Blame the Chinese regime for coronavirus, not the Chinese

White House Correspondent for Newsmax, Emerald Robinson tweeted to her 152,000 followers, “It’s time to kick out Chinese students from US universities. They can attend their own colleges at home. It’s time to ban Chinese money from our media & entertainment companies. It’s time to prosecute American politicians for taking their money. It’s time to get serious.”

Her tweet received 10,500 likes and nearly 4,000 retweets, as of this writing. This is terrifying.

The history of my people illustrates the dangers of this mindset, profoundly. The Black Plague was blamed on the Jewish people, as described in this horrifying quote from an article detailing the scapegoating of ethnic groups during crisis, “Lacking a germ theory of disease, they claimed that Jews had poisoned the wells, or as one deranged medieval conspiracy theorist claimed, the Jews “wished to extinguish all of Christendom, through their poisons of frogs and spiders mixed into oil and cheese.”

As ridiculous as this might sound to modern perspectives, take a twitter argument from a Young Americans Foundation representative who began the argument stating the Chinese are “evil, genocidal communists” and continued, “It is an undeniable fact that the Chinese government has used its students and its money to push their propaganda in American colleges and universities. It is utterly ridiculous to cry racism when serious people are trying to deal with the threat posed by China.”

While these accusations are true of the communist government controlling China, the direct blame towards China’s citizens is the problem. Similar to claims after 9/11 of Islamic infiltration of our schools by Muslim students, the paranoia and fear come from seeds of truth that bloom into xenophobia and irrational, hysterical declarations.

If not contained, these declarations become calls to action and innocent people are targeted. That is unacceptable. Henry Abramson of the Jewish Telegraph Agency provides another look into the scapegoating of Jews, “According to historian Hillel Ben-Sasson, some 300 Jewish communities were destroyed in the mass hysteria associated with the plague.

Much of the agitation came from the local population: Church officials often issued appeals on behalf of the Jews, including Pope Clement VI, and Emperor Charles IV and Peter IV of Aragon urged an end to the violence, to no avail.” He continues, “Jewish communities charged with well-poisoning were typically taken out to their own graveyards, ordered to build their own funeral pyres, and set alight.”

A Campus Reform reporter declared on March 17th, 2020, “As soon as we can stabilize our own situation, we should look to cripple China economically and move to diminish their place in global trade. And an easy first message we could send would be to deport Chinese students here on visas, and refuse to admit any in the future.”

On March 14th, 2020 Era Levant of Rebel News tweeted in response to a Chinese Journalist who had a fever and was turned away from a White House press event, “Chinese owned”? No, CGTN is a propaganda channel, formerly called CCTV-9. It reports directly to the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China. That’s not a journalist, that’s a Chinese government agent, trying to bring his fever into the White House. Deport. Now.”

As reported on twitter by The Jacob Wohl Report, on March 18th, 2020 Wohl told his followers, “President Trump should deport all 326,000 Chinese Students that are in this country immediately. They are loyal to Communist China. Not America. Then we should suspend all Green Cards issued to Chinese citizens. They are loyal to Communist China. Not America.”

Using this identical reasoning, The history of American Japanese internment, recorded by the Encyclopedia Britannica, “In early February 1942, the War Department created 12 restricted zones along the Pacific coast and established nighttime curfews for Japanese Americans within them. Individuals who broke curfew were subject to immediate arrest.”

“On February 19, 1942, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which gave the U.S. military authority to exclude any persons from designated areas. On March 18, 1942, the federal War Relocation Authority (WRA) was established. Its mission was to ‘take all people of Japanese descent into custody, surround them with troops, prevent them from buying land, and return them to their former homes at the close of the war.’ On March 31, 1942, Japanese Americans along the West Coast were ordered to report to control stations and register the names of all family members. They were then told when and where they should report for removal to an internment camp.”

Most strikingly the report states, “John J. McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, remarked that if it came to a choice between national security and the guarantee of civil liberties expressed in the Constitution, he considered the Constitution ‘just a scrap of paper.”

We cannot allow mass panic to grow into paranoia targeting innocent people because of the corrupt and intentional actions of their government. The Chinese government deserves worldwide rebuke and criminal consequences, the Chinese people are victims of their deception as much as the rest of us. China deported American journalists, but under no circumstances should we do the same.

We must stand up to those on our side calling for efforts that target Chinese Americans or legal residents and unite against repeating this cruel and otherwise inevitable history.