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

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Do we really need to relearn the lessons of Japanese American internment?

Fred Korematsu

In 1942, I was arrested and convicted for being a Japanese American trying to live here in the Bay Area. The day after my arrest a newspaper headline declared, "Jap Spy Arrested in San Leandro."

Of course, I was no spy. The government never charged me with being a spy. I was a U.S. citizen born and raised in Oakland. I even tried to enlist in the Coast Guard (they didn't take me because of my race). But my citizenship and my loyalty did not matter to the federal government. On Feb. 19, 1942, anyone of Japanese heritage was ordered excluded from the West Coast. I was charged and convicted of being a Japanese American living in an area in which all people of my ancestry had been ordered to be interned.

I fought my conviction at that time. My case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in 1944 my efforts to seek protection under the Constitution were rejected.

After I was released in 1945, my criminal record continued to affect my life. It was hard to find work. I was considered to be a criminal. It took almost 40 years and the efforts of many people to reopen my case. In 1983, a federal court judge found that the government had hidden evidence and lied to the Supreme Court during my appeal. The judge found that Japanese Americans were not the threat that the government publicly claimed. My criminal record was removed.

As my case was being reconsidered by the courts, again as a result of the efforts of many people across the country, Congress created a commission to study the exclusion and incarceration of Japanese Americans. The commission found that no Japanese American had been involved in espionage or sabotage and that no military necessity existed to imprison us. Based on the commission's findings and of military historians who reconsidered the original records from the war, Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, declaring that the internment of Japanese Americans was unjustified. Finally, it seemed that the burden of being accused of being an "enemy race" had been lifted from our shoulders.

But now the old accusations are back. Fox News media personality Michelle Malkin claims that some Japanese Americans were spies during World War II. Based upon her suspicions, Malkin claims the internment of all Japanese Americans was not such a bad idea after all. She goes on to claim that racial profiling of Arab Americans today is justified by the need to fight terrorism. According to Malkin, it is OK to take away an entire ethnic group's civil rights because some individuals are suspect. Malkin argues for reviving the old notion of guilt by association.

It is painful to see reopened for serious debate the question of whether the government was justified in imprisoning Japanese Americans during World War II. It was my hope that my case and the cases of other Japanese American internees would be remembered for the dangers of racial and ethnic scapegoating.

Fears and prejudices directed against minority communities are too easy to evoke and exaggerate, often to serve the political agendas of those who promote those fears. I know what it is like to be at the other end of such scapegoating and how difficult it is to clear one's name after unjustified suspicions are endorsed as fact by the government. If someone is a spy or terrorist they should be prosecuted for their actions. But no one should ever be locked away simply because they share the same race, ethnicity, or religion as a spy or terrorist. If that principle was not learned from the internment of Japanese Americans, then these are very dangerous times for our democracy.

Fred Korematsu was awarded the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medial of Freedom, in 1998. He and his wife, Kathryn, continue to live in their longtime hometown of San Leandro.

As a conservative, pro-life, "traditional family values" Republican third generation American of Japanese ancestry, I was shocked and saddened by the gross inaccuracies in Malkin's book.

For example, the book purports one of the basic, underlying reasons for internment was the Japanese espionage "threat" on the West Coast. However, Japanese Americans during WWII were among the most loyal to America, and many served valiantly for the U.S. during the war.

According to the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in a report entitled, "Personal Justice Denied", it stated that "not a single documented act of espionage, sabatoge or fifth column activity on the mainland was committed by an American citizen of Japanese ancestry or by a resident Japanese alien on the West Coast." This view has been substantiated consistently by independent scholars and researchers for almost 50 years since WWII.

Two of my uncles, although interned, volunteered to enlist in the U.S. Army in the 442nd Regimental Combat Unit. One of my uncles in the unit earned a REAL Purple Heart after he sustained extensive damage to his ear when an enemy grenade exploded near his head while fighting for the U.S. in Europe during the war.

