A woman cries as she looks for her missing husband in Minamisanriku town, Miyagi prefecture, northern Japan, Sunday, March 13, 2011, two days after a powerful earthquake-triggered tsunami hit the country's east coast. (AP Photo/Kyodo News)

The sympathetic coverage of the devastation wrought by the Japanese earthquake and tsunami has overwhelmed the nasty little story of Rep. Peter King’s loyalty hearings aimed at American Muslims. Both news events, however, raise the compelling question of what it takes to turn a group perceived as alien and threatening--whether across the ocean or down the block--into people Americans see as neighbors, fellow citizens, and fellow human beings.

Just seven decades ago, Japanese Americans on the West Coast were herded into camps--whether they were first-generation immigrants or citizens with a stake of several generations in the United States--in the wave of fear and anger following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Prejudice against Japanese Americans remained high for two decades after World War II--even after the U.S. occupation of Japan ended and the country officially became our ally.

It was not until 1988, it should be recalled, that Congress passed a law requiring that the U.S. government pay reparations to those unjustly interned in what President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself had called “concentration camps.” Each $20,000 check was accompanied, as provided for in the law, by a letter with a personal apology from the president of the United States. Neither a check nor an apology can make up for the confiscated property and ruined lives of those imprisoned as adults or for the psychological wounds inflicted on Japanese American children who were forced to grow up in the camps. Nevertheless, the reparations--and the admission that what our government did was wrong--offer an important example of Americans acting according to the better angels of our nature.

What has happened to American Muslims since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, is not nearly as bad as what happened to the Japanese Americans on the West Coast after Pearl Harbor--but we surely have no reason to congratulate ourselves for not herding Muslim citizens into camps. Morever, the frequent use by public officials (with good as well as bad intentions) of the term Muslim-American is itself a perfect example of what is wrong with our thinking. This is the first time, as far as I know, that a religion has been used as the prefix in hyphenated-American usage. No one talks about Catholic-Americans, Hindu-Americans, Baptist-Americans or Jewish-Americans. What’s really going on here is the application of a religious description to swarthy-looking immigrants, or the descendants of immigrants, of Middle Eastern origins.

An old friend of mine, an atheist from a Christian Egyptian family that immigrated to the United States three generations ago, writes: “Don’t think that the people targeting Muslims make any exception for Christians of Arab descent. My grandmother, who always wears a cross around her neck, was mocked by punks in a suburb of Detroit where a great many Muslims live. She dresses in a very old-fashioned way that marks her as an immigrant, and they told her she had no right to `pretend’ she believed in Jesus.”

It is heartening--an example of the best traditions of American assimilation--that Japanese Americans have spoken out forcefully on behalf of American Muslims. Rep. Mike Honda (D-Cal.), who spent several years of his childhood in an internment camp in Colorado, wrote movingly, “The interned four-year-old in me is crying out for a course correction so that we do not do to others what we did unjustly to countless Japanese Americans.” Honda denounced King’s hearings for targeting an entire religion. “Never mind the fact that many were born in America and have no allegiance to their ancestors’ native homeland,” he wrote, “...millions of Americans have become the new enemy, with no cause and no crime.”

Again, what is happening to American Muslims now is not the equivalent of what happened to the Japanese Americans during the war but the premise is the same. Because we were attacked by Muslims from another country, all Muslims in America are suspected of disloyalty. .

I guess I should be happy that atheists have not launched any violent attacks against this country. I’d hate to find myself in front of a Congress calling me to account for all of the beliefs and actions of every other “atheist-American.” Indeed, I would find it impossible to defend the position taken by some atheists, who maintain that Islam is intrinsically more violent than all other religions and the Koran intrinsically more nonsensical than any other “sacred” book. The difference between Islam and Christianity in such matters is, by my reckoning, a difference of about 500 years since the Reformation and 300 years since the early era of the Enlightenment. Radical Islam is the worst actor on the religious stage today but that does not make it a special case in the history of religious violence. It only makes it the first 21st century case of religious fanaticism coupled with political fanaticism. .

I am not for a moment suggesting that there are no radical Islamists in the United States or that they do not pose a threat. It is the job of local police forces and the FBI, with all the tools at their disposal (including informants within Muslim communities) to find out who these people are and arrest them before they are able to commit the violent acts they are contemplating. That’s exactly what the FBI did during World War II within factions of the German American community working for the Nazis and against their country. (Some of them, as it happens, lived right down the street from where I now live in the Yorkville section of Manhattan.) But we didn’t put Americans of German descent in camps, nor did we hold hearings investigating the entire community of Americans whose parents came from Germany. That would have included my own grandmother.

But the fact that fear of radical Islamists is based on real acts by a few does not justify the current hysteria, any more than the fact that there were some German American spies would have justified suspicion of all Americans of German descent--any more than the existence of a hostile Japan justified what was done to Japanese Americans. “The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another,” wrote George Bancroft in 1834 in his History of the United States, the first “professional” historian’s attempt to sum up the experience of the young republic.

And let’s face it: this is not really solely about religion or even ethnicity, but about ethnic Americans who, in addition to their religion, are visually distinguishable from white Americans.

Which brings us back to the question of how it has happened that a group despised enough 70 years ago to be imprisoned commands great respect from Americans today. The country that attacked us--yes, remolded long ago by an American occupation that actually did engage successfully in democratic nation-building in a defeated country--is now perceived as being much more like than unlike us. When last year’s earthquake devastated Haiti, there was a good deal of coverage but the response of the United States was basically framed in terms of humanitarian obligation. Haiti was poor and unable to help itself; we would have to try.

Japan, by contrast, is perceived as a country that will be able to rebuild itself: the help that we give is based not only on a sense of humanitarianism but because we now see ourselves in this country. Does anyone living on the West Coast today not see what could happen in our own nation--which has given much less thought and invested much less money in disaster planning--in the event of an earthquake of similar magnitude? Are we not having second thoughts about the safety of our own nuclear power plants? Japan is seen as an equal in trouble, not as a chronically incompetent, corrupt, and poor society. And Japanese Americans are seen as people who have paid their dues here and succeeded in spite of the worst that American society could dish out.

Will Muslim immigrants ever be seen as equals rather than as the feared Other? Do their countries of origin have to be prosperous, well-governed democracies for us to respect citizens who left those countries long ago? Will we one day look back with shame on King’s hearings and the ridiculous idea that American Muslims want to impose sharia on the United States? Stay tuned. I hope it doesn’t take 70 years, because then I won’t be alive to see the better angels returning.