ERIC MULLER is guest-blogging over at The Volokh Conspiracy, where he’s promised to post serial criticism of Michelle Malkin’s new book. Muller knows much more about the historical aspects of the book than I do, though what really interests me is today’s dysfunctional immigration system — which, as I mentioned below, seems mostly to inconvenience honest people while remaining porous to terrorists and criminals.
There’s a connection, of course — I think that Malkin’s right to say that reaction to the wrongs (well, I think they were wrongs) of the Japanese internment of World War Two is limiting our ability to do the rather mild things that we need to do now. (A couple of readers hysterically emailed wondering if Malkin, was advocating “interning all Muslims,” or even if I was. Uh, no. But fingerprinting people at the border hardly counts as internment, despite what people sometimes say.) Still, I’m afraid that the historical argument about the rights and wrongs of what happened over 60 years ago will hijack the discussion of what to do today. That could turn out to be expensive.
UPDATE: Malkin’s talking about the present day in this piece, in which she praises anti-terror efforts by Charles Schumer. And she responds to some criticism by Muller here. I hope we’ll see a fruitful dialogue, though again I’m far more interested in what we should be doing now than in revisiting the past, worthy as such efforts might be.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader David Kern emails:
Regarding your comment that you are much more interested in a debate about present day protection than rehashing Japanese internment:
While they may be competely separate issues, they have become inseparably connected in the political conscience. As a student at Columbia Law, every single argument I hear against profiling starts with condemning the Japanese internment as both an unnecessary and unbalanced response to a non-existent threat. It doesn’t take a lot of additional preprogramming to eliminate profiling as an acceptable action under any circumstances.
No discussion of our current options exists because the present historical understanding of internment is a silver bullet for the enemies of profiling. In political terms, it simply plays great and makes the issue untouchable for realists requiring a moderate appeal. Without something to address these arguments, little headway in the current, more important discussion is possible. A reasoned argument that adds interpretation of these past events could open discussions about what kind of trade-offs we currently face and how, if at all, we can effectively target high-risk groups while dispersing the costs of security to the general population. Regardless of the final answers, this seems a project very worthy of attention.
Yeah. I agree. I’m not at all convinced that ethnic profiling is the way to go — and I seem to recall Bruce Schneier making some cogent arguments along that line a while back — but I definitely agree that the history regarding internment is often used as a way of shutting off debate. And Eric Muller thinks so, too:
I’ll note a part of the book where I think Michelle is quite right. In her introduction (pages xiii to xxxv), or at least in certain parts of it, she makes the case that the civil liberties Left and representatives of the Japanese American community have not helped anyone think clearly about the Roosevelt Adminisration’s policies by attacking each step of the Bush Administration’s domestic antiterrorism policy since 9/11 as a reprise of the worst mistakes of WWII. This was one of the two main points I made in my article “Inference or Impact? Racial Profiling and the Internment’s True Legacy,” which Michelle graciously cites in her book.
A big part of what drove Michelle to write this book was her disgust with people on the left who have never met an antiterrorism policy they like, and who have trotted out the scary specter of the incarceration of Japanese Americans at every opportunity. In “Inference or Impact,” I worried about the Chicken Little effect of repeatedly claiming a replay of the WWII experience of Japanese Americans–that it might lead people to minimize the reality of that experience. Michelle is doing that in this book, and in at least a small way, I think the civil liberties left has some of its own rhetoric to blame. David Cole didn’t force Michelle Malkin to write this book, mind you. But maybe some of David’s rhetoric helped her build her head of steam.
He’s still not a fan, but this is an important point. (And I should note that I think well of David Cole, too, with whom I’ve worked in the past on some of these issues, though I do think he’s been somewhat alarmist). It’s been very difficult to have any kind of reasonable discussion of these issues in the nearly three years since September 11, and I think that has cost us dearly in terms of security. I’m also afraid that if we have another major terror attack, we won’t have that debate then, either.
MORE: These scurrilous photoshops of Malkin — one showing her in front of a bunch of concentration-camp inmates, quite a few others frankly racist (is Ed Cone endorsing these? Surely not) — prove Malkin’s, and Muller’s, and Kern’s, points about the Left’s desire to shut off debate here and about its willingness to call names rather than engage in argument. That’s a loser’s strategy, in more than one way.
The one about my hair, on the other hand, is kind of funny — though dollars to donuts the guy who did it is bald. . . .
STILL MORE: Muller has another post that seems to make Malkin’s thesis regarding MAGIC intercepts as the basis for federal action look shaky — though it doesn’t make FDR look very good, either:
In particular, there is no evidence that President Roosevelt ever saw or was briefed on the MAGIC excerpts the author mentions, let alone that he was decisively influenced by them. As I detail at great length in my book “By Order of the President,” throughout the 1930s Roosevelt expressed suspicions of Japanese Americans, irrespective of citizenship, and sought to keep the community under surveillance. As early as 1936, he already approved plans to arrest suspicious Japanese Americans in Hawaii if war broke out. As of early 1941, before FDR could have received any MAGIC excerpts, the Justice Department and the military had already put together lists of aliens to be taken into custody (the so-called ABC lists). These were not based on suspicion of individual activities, but of the suspected individuals’ position in Japanese communities. Roosevelt continued to believe in a threat despite receiving reports of overwhelming community loyalty from the FBI and his own agents, reports he called “nothing much new.”
More politicized intelligence, in an Administration dead-set on a pre-determined policy!