-Qaeda terrorists. In a country where whites, African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans and Muslims live on the same block and learn in the same classrooms, knowledge and understanding, not extremi and blame, are critical to the peace asmnd prosperity of our great nation." NEA Statement on September 11 lesson plans.

We have walked this way before and it took nearly a half-century for America to acknowledge that it had trod the wrong path. Ask Daniel Inouye, he knows better than most Americans that shameful chapter in our history. Ask the children of Frank Warmbier of Champaign, Illinois who looked out their front door to see swastikas scrawled on their sidewalk even while their father was awaiting rescue from shark infested waters after USS Indianapolis sank from under him. While Senator Inouye was fighting for his country against the Axis in Europe his family was confined because of their Japanese heritage. While our next door neighbor manned his battle station in the Pacific his children were vilified in their home and called Nazi on the school ground merely because their grandparents had left Germany behind.

I would like to believe that America has become better than that in the last sixty years. I would like to believe that America has learned from its historical mistakes. I would like to believe it, but the drumbeat of political invective thundering on the right makes belief impossible. In the aftermath of an attack on America perpetrated by a small but well organized gang of terrorist criminals espousing a perverted version of Islam America seems bent on labeling every person of Moslem descent as a terrorist enemy. When the National Education Association speaks out against that Un-American practice its collective patriotism is questioned. When any speak up and question how it is in America any American can be held in detention without charges and without being afforded the right to legal representation they are shouted down by a chorus of conservative catamites.

Shortly before I was born the Reichstag burned, and in the wake of the fire the authorities blamed the Communist Jews. The flames of that conflagration were fanned until it became Kristalnacht, Auschwitz and Dachau and Nazi steel was annealed in Jewish blood. It its lust after someone to blame, for scapegoats the German nation let itself be consumed by an unreasoning hatred for an imagined enemy. I want to believe that America is better than that. I want to believe that America will see through the demagogic manipulations of those who seek to turn national tragedy to political advantage and as a tool to consolidate their hold on national office.

People of conscience of both political persuasions are seeing the difference between ideological agreement and blind obedience and they are beginning to question. Dick Armey is one. Brent Scowcroft is another. In that there is some hope for America.