Fire Mineta!
SAD OBSESSION
By MICHELLE MALKIN
August 9, 2004 -- <font size=4>FEW government officials have invited more scorn than Transportation Secretary Norm Mineta. It's long past time for the Bush administration to send him out to pasture.
And it is time for America to purge itself of the addled, anti-profiling mindset of Mineta. He has turned his personal World War II experience into an excuse to do nothing to fight our enemies today.
After 19 Islamist foreign hijackers murdered 3,000 people on American soil, Mineta quickly declared that any profiling taking into account race, ethnicity, religion or nationality would be forbidden in airport security. When 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft asked Mineta whether he could envision any circumstance where it would make sense to use racial and ethnic profiling, he responded, <font color=blue>"Absolutely not."<font color=black>
Croft followed up: <font color=blue>"If you saw three young Arab men sitting, kneeling, praying, before they boarded a flight, getting on, talking to each other in Arabic, getting on the plane, no reason to stop and ask them any questions?"<font color=black> Mineta remained obstinate: <font color=blue>No<font color=black>.
Since that interview, Mineta has shaken down airlines for engaging in profiling and continues to lean on the industry to prevent cautious flight crews from applying heightened scrutiny to any and all Arab/Muslim passengers. United Airlines, American Airlines and Continental Airlines have all been forced to settle discrimination cases with the Department of Transportation for a combined $3.5 million.
While ostensibly defending the Bush administration's treatment of Arabs and Muslims in America, Mineta revealed his real beef: <font color=blue>"I think we are seeing shades of what we experienced in 1942."<font color=black>
During World War II, Mineta was evacuated as a young boy from San Jose, Calif., to a relocation camp in Heart Mountain, Wyo. He remains deeply aggrieved about the so-called <font color=blue>"Japanese-American internment"<font color=black> and his gross misunderstanding of history continues to blind him to current realities.
Mineta, like most Americans, has been brainwashed into believing that the decision to evacuate the West Coast and relocate ethnic Japanese to the interior of the country was motivated solely by racism and wartime hysteria — rather than bona fide national security concerns.
This myth has served as personal catharsis for many. But in a post-9/ 11 world, we can no longer afford the abuse of history as multicultural group therapy.
The long-hidden truth is that the internment of Japanese, German, Italian and other European enemy aliens, and the mass evacuation and relocation of ethnic Japanese from the West Coast, were not the result of irrational hatred or conspiratorial bigotry. In fact, President Roosevelt's homeland security policies were firmly justified based on the exigencies and intelligence of the time.
What Mineta and the internment alarmists don't tell you is that the Roosevelt administration had uncovered solid evidence of countless ethnic Japanese sympathetic to Japan's war effort. They included thousands of members of Japanese civic associations considered subversive; thousands of dual citizens who served in the Japanese Army; and Japanese-American Richard Kotoshirodo, who assisted a Honolulu spy ring that gathered crucial intelligence for the Pearl Harbor attack. Kotoshirodo told interrogators that despite his American citizenship, he was <font color=blue>"100 percent loyal"<font color=black> to Japan.
In addition, naval intelligence officers raised red flags over the little-known Niihau invasion, in which two Japanese-Americans conspired with an enemy Japanese fighter pilot to take over the northwestern Hawaiian island on the day of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Above all, top-secret intelligence, called MAGIC, was key to Roosevelt's decision to evacuate ethnic Japanese from the extremely vulnerable West Coast. These decoded diplomatic communications from Japan revealed an aggressive effort to recruit ethnic Japanese spies, including both Japanese permanent resident aliens and U.S.-born citizens of Japanese descent.
Just as the VENONA decrypts of Soviet diplomatic communications revealed the long-hidden truth about Russia's extensive espionage attempts to infiltrate the U.S. during the Cold War, the MAGIC decrypts provided compelling evidence that Japan had succeeded in establishing a formidable West Coast espionage network by mid-1941. After Pearl Harbor, U.S. intelligence agencies believed that this network remained in place.
We cannot win the war on Muslim terrorists as long as we keep learning the wrong lessons of World War II. Mineta is the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place. He seeks penance for the past by handcuffing the nation's defenders of the present. To defeat the Islamists, America needs dry-eyed leaders who refuse to be sorry for putting homeland security over hurt feelings.
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Michelle Malkin's new book is "In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror."
E-mail: malkin@comcast.net |
