Michelle Malkin
About In Defense of Internment

If you want to read a book decrying the loss of personal freedom in wartime America, this is the wrong book. If you want to read a book about the history of institutional discrimination against minorities in America, you’re out of luck again. Bookstores, library shelves, and classrooms are already filled with pedantic tomes, legal analyses, and educational propaganda along these conventional lines.

In Defense of Internment provides a radical departure from the predominant literature of civil liberties absolutism. It offers a defense of the most reviled wartime policies in American history: the evacuation, relocation, and internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II (three separate actions which are commonly lumped under the umbrella term “internment”). My book is also a defense of racial, ethnic, religious, and nationality profiling (widely differing measures that are commonly lumped under the umbrella term “racial profiling”) now being taken or contemplated during today’s War on Terror.

I was compelled to write this book after watching ethnic activists, historians, and politicians repeatedly play the World War II internment card after the September 11 attacks. The Bush Administration’s critics have equated every reasonable measure to interrogate, track, detain, and deport potential terrorists with the “racist” and “unjustified” World War II internment policies of President Roosevelt. To make amends for this “shameful blot” on our history, both Japanese-American and Arab/Muslim-American activists argue against any and all uses of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in shaping current homeland security policies. Misguided guilt about the past continues to hamper our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks.

Powered by Movable Type 2.661   ·   Design by Sekimori   ·   Maintenance by Mark Jaquith
© 2004-06 - Michelle Malkin - all rights reserved