In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror



In Defense of Internment: The Case for "Racial Profiling" in World War II and the War on Terror is a 2004 book by conservative author Michelle Malkin. As it says in the title, the point of the book is to defend the Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, and to advocate that the United States engage in something similar in order to fight the War on Terror.

Michelle vs. The Founders
The book opens with this paragraph:

Of course, one could find several quotes from the founding fathers that disagree with Malkin's rather odd interpretation. The most famous example being Benjamin Franklin's famous line "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." However, one only needs to understand what the word "unalienable" actually means ("impossible to take away or give up" ) in order to understand why Malkin's point about word order is grasping at straws, to put it nicely.

For the record, the phrase "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" actually comes from John Locke, specifically a phrase he coined put along side his notion that a government must protect its citizens right to "life, liberty, and property."

Malkin's disdain for civil liberties is present all throughout the book. She defends one person who was "merely observing that adopting lesser measures that the entire grievance industry vehemently protest as civil rights atrocities… can prevent acts of terrorism, which in turn can prevent larger infringements on civil liberties down the road." However, even giving her the benefit of the doubt that a civil liberties-minded government would one day perform a 180° turn the second they have an excuse to, that would still in no way justify the original infringements.

Were there Japanese terrorists?
One of Malkin's big pieces of evidence is the MAGIC cables, which she claims provide evidence of "an aggressive effort to recruit West Coast spies, including both Japanese aliens (Issei) and U.S.-born citizens of Japanese descent." Malkin writes that it had "vital importance in shaping FDR's national security policies abroad and at home."

However, in his review for Reason Magazine, Eric L. Muller points out two major issues with this claim. The first one being:

And the second issue being:

Regarding claims of recruitment, Malkin is greatly misrepresenting what these messages actually said. Historian Greg Robinson points out that one message cited "does not say that such recruitment took place, and furthermore that recruitment was to take place even more among non-Japanese. "He also notes that many of the cables could not have been used as justification for internment because they "recount information given to Japan in fall 1941, long after any discussion of recruiting Japanese Americans had ceased." (This isn't the only issue with time Robinson finds, as he notes one event that Malkin used to justify internment happened "four days after Executive Order 9066 was signed, so it could not have played a factor in any of the decisions.)

Malkin and David Lowman
In Defense of Internment is dedicated to a man named David Lowman, whom Malkin has also credited as being the person who got her interested in this topic in the first place, writing in 2004:

However, given Malkin's decision to hold Lowman in high regard, it's important to note that he, to put it simply, was not a very good source and the book doesn't say what Malkin thinks it does. Publisher Weekly noted, although Lowman does say MAGIC played a large role in the decision to intern the Japanese, his book has nothing "directly rebutting charges that sheer racist hysteria contributed as well." This is a far cry from Malkin who says, definitely, that the "internment measures were based not on anti-Japanese racism."