Michelle Malkin--A Self-Hating, Dangerous Kook

[DB Roy]

I just finished reading Michelle Malkin’s 2004 book, In Defense of the Internment: The Case for ‘Racial Profiling’ in World II and the War on Terror put out by Regnery. I hardly know what to say after having my brain numbed by this literally unbelievable drivel. First of all, I should point out, in case you didn’t know, that Malkin is Filipino-American. So you need to understand how Malkin is viewed by the majority of Asian-Americans, myself included: They hate her. She is known as what Asian-Americans call a banana—yellow on the outside and white on the inside. Since Malkin is actually more of a brown color, she is often referred to by the more generic label of “white-worshiper.”

Her contempt towards the Asian-American community appears to be, in large part, a bid to win the approval of white America and I should specify white conservative America. White liberals, from I see and read, also hate her. White conservatives of the male gender find her attractive and aren’t ashamed to display some of the worst examples of Asiaphilia to prove it. And yet, she’s definitely a second-class citizen in the white conservative movement. During her stint on Fox, the station tried to use her as a stand-in for Bill O’Reilly and his fans were having none of it. They wanted her gone and she went. This caused a rift between her and O-Reilly/Fox that had me sitting in the front row eagerly munching mouthful after mouthful of popcorn.

When an Asian-American woman displays a shameless preference for everything she views as “white,” the sure bet is that she inherited this predilection from her mother. She sometimes, in her blogs, quoted her mother as if the woman was a fount of unassailable wisdom and people often noted that this woman seems to be cold, emotionally detached and unempathetic. It seems very strongly that Malkin vicariously cried out to her mother for love and acceptance but it was never offered. She would quote the cold things her mother would say to her as a kind of see?-my-mother-didn’t-mollycoddle-me-like-the-rest-of-you-slant-eyed-peasants-but-made-me-tough-and-ready-for-the-world. Whenever I would read one of her blogs where she quotes her mother, I would find myself feeling sorry for her because the woman was such an obvious cold fish.

Malkin comes across as unflappable because she doesn’t appear to care in the slightest what her critics say about her but the surefire way to raise her hackles is to remind her that, for better or worse, she is still a member of the Asian-American community. She hates that and will immediately go on the attack!

In one case, during the Abercrombie & Fitch debacle when Asian-American watchdog groups decried their marketing of “Two Wongs Can Make It White” t-shirts and two others that stereotyped and trivialized Asian culture and people. A&F issued the bizarre statement that they thought Asian-Americans would love these items. They were wrong. The overwhelming reaction was one of anger and loathing. I never saw anyone of any race wear these shirts which would tend to prove that the vast majority of A&F’s clientele were put off by them or least felt uncomfortable about wearing them although they continued to shop at A&F despite calls by Asian-American groups to boycott the stores.

Malkin’s take on the episode is very typical of her way of seeing the world and her place in it: she wrote that the designer of the offending shirt was, in fact, Asian-American and therefore what right do Asian-Americans have to complain? Of course, it makes no difference who designed the shirt, if it’s offensive then it’s offensive. Could A&F’s corporate management not see the problem of marketing such merchandise? In one fell swoop, Malkin managed to hold A&F blameless for the t-shirt debacle and place the blame entirely on Asian-Americans who were offended. What she left unsaid was how she herself felt about the shirts. Did she honestly think shirts depicting faces with slits for eyes and wearing conical hats accompanied by ching-chong-type references were acceptable to peddle to people? Did she really think that because an Asian-American designed them (and I don’t know if this is true or not because it doesn’t matter) that Asian-Americans who were offended needed to shut up and stop blaming A&F and blame themselves instead?

