AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: The Uses and Abuses of Race: "Today, the pendulum swings back. Fox News commentator Michelle Malkin's recent book, In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror, calls on Us to lock up the Other. Malkin claims that mass ethnic detentions are a prudent response to espionage and terror plots, as if securing a haystack automatically serves to pinpoint a needle. Her guilty-until-proven-innocent approach equates color with criminality and obstructs effective law enforcement. Only in the movies does badass bullying expose conspiracies rather than recruit new conspirators to the cause. Dragnets can't substitute for field operatives and translators.

Most importantly, Malkin's sleazy tract shows how readily our laws and law officials become instruments of evil. The 'black codes' and segregation laws of yesteryear were not the freak consequences of unenlightened times--they were the ordinary outcomes of those in power protecting their self-interest through division and despotism. If we dismiss these laws as rogue jurisprudence with no contemporary relevance, we are the rogues, oblivious to our complicity in racism."

(Via AlterNet.)