Today is the 60th anniversary of Iwo Jima. Blogger tributes here and here. See also Power Line, Ace, and LGF.

It’s also the 63rd anniversary of Executive Order 9066, the West Coast evacuation order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. We’ve seen plenty of stories and op-ed pieces leading up to the event. Here are the highlights and lowlights:

The Bremerton Sun reports on the latest incident in the controvery over Bainbridge Island’s internment curriculum:

A parent of a Bainbridge Island sixth-grader said he will meet with a civil rights attorney after being denied access to a middle school classroom. James Olsen arrived Wednesday morning to attend a 90-minute history presentation regarding the World War II-era internment of Japanese residents but was prevented from entering by the principal and two Bainbridge police officers, he said. Superintendent Ken Crawford said Olsen was barred to protect the classroom environment. Olsen and his wife have been the most vocal critics of the district’s “Leaving Our Island” curriculum, which deals with the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.

What do the school officials have to hide?

Previous posts:
How not to teach Japanese internment
Book buzz

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From Oregon’s Bend.com:

Mary M. Schroeder, the first woman to be named chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, will speak on what it means to be a woman in the judiciary in a Feb. 16 speech at the University of Oregon…. Among her noteworthy cases is Hirabayashi vs. United States, which held in 1987 that the World War II Japanese internment was unconstitutional.

The Bend.com article is referring to a 1987 coram nobis case in which Judge Schroeder overturned Gordon K. Hirabayashi’s 1942 convictions. While many have embraced the outcome of this case (and others like it) as proof that the West Coast evacuation of ethnic Japanese was “unconstitutional,” the coram nobis rulings did not affect the underlying constitutionality of President Roosevelt’s executive order. Despite what Bend.com suggests, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Korematsu v. United States (1944), which upheld the constitutionality of the West Coast evacuation, has never been overturned.

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In New Jersey, the Bridgeton News notes that “West Coast Japanese Americans were imprisoned in internment camps during the war” and “were brought here to work at the Seabrook food processing facility.” How could they be “imprisoned” in camps if they (like thousands of other Japanese-Americans who were evacuated from the West Coast) were allowed to go to the East Coast to work? The reporter never explains the process by which thousands left the camps after obtaining security clearances, and does not mention that ethnic Japanese who did not live on the vulnerable West Coast were not required to enter the camps in the first place.

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One of those, artist Isamu Noguchi, was profiled in the Washington Post on Sunday. To its credit, the Post notes:

As a resident of New York, [Noguchi] could have escaped the internment forced on Japanese Americans on the West Coast. In solidarity with them, however, he chose to join them in the camps for seven months in 1942.

In fact, hundreds of people chose to enter the relocation camps voluntarily–a fact I strongly suspect is not disclosed to schoolchildren in Bainbridge Island and elsewhere.

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The Stanford Daily reports on a Forum exploring the connections between Japanese internment and civil liberties infringements in the War on Terror. One participant, 80 year-old Kiku Funabiki, told the tale of her grandfather (a citizen of Japan) being placed in an internment camp by the Department of Justice:

“The only evidence presented in the brief closed hearings was that he had contacts with Japanese naval vessels, that he socialized with Japanese naval officers and that he was an ardent Buddhist,” Funabiki said.

This evidence may strike Funabiki as completely innocuous now, but at the time, it would have been completely reckless for officials to ignore her grandfather’s contacts with Japanese naval vessels and naval officers. It’s not clear whether Funabiki’s grandfather was a Buddhist priest or merely an ardent devotee. Either way, law enforcement authorities were right to view devoted Buddhists with concern. The Office of Naval Intelligence, the United States’ premiere intelligence agency at the time, stated in December 1941 that most Buddhist priests were “to a considerable extent” under the direct control of the Japanese government and that many were members of subversive organizations.

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An earlier article in the Stanford Daily said the Forum was inspired by Fred Korematsu’s attack on my book:

The idea for the event came from a Sept. 16 article in the San Francisco Chronicle, in which Fred Korematsu, who was detained in a Japanese internment camp from 1942 to 1945, responded to claims made by Fox News media personality Michelle Malkin.

According to the article, Malkin said that “some Japanese Americans were spies during WWII and that racial profiling of Arab Americans today is justified by the need to fight terrorism.”

However, in the 1980s a federal commission found that “no Japanese American had been involved in espionage or sabotage and that no military necessity existed to imprison them.”

A federal panel stacked with critics of internment did indeed come to that conclusion. However, the assertion that no Japanese-Americans were involved in espionage is false. See here for a list of known subversives, here for intelligence memos outlining the concerns about espionage among officials at the Military Intelligence Division and Office of Naval Intelligence, and here for some of the top-secret MAGIC messages describing Japan’s espionage activities.

Even University of North Carolina law professor Eric Muller, my loudest critic, concedes that Japan successfully recruited spies in the U.S.:

Nobody doubts that Japan and Germany wanted to set up espionage and sabotage relationships in the US with both their own nationals and others (including, but by no means limited to, children of their nationals.) And nobody doubts that in a few instances they were successful in doing this.

Muller also suggests that Richard Kotoshirodo, the Japanese-American man on the cover of my book, violated espionage statutes. (Wanting to give Kotoshirdo the benefit of the doubt, I had expressed doubts about whether Kotoshirodo’s activities rose to the level of espionage, since the information he transmitted to Japan was not classified.)

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The Washington Times quotes Rep. John Conyers comparing the Real ID Act (which is designed to improve the security of drivers’ licenses and other government-issued ID cards) to the Japanese internment. As I point out in my book, playing the internment card is a common tactic among those who oppose beefing up homeland security today. Here’s another example from the Los Angeles Times today.

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The Dartmouth Online continues the smear campaign against Daniel Pipes, repeating the false claim that Pipes wants to toss Muslim-Americans into internment camps:

Daniel Pipes, a New York Sun columnist who once argued that Muslim-Americans should be placed in internment camps, will bring his contentious views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Dartmouth Hall on Thursday. Pipes’ presence on campus is provoking strong feelings among students and faculty on both sides of the issue.

See here, here, and here, for bloggers repeating the defamatory accusation.

The big lie is repeated again in a noxious piece published by Final Call, Louis Farrakhan’s house organ.

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Finally, here’s an e-mail I received yesterday from one Kathryn Yamamoto (e-mail candycane25186@yahoo.com), indicating the abysmally low level of intellectual firepower on the other side of this debate:

Michelle Malkin,

I can’t believe you actually think what your doing is right! What you believe is bullshit! I don’t know anyone who has worst opinions than you! I know you have the right to speak your mind…..but that doesn’t mean you have to try and get people to agree. My Dad was in one of the Japanese Intern camps and he has gone to many different schools and other public places telling people exactly what went on in those camps. YOU HAVE NO FUCKING RIGHT TO SAY THE JAPANESE INTERN CAMPS ARE OK AND RIGHT! IF YOU DO TRULY BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TO NOT ONLY THE JAPANESE BUT WITH EVERYTHING ELSE THAT’S TERRIBLE IN THIS WORLD THEN YOUR A FUCKED UP BITCH/SLUT/DYKE/CUNT/AND ASS HOLE! When I heard about this bullshit I got so mad for you trying to get people to believe this shit! You absolutely have no reason to be popular with your stupid little books and interviews! You and all your fans who follow you are bad people! Fuck you bitch!

~Kathryn

The woman seems, I dunno, suspended somewhere between meltdown and release.

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