So, in the Asian-American community (assuming for the moment that such a thing really exists), Malkin is almost universally recognized as the most salient example of Asian-American self-hate and white-worshiping. They view her as an embarrassment but Malkin’s underlying reason is to want their loathing because by being loathed by her fellow Asian-Americans, she can symbolically separate herself from them. There is no such thing as a superiority complex. Those who hold themselves to be superior to others do so solely because they feel hopelessly inferior. For Malkin to stoop to considering herself Asian-American makes her feel like a failure in her mother’s eyes who clearly suffered from the same mental disease. Her real reason for slamming the Asian-American community at every turn may not be so much to win the approval of white conservative America (whom I suspect that she may even loathe at some level in a passive-aggressive manner) but to win long sought after approval from her mother (whom I understand to be deceased). I can imagine her turning to the ghost of her mother hovering over her and asking her, “How was that, mom?” and, as in life, getting no answer.

Michelle Malkin deals in dangerous, irresponsible ideas because she is a staunch and unapologetic nationalist. In her book, she even stated that people who oppose the government, regardless of race, belong in prison camps. She advocates dangerous ideas and one can only wonder what happened to her as she grew up to have pushed such destructive thoughts into her mind or why she would advocate ideas that are so detrimental to her as a person of color.

So to the book. I went into this long side discussion of Malkin’s character and psyche so that the reader can understand what kind of person we are dealing with here and what kind of a person writes a book like this. In Defense of the Internment will not go down as one of the greatest examples of Asian-American literature but perhaps the very worst. The best example, or at least my favorite, is John Okada’s 1957 novel, No-No Boy. We shall refer to it here in more than passing because it ties in directly with the subject matter—the Japanese-American Internment. No-No Boy was published by Charles Tuttle with no fanfare whatsoever. No one noticed not even Asian-Americans. Not until 1970, the year of Okada’s death at age 47, did the book gain any traction among Asian-Americans when a Chinese-American activist discovered it on a shelf in a bookstore in the Japanese area of San Francisco. The book made the rounds and in its wake its readers would go onto write and perform the first Asian-American drama to reach the stage in New York (The Chickencoop Chinaman), found bookstores catering to Asian-American literature as well as the founding of CARP (Combined Asian-American Resources Project). From there, the book made its way to college campuses across the nation.

I am a product of World War II like many of you. Unlike many of you, I am well aware of it. In fact, I can trace the point to which I ultimately owe my existence—Pearl Harbor. Had not those bombs fallen, the U.S. and Japan would never have gone to war, Japan would never have been devastated necessitating a rebuilding effort in which my father took part and during which he met the woman who would become his wife and my mother. My father was not a serviceman when he met my mother but he had served in the U.S. Navy during the war, joining on December 8, 1941 and graduated the last week of the month. He spent most of the war stationed at Guadalcanal as an aircraft metalsmith, a rate that did not exist by the time I joined the Navy 41 years later as an electrician.

The decision to intern the Japanese-Americans did not come suddenly as a result of that Day of Infamy. FDR had since the mid-1930s wondered whether the Japanese-American population could be trusted and whether it might be prudent, if not necessary, to imprison them somewhere. The bombing of Pearl Harbor settled the question. On February 19, 1942, he signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the removal of all Japanese-Americans from the West Coast. All the Japanese nationals living in or visiting the U.S. were deported and only those Japanese considered too Japanese were “relocated.” But then the government came back again this time for those who were a little less Japanese than the first but still Japanese enough to make Uncle Sam-san jittery. These men were taken away from their families who would be very hard pressed to survive without them but they needn’t have worried as the government decided on the next go-around to just nab up all of them and put them all in camps. Not in the same camps, mind you. Many families were split up. They had to lived behind barbed wire an under the watchful eye of military guards in towers. The camps were run by the War Relocation Authority (WRA). The only possessions they were allowed to bring with them were only what they could carry. Everything else would have to be left behind. Ask yourself, dear reader, if given the choice of taking with you only what you could carry, what you would take. Within a few months, only one Japanese-American still lived on the West Coast pretending to be Chinese and finding employment in a shipyard.

