I thoroughly enjoy how people just take the word of news agencies who refuse to report on anything unless it is scandalous, controversial or down right bad, and who don't even think twice about pulling comments out of context to make a story more sensational. I want to know if these people that now hate Tom Hanks with a passion actually took the time to look into the allegations or if they just heard the story on the "news" and took it as fact. He stated, "Back in World War II, we viewed the Japanese as 'yellow, slant-eyed dogs' that believed in different gods." If you have seen any of the cartoons from the WWII era referencing the Japanese you would know he was right about that. If you knew your history, you would know the U.S. built concentration camps of their own for Japanese-Americans. From what I can tell he never stated that Pearl Harbor or 9/11 were not the major reason for going to war, just that racism was A reason, and if you don't believe that it was then me trying to convince you otherwise would be like trying to convince a holocaust denier that the holocaust did happen.
Tom Hanks defended his remarks during an appearance at the World War II memorial in Washington where he stated, "I said it's familiar with what’s going on today, You can walk into the National World War II museum in New Orleans, in the Pacific wing, and Steven Ambrose himself has made that very point. It's up in black and white, that after Pearl Harbor, these people that were very, very different from each other, the Americans and the Japanese, who had different heritages, who had different theologies and different ways of government, had a different sense of society went at it tooth and nail." He continued, "I have talked to all sorts of people who have, in the vernacular, used incredibly racist terms about the people on the other side of the fence, and we can see all the time that comes over in the regular news media from their side, from the other side, terms that can only be viewed as racist. But let’s just take the word 'racism' out of it and put 'ignorance' instead, because it’s, racism, is a mere virulent form of what that ignorance is."
I have no idea what kind of personal vendetta the news media has against Mr. Hanks, maybe it is just his time in the celebrity dunk-tank, but I do find it highly depressing that otherwise intelligent individuals refuse to do any research on their own before they demonize someone because the news tells them to. I dare anyone here to find a credible source showing Tom Hanks saying that Pearl Harbor had nothing to do with why we went to war.