Kamala Harris Quotes
I was standing on a ladder outside the Homestead juvenile immigrant detention center outside Miami, looking over the fence, and I saw children lined up like prisoners. They had been separated from their families and put in this private detention facility. It was horrible.
Harris, Kamala. First Democratic Presidential Debate. NBC, 27 June 2019, Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami, FL.
She was very conflicted about the interment of Americans of Japanese origin. She understood the arguments for the internment and some had some merit for her. But she was opposed to the internment from the beginning. However, she frequently discussed this issue privately with FDR. She consulted with the judges who dissented in the law suits and presented their arguments to her husband. She visited some of the internment camps and maintained a correspondent with some of the interned Japanese American leaders. Earlier, once FDR signed the internment executive order, she maintained a public silence on the issue until 1944 when she publicly broke with her husband on this issue. (While that may be shocking to us today—for a first lady to publicly disagree with the President—for Mrs. Roosevelt, it was not unusual and was not the scandal that it might be today. Throughout her over 3 terms as First Lady, she wrote a daily newspaper column and did a weekly radio show for much of the period.
In the brutal history of slavery there were very few instances of any degree of minimal humanity by slave states. This is one.
She had saved over 2000 Jewish Children in the Warsaw Ghetto from Death by the Nazis. As a member of the Polish Resistance, she was caught be the Germans, badly tortured, and sentenced to death which she narrowly escaped.
The horrible practice of female genital mutilation (often referred to as FMG) is often believed to be an Islamic ritual. However, it is not. It is a custom whose origins were pre and outside of Islam. (See {635209}.) It has been practiced—mostly in Africa—by Christians and Animists also, but that is now rare among those religions. For Muslims, there is not a single mention of it in the Koran or in any other writing or saying attributed to The Prophet. A few modern Islamic clerics have issued Fatwas (Islamic legal opinions) against the barbaric practice. the procedure is extremely painful and a bleeding complication can be and often is fatal. Other immediate complications include acute urinary retention, urinary infection, wound infection, septicemia, tetanus, and in case of unsterile and reused instruments, hepatitis and HIV. 140 million women and girls are living with the effects of FGM.
At that time in American History, the George W. Bush Justice Department had a small team of lawyers who wrote a legal brief that defined torture in such a way that many of the most common forms of torture were no longer legal torture, even though they had been torture in American law and were again torture after this embarrassing episode of American history. The renamed techniques were called “enhanced interrogation” and a few terrorist suspects were subjected to it before the rules and laws were changed and the “legal opinions” nullified. The FBI and military intelligence did not use the so called enhanced interrogation techniques as they felt that torture produced unreliable intelligence as the victim will say anything the questioner wants to hear to end the torture. They also thought the Justice department memo was sloppy and defective legal work. Senator McCain was a particular expert on torture in that he had, during the Vietnam War, been captured and imprisoned for 7 years during which he had been tortured on several occasions.
Effective, terse quotation illustrating the research findings that adults who were abused as children tend to become child abusers themselves. Although he was referring to Black parents, the findings have been borne out for all ethnic groups.
Kamala Devi Harris is an American politician and attorney who is the 49th vice president of the United States. She is the first female vice president and the highest-ranking female official in U.S. history, as well as the first African American and first Asian American vice president. She was an unsuccessful presidential candidate, losing to Donald Trump, in the 2024 presidential election.