Those Japanese-Americans who were visiting relatives in Japan or studying there were forgotten by their government and left there. They had to make a living however they could. Many of them found employment at NHK as broadcasting propagandists because they spoke English. One of these was “Tokyo Rose” even though no one existed under that moniker. A Japanese-American named Iva Toguri who broadcast propaganda under the name of Orphan Annie was identified as Tokyo Rose. Toguri was staunchly pro-American and worked with Allied POWs to write out scripts that had secret messages in them that they hoped someone out there among the Allies would key in on. In reality, Tokyo Rose was several women. On weekends, she was played by Ruth Hayakawa, a Canadian-Japanese also abandoned in Japan by her government (Canada also interned its Japanese citizens). Even a white woman in the Philippines broadcast pro-Japanese propaganda under the name of Little Margie. Most Japanese-Americans renounced their citizenship out of fear. Only Toguri refused to do so. Ironically, this caused the American government to target her after the war. None of the others could be tried for treason since they had renounced their citizenship but Toguri could be and was. She was stripped of her citizenship and imprisoned for a 10-year sentence of which she served six. Her citizenship, however, was not restored until President Gerald Ford pardoned her on his last day in office in 1976.

Then there were the loyalty tests. The WRA and the War Department issued written loyalty tests (Selective Service Form 304A) to gauge the loyalty of the Nisei or second generation of Japanese-Americans who were born in the U.S. and therefore citizens. Their parents were Issei of first-generation Japanese-Americans who had emigrated from Japan who could not be citizens because of their race. Since the 19th century, Asian immigrants struggled in the U.S. to be recognized as legally white in order to qualify for citizenship but the legality was denied time after time:

See, e.g., In re Ah Yup (1878) (Chinese are not White); In re Camille 1880 (persons half white and Native American are not White); In re Kanaka Nian (1889) (Hawaiians are not White); In re Hong Yen Chang (1890) (Chinese are not White); In re Po (1894) (Burmese are not White); In re Saito (1894) (Japanese are not White); In re Burton (1900) (Native Americans are not White); In re Knight (1909) (persons half White, one-quarter Japanese, and one-quarter Chinese are not White); In re Balsara (1909) (Asian Indians are not White); In re Najour (1909) (Syrians are White); In re Halladjian (1909) (Armenians are White); Bessho v. United States (1910) (Japanese are not White); In re Alverto (1912) (persons three-quarters Filipino and one-quarter White are not White); In re Young (1912) (persons half German and half Japanese are not White); In re Akhay Kumar Mozumdar (1913) (Asian Indians are White); Ex parte Dow (1914) (Syrians are not White); Petition of Easurk Emsen Charr (1921) (Koreans are not White); Ozawa v. United States (1922) (Japanese are not White); United States v. Thind (1923) (Asian Indians are not White); United States v. Ali (1925) (Punjabis are not White); In re Feroz Din (1928) (Afghanis are not White); United States v. Gokhale (1928) (Asian Indians are not White); De La Ysla v. United States (1935) (Filipinos are not White); De Cano v. State (1941) (Filipinos are not White); Kharaiti Ram Samras v. United States (1942) (Asian Indians are not White); In re Ahmed Hassan (1942) (Arabians are not White); Ex parte Mohriez (1944) (Arabians are White).

One of the questions asked the internee to renounce his Japanese citizenship. This was not possible for the Issei who could not became American citizens and so by renouncing their Japanese citizenship would have no citizenship at all. But the government wasn’t really interested in the Issei. The military wanted to determine whether or not the Nisei were fit for service in the American military but first had to clear up how many Nisei held dual citizenship. Many of the questions seemed innocuous such as how many languages do you speak, what are your hobbies, how many relatives do you have living in the U.S., what church and civic organizations do you belong to, but these questions were used to determine how Japanese or how American a Nisei person was. Being a Christian added points, being a Buddhist took points away. Belonging to the Boyscouts added points, belonging to a karate class took them away. Speaking English only added points, speaking Japanese with any amount of fluency took them away.

