IF YOU CRITICIZE COBLE, YOU'RE A FANATIC AND AN IDEOLOGUE. At least according to Ken Masugi over at the Claremont Institute. For my (short) discussion of Representative Coble's understanding of internment, see here. Go also to Eric Muller's website, Is That Legal?, for the most comprehensive discussion of the controversy to date. But be warned: Muller is probably the kind of "fanatic" that Masugi is talking about.

Masugi takes the critics of Coble to task for being blind to the very real concerns about loyalty that were raised concerning Japanese-Americans during WWII. As far as I understand the critics of internment, none of them are saying that loyalty is never a valid concern. Nonetheless, it's very hard to take the Roosevelt administration's loyalty concerns seriously given the disparate treatment meted out to Japanese-Americans on the west coast compared to German-Americans, Italian-Americans, not to mention Japanese-Americans in Hawaii itself.

He also implies that the people who criticize Coble for not knowing his history are more dangerous than Coble himself, even though Coble is chair of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security. I don't know what to make of this argument.

They key to Masugi's argument, though, is the following claim:

"[T]he great need here is to defuse the charge of American racism (in a war against what can be called Japanese racism) and thus permit thoughtful consideration of the domestic security measures we need to deal with the crisis confronting us."

This claim is not actually defended in detail in the article. But what it seems to mean, at least, is that some sorts of uses of racial categories might be necessary in the current war on terrorism. Especially if that is true (and the cross-racial nature of al-Qaeda itself seems to make it seem a naive suggestion that race will tell us anything about terrorists), it's necessary to have as much knowledge as possible of past, abusive uses of race in order to avoid their pitfalls. In addition, precisely because terrorism feeds off of inappropriate reactions on the part of its targets, we should be extraordinarily careful in enacting measures that seem to confirm the al-Qaeda, "war on islam" theory of U.S. international involvement.