On Sunday, the Sacramento Bee published a thought-provoking op-ed piece about homeland security in an age of terror by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The major points of the piece are that “the ongoing global terrorist threat poses the greatest challenge to the American future since the Cold War and the specter of nuclear annihilation” and that politicians should provide greater leadership on determining how to confront this threat.

Pretty standard fare, but if you read the whole thing, Cooper and Brackman reveal a more interesting motivation for writing the piece–namely, their disgust with those who invoke the Holocaust and Japanese internment cards every time our leaders try to do something to secure the homeland against the threat of Islamic terrorism. Key excerpts:

“A new book by journalist Michelle Malkin, “In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror,” raises critical issues that our presidential candidates need to address. Malkin makes a compelling case for the Patriot Act and profiling as legitimate tools in the current war against terror.”

“Like Arab and Muslim activists who campaign to repeal the Patriot Act without proposing any constructive alternatives, some Latino activists pursue their agenda for more rights and privileges for undocumented workers, without simultaneously addressing the very real post-9/11 internal security implications.”

“to unjustifiably compare opposition to legislation for driver’s licenses of illegal immigrants to genocidal Nazis forcing Jews to wear “the yellow star” or to those responsible for interning the Japanese Americans, only invites an escalation of rhetoric and extremism, not the dialogue needed to create balanced public policy.”

Even more interesting, Cooper and Brackman acknowledge that many history books neglect the crucial role of MAGIC in the development of FDR’s homeland security policies during WW II:

“Malkin is right that many sanitized histories ignore the documented threat - revealed in declassified Japanese cables - that was posed by spy rings operated by Imperial Japan’s foreign agents in complicity with a handful of Japanese Americans.”

Ultimately, Cooper and Brackman do not agree with my conclusion that the round-up of ethnic Japanese during WW II was justified. (They mistakenly believe that the policy was implemented primarily at the behest of West Coast politicians.) Nevertheless, their piece represents a challenge to internment-card alarmists and at least a partial challenge to the P.C. historians who for years have argued that ethnic Japanese posed no threat whatsoever to the security of the West Coast during WW II.

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