Indefensible internment: there was no good reason for the mass internment of Japanese Americans during WWII.

• Author: Muller, Eric L.

In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror, by Michelle Malkin, Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 416 pages, $27.95

SINCE 9/11, some civil libertarians have denounced every antiterrorism policy that singles out Arab men as a repetition of the terrible mistake the government made after Pearl Harbor, when it evicted tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry from their West Coast homes and banished them to barren camps in the interior. Supporters of profiling have a reasonable response to this comparison with what we've come to call the Japanese-American internment: There is a big difference between asking Arab male airline passengers some extra security questions and forcing American citizens behind barbed wire in the high desert for three years.

As obvious as that answer might seem, it is not the answer that conservative columnist Michelle Malkin gives in her book In Defense of Internment: The Case for 'Racial Profiling' in World War II and the War on Terror. She argues instead that the desert imprisonment of virtually all of the West Coast's Japanese-American men, women, and children for three years was the right thing to do: It was a sound military judgment that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his top war advisers made on the basis of solid intelligence that Japan had organized untold numbers of Japanese resident aliens (the "Issei") and their American-citizen children (the "Nisei") into a vast network of spies and subversives.

Over the last several decades, historians have shown that the chief causes of the Japanese American internment were ingrained anti-Asian racism, nativist and economic pressures from groups in California that had long wanted the Japanese gone, and the panic of wartime hysteria. As the Presidential Commission on the Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians said in its 1981 report to Congress, "The broad historical causes which shaped [the decisions to relocate and detain Japanese Americans] were race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." Malkin contends that this history is a big lie--a "politically correct myth" that "has become enshrined as incontrovertible wisdom in the gullible press, postmodern academia, the cash-hungry grievance industry, and liberal Hollywood."

That passage alone should tell the reader this book is not a trustworthy work of history but a polemic--The O'Reilly Factor masquerading as the History Channel. At the heart of...