The two key questions on form 304A (questions 27 and 28) were whether the internee was willing to serve in the military and was willing to forswear any and all allegiance to Japan and the emperor and swear loyalty to the U.S. only. Those who answered no to these questions were considered the greatest loyalty risks. They were carted off to prison for the rest of the war. Among the internees, these men were dubbed the no-no boys. Some internees regarded them as heroes while others spit on them. Many families fell apart over a family member being dubbed a no-no boy. Okada’s novel deals with the post-war fate of a young Japanese-American internee who spent the last two years of the war in prison for being a no-no boy. Okada himself served in the U.S. Army during the war. No-No Boy was his only novel.

Malkin’s book claims to correct the record on what really led up to the Internment but her claim is belied by others she makes such as spending a whole 16 months writing the book while doing her stint on Fox, blogging and raising a child. Even if she had a trained staff who knew exactly what they were looking for and knew exactly where to find it, to go through all the material found in memos and files archived in military and government facilities would take a decade or more of working on nothing else. Just sifting through it and organizing it would take years. We are talking thousands of files, memos, letters, etc. numbering into tens of thousands of pages and maybe even a hundred thousand. If we try to grant her the excuse that she was merely perusing the works of those who done that type of research (i.e. secondary research) instead of doing it herself then we are stuck trying to explain how her conclusions could be so vastly different from theirs. They found no justification for the Internment. If Malkin is going to claim she has corrected the record then that would require starting from scratch and unearthing evidence never before seen. She did not do that and could not have done that in a mere 16 months. It’s a careless claim at best and an outright lie at worst.

The entire thrust of her book centers on the MAGIC decrypts. The U.S. military first cracked Japanese code in 1923. When the Japanese revamped their code system in the 30s, the U.S. again cracked it pretty easily. With the help of the Germans, who had more extensive knowledge of the types of codes the U.S. had trouble with, the Japanese came up with the purple code (because transcripts of the messages were kept in purple binders). The purple code turned out to be virtually uncrackable for a while and when it was finally decoded, the info it contained was found to be obsolete. What stands out to Malkin is the following transcript excerpt:

(3) Make a survey of all persons or organizations which either openly or secretly oppose participation in the war.
(4) Make investigations of all antisemitism, communism, movements of Negroes, and labor movements.
(5) Utilization of U.S. citizens of foreign extraction (other than Japanese), aliens (other than Japanese), communists, Negroes, labor union members, and anti-Semites, in carrying out the investigations described in the preceding paragraph would undoubtedly bear the best results. These men, moreover, should have access to governmental establishments, (laboratories?), governmental organizations of various characters, factories, and transportation facilities.
(6) Utilization of our "Second Generations" and our resident nationals. (In view of the fact that if there is any slip in this phase, our people in the U.S. will be subjected to considerable persecution, and the utmost caution must be exercised).

Here, officials in the Japanese military government are trying to come up with propaganda and intelligence coups to use against the American war effort by weaken them from the inside. Item #6 is of interest to Malkin. The Japanese talk about utilizing the “Second Generations” and “resident nationals.” So here is proof, she cries, that the government had spies among the Nisei who were passing information to the resident nationals. At first glance, this seems a logical conclusion. The Japanese government seems to be saying, “Let’s make use of the spies among the Nisei and the our nationals living there.” But a closer examination reveals little logic in this conclusion.

Resident nationals doesn’t refer to Nisei or Issei but to diplomats, professors, emissaries, ambassadors and so on. These would have little to no contact with Nisei people who were poor to middle class, owned small businesses or worked in offices, factories, shipyards, railyards or were employed as gardeners and other domestic help for well-to-do mostly white families. Few were involved in government except in the most superficial ways. They would have had no information to pass to the resident nationals even if they actually knew any. Let us remember that the resident nationals were Japanese citizens who had no reason or obligation to be loyal to any country but their own—Japan.