The 442nd suffered huge numbers of casualties and is the most decorated combat unit in American history. They were credited for saving a Texas unit trapped behind Nazi lines, although a significantly larger number of Japanese American U.S. soldiers lost their lives rescuing them than the total number of soldiers that were in the Texas unit.

My mom, a U.S.-born American citizen, was also interned during the war. She felt as if she were without a country. Yet she never, ever considered turning her back on this nation she calls "home". She, along with my family, proudly display American flag decals on our clothes and our cars.

Yes, I strongly believe America needs to continue to vigorously fight for freedom here in our homeland and abroad, and defend itself against terrorism. I also have confidence that America, through prayer, wise decision-making and courageous, measured action will pro-actively prevent the mistakes of the past and implement much more innovative and effective means of fighting 21st century terrorism rather than even considering reverting to the extreme, heinous act of wholesale incarceration of innocent people without due process.

Apparently Michelle Malkin believes in the selective, subjective, and arbitrary application of constitutional rights for US citizens. There is a vast difference between using "racial profiling" as a tool to assist in the investigation of an actual crime- for instance, looking for evidence of spying among Japanese aliens that worked for the Port Authority in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor- and "racial profiling" as an unconstitutional presumption of guilt that results in the wholesale imprisonment of citizens and legal aliens without any tangible evidence of wrongdoing. Michelle Malkin doesn't seem to recognize the moral spread between the two.

I see from other reviewers' comments that Michelle Malkin is Filipina. I wonder if Michelle Malkin would be willing to have her property stripped from her and live behind barbed wire in a tent in the desert, watched by armed guards, should the U.S. government determine that persons of Filipine descent constituted a terrorist threat to the general populace. It wouldn't be all bad: She could organize schools for the imprisoned children, eat free Army issue food, take some time off from her career, socialize in the communal latrines while she cleaned them, and publish her own newspaper. Maybe Michelle Malkin could even get the chance to swear an oath of fealty in exchange for a trip out of camp as a migrant farm worker, picking potatoes for less than minimum wage. Michelle Malkin: Will you show us your patrotism by giving up your rights? I'd be happy to provide the barbed wire and MREs.

Michelle Malkin conducted absolutely no scholarly research in the writing of this ridiculous book. She argued that Japan controlled the entire Pacific Ocean, maintained a vast network of spies in the US, and planned to invade the West Coast. Through subterfuge and falsification of information, she thus concluded that internment camps were not morally reprehensible because they were of military necessity and because, in her mind, racism did not exist during the 1940s.

Fortunately, Eric Muller, a law professor at UNC -- Chapel Hill, revealed that Malkin's arguments were entirely unsubstantiated and willfully falsified. As historian Greg Robinson observed, "there were no reports of sabotage or espionage" following Pearl Harbor or before Japanese-Americans were unlawfully imprisoned. Allied forces maintained a Germany-first strategy because they considered Japan to be a lesser threat, in part because it did not have absolute control of the Pacific Ocean. Moreover, internment camps were established in June 1942, after the Battle of Midway, in which Japan's defeat greatly diminished its threat to the US mainland.

Despite the great deal of criticism she received, Malkin refused to budge from her position that MAGIC cables established the military necessity of internment camps. She underscored how important MAGIC was to her argument by dedicating her book to David Lowman, whose "research" on MAGIC she borrowed extensively from. However, James C. McNaughton, Command Historian of the US Army, Pacific, declared that Lowman's work on MAGIC to be of no merit and dismissed Lowman's "polemics ... as symptomatic of the lingering bitterness stemming from Pearl Harbor and the emotions raised by apologies and compensation."

Even the Historians' Committee for Fairness proved that Malkin's book represented "a blatant violation of professional standards of objectivity" -- "decades of scholarly research, including works by the official historian of the US Army" have contradicted every one of her intellectually dishonest claims. Following a report by the US government Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, President Reagan authorized that compensation be paid because the denial of civil rights to Japanese-Americans had been "motivated by racism" instead of veritable military concerns. As the noted biographer Jean Edward Smith pointed out, during their internment, Japanese-Americans lost more than $400 million from 1942 to 1945, a sum when adjusted for inflation equated to almost $5 billion. These financial losses were never fully or adequately recouped.

