A student at the University of California, San Diego on Wednesday posted Japanese internment-style flyers around campus that called for the evacuation of Muslims from San Diego County.
The flyer, titled “Instructions To All Persons Of Islamic Belief,” follows the same formatting of Japanese internment flyers posted in April of 1942, according to the campus newspaper The Triton.
“All Muslim persons, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from the above designated area by 12:00 o’clock noon Wednesday, April 8, 2017,” the flyer reads.
The student, who is a Japanese American, said the flyers were in no way anti-Muslim and were intended to serve as a warning for what could happen under the new administration.
After the flyers were received negatively by the campus community, the student responsible for posting them reached out to The Triton to clarify their true intention.
“The posters were meant to mimic the [Japanese] internment poster because I wanted to shock/anger people and to show them what could happen if they didn’t do anything to stop it. It was a warning presented as a possible future,” the student wrote.
The student’s statement continued.
“I left many of the messages vague and with a loose connection to internment because I wanted to simply establish a connection between the situation of the Muslim people, and the Japanese people, and then let the viewer arrive at their own conclusion,” the student said.
The flyers were posted during the 75th anniversary of the internment of Japanese Americans.
UCSD officials did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.