So what does the reference to second generations mean? According to historians, including high-ranking military officers, it refers to homegrown spies in the government. Since there were few, if any, Japanese-Americans in government jobs at that time, there is virtually no chance that these “Second Generations” could be referring to Japanese-Americans. So what the MAGIC decrypt was saying was, “Let’s make use of our homegrown spies and the resident nationals” and that makes far more sense than Malkin’s conclusion because these homegrown spies would have been in a position to meet up with the resident nationals and pass them information but there is almost no chance any of them could have been or would have been Nisei. After the war, 10 people were tried for treason against the U.S. by passing sensitive information to the Japanese government—all were white and all did it for money. With all the anti-Japanese and anti-Japanese-American sentiment felt across the nation during the war (non-Japanese-Americans were overwhelmingly in favor of the Internment), the failure to produce a single Japanese-American spy in all this time is telling.

But let us suppose that the decrypt actually was referring to Nisei, what would that prove? Nothing. The decrypt does not say that there were any Nisei spies or even that were being recruited for it. It simply says to utilize them and that can mean almost anything. And even if a few Nisei were recruited as spies, does that justify locking up 112,000 Japanese-Americans? Malkin can’t provide even a shred of evidence to prove her point which is only sheer speculation.

Then Malkin would have to show that the MAGIC decrypts were used as a justification to intern Japanese-Americans. There is no evidence to show they did. Malkin even trips herself up by saying the decrypts were so secret that only a few people actually saw them. Then how can she know that they served as a basis for the Internment? The truth is, we don’t know who saw them or what they thought of them. We are just in a black area on that point. Malkin seizes this to insert speculation. That hardly “corrects” a record, I’m afraid. Certainly, the Canadians never saw the decrypts and their treatment of the Japanese-Canadians was at least bad as the U.S. and really worse!

Malkin’s claims cannot explain why no Japanese-Americans in Hawaii, for example, were interned even though Hawaii was where the Japanese attacked! If there were Japanese-American spies anywhere, then certainly Hawaii—home to 100,000 Japanese-Americans—would be the place to intern them out of national security. But it never happened. California was the state that focused on internment and that was driven by hysteria and racism. One writer says that to make this claim is “oversimplifying.” Okay, I agree, let’s add greed to that list. Ask yourself who got all that land and property the Japanese-Americans were forced to leave behind. You can bet nobody gathered it all up and saved it for them. There is plenty of testimony from people who saw whites entering the houses of evacuated Japanese-Americans and taking whatever they wanted.

The Japanese-Americans were treated by other Americans as being inseparable from the Japanese. Newspaper headlines of that period did nothing to straighten this out but rather confused the issue even more. General John DeWitt, the man largely behind the rationale for the Internment even stated, “A Jap is a Jap.” None of them can be trusted and he clearly wasn’t basing his decision on the MAGIC decrypts. Some of this wartime hysteria is understandable but Malkin herself has still carries on this belief. In a blog some years back when writing about the Internment (I supposed being savagely beat down by her critics isn’t enough to shut her up), she offered yet a new rationale: the internees should have been made to explain the atrocities committed by the Japanese military. Yes, you read that right! Apparently, people stuck in prison camps out in the middle of the American desert that had no A/C in the heat and no heating in the cold were somehow magically informed about the atrocities committed by the Japanese military machine and apparently had some sort of hand in it. I was flabbergasted to read that. That’s taking “a Jap is a Jap” to an extreme that even DeWitt couldn’t have dreamed of!

Malkin makes the point that all Japanese-Americans being totally loyal to the U.S. is a falsehood perpetuated by guilt over the Internment. I’m willing to grant her this because, as we see with the no-no boys, not all Japanese-Americans were completely loyal to America. Some were still loyal to Japan, some were loyal to Japan and the U.S. but I doubt anybody would be particularly startled by this revelation. It is only to be expected. But being loyal and committing espionage are, of course, two completely different things. There is certainly evidence that a sizable number of Japanese-Americans (but by no means the majority) had questionable loyalty to the United States, yes, but there is NO evidence that any of these people committed espionage.