Lastly, it should be noted that the segregated Japanese-American 100th Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team became the most highly decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of the US Army. When the European Theatre finally ended, the 100th/442nd had received 7 Presidential Unit Citations, and its members were awarded numerous decorations for valor and competence, including 21 Medals of Honor, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 560 Silver Stars, 4,000 Bronze Stars, and 9,486 Purple Hearts. Their sacrifice was astounding because they suffered a casualty rate of 314 percent, which meant, on average, every man was injured more than three times.

I picked up this book at a store because it caught my eye. You see, unlike the author, or any of the reviewers heartily recommending the book, I have some relatives who were actually in the camps.

One of my aunts was interned as a child, as was her entire family. I have talked with her and her surviving family many times about this subject. The family of girlfriend of mine had been in the camps, and she interviewed many former internees for a documentary film as a senior project. I worry that, as the surviviors die off, there will be no one left to refute revisionists such as Michelle Malkin.

Needless to say, I was disgusted by reading the book, and returned it for a refund. The author does do a good job of creating the impression of a well-researched book, so I did some research of my own on the internet. What I found made me realize that the author probably did as much research as I did.

Like any other revisionist book, this has sparked a sharp response from actual scholars in the field. Realize that Malkin is a hard-right COMMENTATOR. She is not a journalist, much less a scholar. She apparently spent about a year writing this book (on a part-time basis), and her research was largely based on files gathered by other revisionists. She has made a career out being controversial and propagating a right-wing agenda. She is the perfect shill for this, since she is an articulate, attractive, Asian woman. Can you imagine if someone like Pat Buchanan had written this book? I look forward to her next book on how the Holocaust never happened.

However, the relevant point of this book is not scholarly research. The author seeks to convince us that racial profiling is required today if we are to survive the terrorist menace. This is where Malkin's "ethnicity", at least in appearance if not in character, pays off in spades in being to get away with being controversial.

What does racial profiling really mean? Does it mean we should treat people differently based on their appearance, their religion, their accent, their manner of dress? For one, the assumption that all potential terrorists are young Arabs is flat wrong. Think of McVeigh, John Walker Lind, or Padilla, as well as Phillipine extremists (hello, Michelle?), Indonesian muslims, and on and on. Even if true, how do we identify these Arabs? They can change their clothes, accents, even falsify papers. What's left is outward appearance. Well, there are millions of Americans with ethnicities that are Latin-American, Jewish, Spanish, Indian, Greek, Italian, and on and on, who could pass for "Arab or "Muslim". And what about the women and kids? Couldn't they be terrorists too?

Basically, what happens today is that any American or visitor who looks obviously Muslim (or wears a turban, like Sikhs do), gets treated with suspicion in many public places. Obviously, any real terrorists would not attract attention to themselves, so usually innocent people get treated badly.

The unavoidable inference from the premise of this book is that it is OK to discriminate based on race, and that we should consider locking up the Arabs. This is never stated by Malkin, of course, but the cover of the book alone speaks volumes. Is this what we have come to, again? This is a sad day indeed for Americans who care for the values that make this country great, and who despise ignorance, paranoia, and intolerance.

Here is law professor Eric Mueller's comments on this book:
http://www.isthatlegal.org/archives/2004_08_01_isthatlegal_archive.html#109176416329230176

The following is an excellent overview on Michelle Malkin: who she is, who is backing her, and what her agenda is.
http://www.bopnews.com/archives/001225.html#1225

Malkin's book is based on documents that have been discredited by an independent commission of the U.S. Government and full-time academic scholars of the Japanese American Internment. The documents she cites as the foundation of her argument have been found to be made up "war hysteria" and not based on the facts collected. Furthermore, the Commission found that the documents she cites do not add up to a rational argument for the Internment. Malkin's misinformation is deceptive and dangerous. If you're going to read this book, be sure to check out "Personal Justice Denied," the Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and the Internment of Civilians to get the complete story.

