historiblogography

more on malkin

As Eugene Volokh notes, there's an excellent Cathy Young column in today's Boston Globe. Last paragraphs are especially good:

Ironically, the profiling measures Malkin advocates today, such as
selective monitoring of aliens and visitors from countries with terrorist links,
are moderate and fairly sensible. She is right that it's ludicrous to invoke
Japanese internment as a parallel. But surely, defending something as extreme as
mass internment can only undermine her case. The people Malkin dubs "profiling
alarmists" argue that if you accept any ethnic profiling, you're on a slippery
slope to defending internment camps. And Malkin does her best to prove it for
them.

But this doesn't mean that Malkin's book -- the new featured selection of
the Conservative Book Club -- is harmless. Among the conservative faithful, it
is likely to promote anti-immigrant bias, contempt for civil liberties, and the
attitude that acknowledging the racism of our past is for namby-pamby liberals
or America-hating lefties.

And that's a shame. It was President Reagan, a great conservative, who
first authorized reparations for Japanese-American internees and issued an
apology for the injustice done to them. For conservatives to embrace Malkin's
extremism is a betrayal of his legacy.

posted by Chris Bray @ 3:56 PM