Malkin brings up such evidence as a Pearl Harbor attack pilot landing in a remote part of Hawaii and becoming friends with three Japanese-Americans. Malkin cannot even prove that these people knew anything about the attack much less that they were conspiring against the U.S. She also brings up the case of Richard Kotoshirodo who was hired by the Japanese consulate in Honolulu prior to the attack to keep tabs on what ships entered and left the harbor. The book’s dust jacket even places Kotoshirodo’s photo next to that of 9-11 attacker Mohammad Atta as though Kotoshirodo was Atta’s equivalent. Not only were Kotoshirodo’s actions not damaging to the U.S., they weren’t even illegal! Anyone could have watched the ships entering and leaving Honolulu all day and night if they were so inclined. How she can compare him to a man who hijacked a plane full of people and deliberately crashed it into the World Trade Center killing thousands is something she never tries to explain.

Malkin also defends the fact that no Italian-Americans or German-Americans were interned. Italian and German nationals within the U.S. were interned but not any that wee American citizens despite the fact that many German-Americans were known to be fanatically pro-Hitler. Hermann Göring even had a regular column in the New York Times for a while where he urged German-Americans to support Hitler. Why were the Japanese-Americans singled out for internment? According to Malkin, the reason why it was necessary was because Japan had already attacked the U.S. and had the aircraft carriers and planes to launch attacks on the mainland. This really doesn’t explain why it was necessary to intern 112,000 Japanese-Americans nor does she explain how a Japanese aircraft carrier would be able to get close enough to launch such an attack unless she’s dumb enough to assert that these planes could fly over 5,000 miles from Japanese waters to American shores. But she still fails to connect this to why 112,000 people needed to be interned.

In fact, by defending the decision to intern Japanese-Americans but not Italian- or German-Americans, Malkin actually defeats her own argument for racial profiling. In the case of the Japanese-Americans, it was necessary; in the case of the others, it was not. That’s her rationale! Moreover, Malkin is using this to draw a parallel that we must do the same thing to today’s Muslims. She actually denies this in her book but the very rationale spelled out in the very title belies this claim.

Of course, she wants racially profile and round up Muslims in the U.S. We already have a good example of why this is bad—the El-Masri Rendition. In 2003, Khalid El-Masri was abducted by CIA agents in a process known in the Bush administration as a rendition, taken to Afghanistan and tortured and beaten in a place called “the Salt Pit.” He was fed garbage and putrid water. After several months of this treatment, during which time El-Masri seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth, somebody finally decided to examine his passport and realized it was genuine. They had mistaken El-Masri for Khalid al-Masri, an al-Qaida operative who traveled on a fake German passport. El-Masri was released without so much as an apology and his attempts for justice in the courts has been denied him. This is why racial profiling is bad.

For someone who is obviously not white or even part-white, Malkin asserts the need to racially profile at her own peril. As with El-Masri, you can so easily be mistaken for what you are not. If Trump becomes president and racially profiles Mexicans or Chinese, Malkin could easily find herself being rounded up and put in detention. Her protests that she is Filipino not Mexican or Chinese will elicit exactly no concern on the part of detention force officers. If that day ever comes, I hope I can laugh at the irony instead of finding myself in the cell next to her. This woman is sick and dangerous. Her book ended up on the New York Times Bestseller list which shows too many idiots out there are content to let those least qualified do their thinking for them. If Trump should get into the White House, you have to wonder how much influence she'll have with him. Quite a lot, I'll bet.

[LanDroid]

Wow you wasted time reading that thing?

Lemme guess:
A. She thinks liberals want to round up conservatives and put 'em in concentration camps.
B. She cannot wait to round up Muslims and put 'em in concentration camps.

[DB Roy]

Wow you wasted time reading that thing?

I really had a hard time getting through it. I was totally sick of it halfway through. But I had to get through it. Admittedly, I read much of it in a kind of stupor where you read the words but then realize you had no idea of what the last ten pages were about because your mind was somewhere else. You read but don't take any of it in.

Lemme guess:
A. She thinks liberals want to round up conservatives and put 'em in concentration camps.

Actually, that's what SHE wants to do with anyone who disagrees with her form of extreme nationalism. She actually states in the book that anybody who expresses disagreement with the govt (remember Bush was in office at the time) should be locked up. I can't see her as attractive the way conservative males do. Her mentality and value system are so hideous to me that I cannot even stand to look at her. She literally makes me sick.

