Why
the Japanese Internment?
by Daniel Pipes
 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 the United States, either by registering their
whereabouts, profiling them, monitoring their mosques, or infiltrating
their organizations.
Also
encouraging, the survey finds the more a person follows television
news, the more likely he supports 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
the United States, this intimidation results in large part from
a revisionist interpretation of the evacuation, relocation, and
internment of ethnic Japanese during World War II. Although over
sixty 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 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 U.S. 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 two hundred 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, 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, plus the nearly
US$1.65 billion in reparations paid to former internees were 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.
Michelle
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,” FDR 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.”
Daniel
Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org)
is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction
Publishers).
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