Source: The San Francisco Chronicle

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/08/07/DD297141.DTL

On August 7, 2003 columnist Annie Nakao of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the solidarity found between Japanese Americans and Muslims in America after Sept. 11: "The catalyst for this friendship was Sept. 11, 2001, the day terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and changed America forever. In a single stroke, they also laid bare the vulnerability of Muslim and Arab Americans and South Asians in a world that saw them as terrorists, and brought back for Japanese Americans visceral memories of wartime injustice...it is heartening that Japanese Americans -- so traumatized by their World War II internment that they spent the next half century relentlessly pursuing the American dream of assimilation -- were among the first to step up and stand behind Muslims and Arabs in the days after Sept. 11."