B. She cannot wait to round up Muslims and put 'em in concentration camps.

Well, she emphatically claims in the book that she is not advocating this but the entire thrust of the book is geared towards exactly that--racially profiling Arab peoples, rounding them up and locking them away. If Trump wins, I'm pretty sure she would be one of his advisors considering how he likes to surround himself with trophy women. i shudder to think of what America would turn into if it were ever to mirror her vision of a utopia. She is a sick, hateful person full of self-loathing.
m

[LanDroid]

She actually states in the book that anybody who expresses disagreement with the govt (remember Bush was in office at the time) should be locked up.

A direct quote would be very tasty...

I can't see her as attractive the way conservative males do. Her mentality and value system are so hideous to me that I cannot even stand to look at her. She literally makes me sick.

I agree. From the little I've seen - between the words she spews and the looks she flashes - I don't see how you've spent so much time checking her out.




Not to hijack, but here's another bomb lobber that right wingers think is hot. With fingers like that, Ann Coulter missed her calling as a proctologist.

[Taylor]

I guess I've been lucky, until this thread I can honestly state that I never new Michelle Malkin existed.

That's the point of tyranny though isn't it? Keep people blind till its to late for a proper response, let the mob get emotional and violent or otherwise cruel while the leadership devises ways to cover their asses. Hiding an insidious message behind a pleasant face is like reading The Turner Diary's as a child's bedtime story but only in a lyrical tone.

[DB Roy]

She actually states in the book that anybody who expresses disagreement with the govt (remember Bush was in office at the time) should be locked up.

A direct quote would be very tasty...

Well, I would have to quote several pages because she doesn't say in a sentence or two and I don't feel like typing it all out and I don't have an e-copy. I don't even own the book but borrowed it from an idiot who thinks she's great. But there is a section in her book called "A Time for Discrimination" where she lays out her call for the govt to round up and imprison Arab-Americans and Arab foreign nationals and people of any race who protest those actions--people she calls "internment alarmists" (????). The danger Malkin's book and continued presence in the extreme right wing nationalist movement poses is that she is giving a voice to many in the govt who want to round up Arab-Americans and Muslims and who want to use the Japanese-American Internment as a model to implement this. People as North Carolina Representative Howard Coble, chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, North Carolina representative Sue Myrick, former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, Florida Republican Senate candidate Dan Fanelli who advocated racial profiling of Arab-Americans and Muslims in his campaigns against Alan Grayson, and business magnate and financier T. Boone Pickens who openly backs Trump's call for a ban on Muslims entering the country.

Malkin's book got big kudos from pro-Israeli groups and politicians (Daniel Pipes, for instance) and that's worrisome because she is married to an extreme right wing pro-Zionist Jew. Oh, but he doesn't push her buttons and tell her what to write. Why, to assert such a thing would be antisemitism!!

But even people not nearly as wacko still say "we need some form of racial profiling" (Geraldo Rivera). Let me tell you something: if you support racial profiling, you support the Japanese-American Internment and that means you support any kind of internment of any group of people for any reason (evidence doesn't matter since this inherently involves no trials for the accused). So, dear reader, don't tell me you don't support what was done to the Japanese-Americans but believe we need to watch keep a close eye on the Arabs in this country. If you had lived during WW2, you would have been screaming to lock those damned Japs up and throw away the key. In that case, I respect Malkin more than you because at least she comes out and says it. Don't tell me it's okay to lock up people for their race or religion without trials but your gun rights are sacrosanct. If we can violate the Constitution by locking up people without trials based on their race, we can certainly violate the Constitution and take your fucking guns away. So be careful what you wish for!

Not to hijack, but here's another bomb lobber that right wingers think is hot. With fingers like that, Ann Coulter missed her calling as a proctologist.

Malkin says she considers it a compliment when people call her "the Asian-American Anne Coulter." Although, i think she'd like it better if they left the Asian-American part out of it.

