Why the Japanese Internment Still Matters I have posted an associated weblog entry (see below), "The Japanese Internment, CAIR, and Me". by Daniel Pipes New York Sun December 28, 2004 For years, it has been my position that the threat of radical Islam implies an imperative to focus security measures on Muslims. If searching for rapists, one looks only at the male population. Similarly, if searching for Islamists (adherents of radical Islam), one looks at the Muslim population. And so, I was encouraged by a just-released Cornell University opinion survey that finds nearly half the U.S. population agreeing with this proposition. Specifically, 44 percent of Americans believe that government authorities should direct special attention toward Muslims living in America, either by registering their whereabouts, profiling them, monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating their organizations. Also encouraging, the survey finds the more people follow TV news, the more likely they are to support these common-sense steps. Those who are best informed about current issues, in other words, are also the most sensible about adopting self-evident defensive measures. That's the good news; the bad news is the near-universal disapproval of this realism. Leftist and Islamist organizations have so successfully intimidated public opinion that polite society shies away from endorsing a focus on Muslims. In America, this intimidation results in large part from a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Although more than 60 years past, these events matter yet deeply today, permitting the victimization lobby, in compensation for the supposed horrors of internment, to condemn in advance any use of ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion in formulating domestic security policy. Denying that the treatment of ethnic Japanese resulted from legitimate national security concerns, this lobby has established that it resulted solely from a combination of "wartime hysteria" and "racial prejudice." As radical groups like the American Civil Liberties Union wield this interpretation, in the words of Michelle Malkin, "like a bludgeon over the War on Terror debate," they pre-empt efforts to build an effective defense against today's Islamist enemy. Fortunately, the intrepid Ms. Malkin, a columnist and specialist on immigration issues, has re-opened the internment file. Her recently published book, bearing the provocative title In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery), starts with the unarguable premise that in time of war, "the survival of the nation comes first." From there, she draws the corollary that "Civil liberties are not sacrosanct." She then reviews the historical record of the early 1940s and finds that: Within hours of the attacks on Pearl Harbor, two American citizens of Japanese ancestry, with no prior history of anti-Americanism, shockingly collaborated with a Japanese soldier against their fellow Hawaiians. The Japanese government established "an extensive espionage network within the United States" believed to include hundreds of agents. In contrast to loose talk about "American concentration camps," the relocation camps for Japanese were "spartan facilities that were for the most part administered humanely." As proof, she notes that over 200 individuals voluntarily chose to move into the camps. The relocation process itself won praise from Carey McWilliams, a contemporary leftist critic (and future editor of the Nation), for taking place "without a hitch." A federal panel that reviewed these issues in 1981-83, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, was, Ms. Malkin explains, "Stacked with left-leaning lawyers, politicians, and civil rights activists – but not a single military officer or intelligence expert." The apology for internment by Ronald Reagan in 1988, in addition to the nearly $1.65 billion in reparations paid to former internees was premised on faulty scholarship. In particular, it largely ignored the top-secret decoding of Japanese diplomatic traffic, codenamed the MAGIC messages, which revealed Tokyo's plans to exploit Japanese-Americans. Ms. Malkin has done the singular service of breaking the academic single-note scholarship on a critical subject, cutting through a shabby, stultifying consensus to reveal how, "given what was known and not known at the time," President Roosevelt and his staff did the right thing. She correctly concludes that, especially in time of war, governments should take into account nationality, ethnicity, and religious affiliation in their homeland security policies and engage in what she calls "threat profiling." These steps may entail bothersome or offensive measures but, she argues, they are preferable to "being incinerated at your office desk by a flaming hijacked plane." Original article: Daniel Pipes The Japanese Internment, CAIR, and Me December 28, 2004 The Japanese Internment, CAIR, and Me My column today (see above), "Why the Japanese Internment Still Matters." reports on Michelle Malkin's book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror (Regnery) and its challenge to the revisionist view of the ethnic Japanese internment during World War II. What I do not mention there, but note for the record here, is my own cameo appearance in the introduction to her book, on p. xx, where Malkin discusses how the "ethnic grievance industry and civil liberties Chicken Littles" have shut down rational discussion of her topic: Even those who simply profess lack of knowledge about the topic [of the Japanese internment] are subjected to scathing criticism. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes, whom the Bush administration nominated to serve on the U.S. Institute of Peace, stated in an interview that he didn't know enough about the World War II evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese to comment on whether he supported it, ethnic activists launched an immediate attack. "Bush nominee refuses to condemn Japanese internment," the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) proclaimed. "It is outrageous that someone with undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, both in history, would fail to condemn the unjust internment of Japanese Americans by disingenuously claiming he is ill-informed," CAIR executive director Nihad Awad bellowed. Malkin has it right. The incident began on April 9, 2003, when I gave an interview to Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now," the radical left's most prominent U.S. program. Amy Goodman, the host, and I were talking about my usual Middle Eastern and Islamic issues when she, out of the blue, 12:26 minutes into the discussion asked me, "Did you support, do you now, looking back on the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II?" Startled, I replied, "It's not a subject I know enough about to talk about." CAIR, thick in its campaign against my nomination to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, tried, without success, to use this statement of mine to incite the Japanese American Citizens League against my nomination. In retrospect, given that CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper was on the same "Democracy Now" program as I was, I suspect that Hooper fed the question to Goodman. (That would not be the first time CAIR had apparently planted a question about me. For example, I have a videotape of the press conference it held in Davie, Florida, on October 24, 2003, conducted by its Florida head, Ahmed Bedier. Titled "Muslims Demand Probe of Floridian with Terror Ties," the event had nothing to do with me until the very end, when Bedier asked of his tiny audience, "Is there anything else?" To which, a CAIR ally and shill replied with a long question about my recent appointment to the U.S. Institute of Peace." Bedier then provided a long and inaccurate answer about my appointment.) This attempt at sandbagging me on the radio not only failed to derail my nomination, but it also failed in a larger sense, for it provoked my curiosity about the Japanese internment and prompted me to read Malkin's book. Now, should anyone ask the same question Goodman did, I can knowledgeably reply: Yes, I do support the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II because, as Malkin shows, "given what was known and not known at the time," the U.S. government made the correct and sensible decisions. (December 28, 2004) Original Article: Daniel Pipes Weblog