Michelle Malkin's latest effusion is as fine an example as any of the depths to which today's Right has sunk (I voted for Reagan, by the way-twice). She takes reasonable proposals (such as beefing up border security), and debatable issues (Should racial or ethnic profiling be used to safeguard air travel?) and wraps them around stuff sufficiently disgusting that only the fever-swamp right would touch it before now. The trick here, of course, is getting your audience nodding in sweet agreement with you while you slowly bring out the lynching rope.

It is one thing to look for enemy agents among a population in which they could hide, quite another to treat an entire population as the enemy. Madame Malkin claims that she is not calling for a general round-up of all Arabs or Muslims, but her shining example of Japanese-American internment certainly belies this. ALL Japanese-Americans living on the west coast of the United States were deported to what amounted to concentration camps. The fact that prisoners were not shot, gassed, starved, or subjected to sadistic medical experiments, should not prevent us from using that phrase. (It originates not with Nazis, but from the Spanish governor of Cuba from 1896 to 1897, General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, who set up camps to intern civilians--in abysmal conditions--during the revolt against Spanish rule. It also referred to civilian internment camps set up by the British during the Boer War.) Meanwhile in Hawaii, mass internments did not take place, even though the proportion of people of Japanese descent to the general population was far higher than on the U.S. Pacific coast. Even if honorable men acted with good intentions in the continental U.S., they are responsible for stoking the inevitable hysteria that occurs at the outbreak of war, instead of containing it as was done in Hawaii. Madame Malkin makes much of the fact that a thousand or so Japanese-American families "voluntarily" moved to camps in the interior. They chose to leave after being targeted by vigilantes and California officials "suggested" that they move. Some choice.

As mischievous reviewers on this page have pointed out, there are al-Qaeda linked Moro separatists fighting on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. Presumably, Madame Malkin would not mind being deported on a moment's notice (along with family and relatives) to a camp in some isolated, God-forsaken wasteland should Filipino-Americans come under suspicion. If not, then this makes her a hypocrite on top of everything else. But there's more. While the Arab of popular stereotype is a villainous-looking fellow with a hooked nose, hooded eyes and an extremely swarthy skin, the truth is that Arabs can vary in appearance as much as Caucasians do. (I went to high school with a Palestinian who had reddish hair and fair skin, not to mention an Arab-American in college who looked more like an Italian than anything else.) So Madame Malkin's notion of separating the terrorist goats from innocent sheep fails on its own terms. Speaking of Caucasians; as Malcolm X found to his surprise, there are any number of Muslims from central Asia who have blond hair, fair skins, and blue eyes. There are indications that al-Qaeda is assisting Chechen separatists with terrorist attacks (including the latest massacre at a school in southern Russia). What's to keep al-Qaeda (or similar groups) from employing suitable-looking terrorists here if we follow Malkin's advice to round up the usual suspects?

Balancing civil liberties so as to protect American society (and American Muslims) while rooting out Islamists is going to be tough, especially in a conflict that has no definite end. But if we do things Madame Malkin's way, then I suggest that the National Archives send her the original U.S Constitution and Bill of Rights so she can run them through her shredder.

The neocons are just amazing to me. They never stop with their insanity. Now one has written a screed defending the WWII internment camps?

TWO-THIRDS OF THE INTERNEES WERE AMERICAN CITIZENS. THEY WERE HELD IN VIOLATION OF SEVEN ARTICLES OF THE U.S. CONSTITUTION WITHOUT CHARGE, TRIAL, OR EVIDENCE OF DISLOYALTY OR ESPIONAGE. SOME WERE HELD UNTIL OCTOBER 1946. NOT ONLY WERE THE INTERNEES SUBJECT TO EMOTIONAL TRAUMA, THEY SUFFERED ENORMOUS FINANCIAL AND MATERIAL DAMAGES, AS WELL AS THE DISRUPTION OF MANY YEARS OF PROFESSIONAL AND EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE.

The official title of these camps was "relocation centers." Though the Axis powers who threatened the Allies included Japan, Germany, and Italy, only Americans of Japanese--not German or Italian--descent were forced to move to the relocation centers.