[Cattleman]

Like Taylor, I had never heard of Michelle Malkin until I read this post.
I wonder, did her mother live in the Philippines during the Japanese occupation? I know they (the Japanese) could be brutal. That might explain her anti-Japanese sentiment. But it does not explain her negative attitude towards all Asians-Americans. China, Korea, Burma, Thailand, etc. were also under Japanese control at this time. Will have to look into more of her writings i guess.

[DB Roy]

Undoubtedly, her animosity towards the Japanese is based in WW2. That's understandable. There are a lot of Asian people who still hate the Japanese over the atrocities. What isn't understandable is her insistence on lumping the Japanese-Americans in with the Japanese as though they are just as guilty. Then she wants to do this same thing to Arabs and Muslims. An American-born Muslim is no different than a Saudi or Iraqi Muslim so if one is flipping crazy then they're all flipping crazy. If one needs to be locked up then they all need to be locked up. And for a member of a racial minority to be saying this borders on the suicidal (not to mention that Islam has made huge inroads into the Philippines which could point a finger of suspicion at her because people who like to racially profile don't generally know when to stop and don't generally care).

[DB Roy]

In the following article, we see that Malkin's book wasn't just some off-the-wall thing she suddenly decided to write, it was ordained so to speak. As the Asian-American in the alt-right movement, it was her job to help them plant this particular meme. And it bore fruit:

Trump has consistently performed better among Republican voters who feel whites are losing out. According to several recent studies, including one by Hamilton College political scientist Philip Klinkner, the more resentment a voter bears toward minority groups, especially blacks, immigrants and Muslims, the more likely he is to support Trump. Economic status and attitudes were far less important factors, according to Klinkner. An Iowa poll conducted by Public Policy Polling in December 2015 found that nearly half of Trump supporters believed the Japanese internment camps in WWII were a good idea. A national analysis of Trump supporters by The New York Times found that 20 percent disagreed with the Emancipation Proclamation.

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/arti ... alt-right/

[DB Roy]

Now in the news is a former-SEAL, Carl Higbie, who apppeared on Fox News being interviewed by Megyn Kelly about the formation of a Muslim registry. During that interview, Higbie, formerly of the Great American PAC (which has raised millions of dollars for Trump), mentioned the Japanese-American Internment as precedent for creating a Muslim registry which he insisted was completely legal.

Kelly went on the attack. "Come on," she said, "You're not proposing we go back to the days of internment camps, I hope." Higbie replied that he was not but Kelly said, "That's the kind of stuff that gets people scared, Carl." Higbie said that the Japanese-American Internment simply set a precedent not that they were suggesting that people be interned but Kelly wasn't having it: "You can't be citing Japanese internment camps as precedent for anything the president-elect is gonna do!"

Again, I believe the reason this came up at all was Malkin's book. Half of Trump's supporters believe the Internment was justifiable (despite being blatantly unconstitutional) and how many of these people were likely to have read any other book on the Internment other than Malkin's?

As soon as you cite the Internment as precedent, people would be extremely foolish to assume that internment camps aren't coming. Not only is a Muslim registry subject to abuse by the Trump administration, once it is established, it becomes legal precedent for any other registries the administration may wish to pursue against any group of people for any reason. For people who whine about the need for smaller government, they would be handing a frightening amount of power to the executive branch of the federal government run by a racist, narcissist lunatic.

And Higbie is not an isolated incident, last November, David Bowers, mayor of Roanoke, VA cited the Internment as justification to turn away Syrian refugees:

"I'm reminded that President Franklin D Roosevelt felt compelled to sequester Japanese foreign nationals after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and it appears that threat of harm to America from [IS] now is just as real and serious as that from our enemies then," Mr Bowers, a Democrat, wrote.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34864814

Here, Bowers seems to be saying that any Muslims resettled in his state should be interned.

These people mention the Internment showing no concern that Trump's base will react negatively and they don't. Again, the reason is because those of them who have bothered to read anything about the Internment got their information from Malkin.

"Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear." ---Bertrand Russell