These neocons have no respect for the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, but yet they turn around and call themselves patriots. It's just amazing to me.

Don't be fooled. Very little in this book is about racial profiling. Almost the entire book is an attempt to justify the forced eviction and internment of 112,000 Japanese Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom Malkin concedes were INNOCENT. Only the last chapter discusses current-day issues of racial profiling, and the discussion there is superficial and of lesser quality than the editorials on the subject in conservative newspapers.

Malkin, an Ann Coulter wannabe who admittedly tries to be provocative to sell her book (p. xi), argues that the internment of Japanese Americans was justified because there was a spy network of Japanese Americans working for Japan here in the continental United States during World War II. The Answer? Evict and intern EVERY single Japanese American in the coastal areas of the Western United States--even those who were LOYAL, INNOCENT American CITIZENS. Their crime? The color of their skin, their race. Malkin believes that one should be judged by the color of their skin, not the content of their character.

This book is quite simple. She spends the largest portion of her book cataloguing evidence showing that the Japanese had a spy ring in the United States. She spends just one and a half pages attempting to justify the eviction and internment policy. (Pages 78-79.) That's it for her great rationalization of the internment of tens of thousands of innocent, patriotic Americans.

Here are some tidbits from this author who proudly boasts in her "Note to the Reader" (page xii) that she is no historian:

It is a "great myth" that the Japanese Interment was "unjustified." (page xii)

The Japanese American agents working for Japan numbered in the "dozens" or "hundreds." (pages 31, 132.) A classified ONI memo "named dozens" of Japanese agents. ( p. 34.) Since we knew their "names," we presumably could have taken action with respect to them, and not all the innocents.

In spite of the barbed wire, armed guards, floodlights and watchtowers of the camps (p. 100), conditions really were not so bad after all, and the barbed wire was "more symbolic than practical."(p. 108.) And the internment was good for the second generation Nisei--who were American citizens. (p. 108.) Sounds like a Nineteenth Century argument in favor of slavery.

Our country should not have "unwarranted guilt" over the internment. (p. 115.)

The reparations bill to compensate Japanese Americans for the internment was the result of the 1960s and 1970s "antiwar agitation and ethnic politics." (p. 116.) Ronald Reagan made a mistake in signing the bill. (p. 119.) Wow, Reagan was a bleeding heart liberal, a radical anti-war activist from the 1960s!

The injustice of the interment was only "perceived." (p. 131.)

Top secret MAGIC (intelligence) memos that were kept from the public for many years and ignored by historians show that the internment was justified. (p. 129.) These MAGIC memos discussed Nisei and Issei (first and second generation Japanese Americans) "by name." (p. 132.) So, we knew who they were, but we had to evict and incarcerate all 112,000 just for good measure.

How many MAGIC memos mentioned Japanese Americans as possible intelligence sources? Six. (p. 135.)

Of the 19 suspects convicted of committing acts of espionage just before and during World War II, how many had Japanese names? None. (p. 138.)

Malkin's conclusion for our current war on terror:
"[W]e must steel ourselves for the possibility of a long-lasting reduction in the overall level of individual liberty we have heretofore possessed." (p. 165.)

That's it. That is really all you need to know about Malkin's book. Don't fund her self-promotion by buying it.

Okay, let's just say for arguments sake that we follow mrs malkin's advice and profile ONLY male middle-easterners. Terrorists arent stupid. They'll quickly catch wind of this and start to change their attack strategy. What if they decide to start using females? If they havent already. Or more light-skinned people? Or maybe even children? Who knows what terrorists can be capable of.

Folks, terrorism is an idea not EXCLUSIVE to male muslims from the middle-east. Sure in the short term profiling male muslims might work, but what about LONG term? That is the key. We must defeat the idea of terrorism in general.

I also sometimes wonder if Ms Malkin would be singing the same tune had she been alive during the days of japanese internment during WWII. Even, though she isnt japanese herself, those in government at the time could probably have cared less. To them she probably looked "Close Enough" and still had her thrown into one of those camps. If you catch my drift...

That's the dangerous reality of profiling.