Malkin tries to speak louder in to the microphone to drown out the chants of the protesters. The American flag taped up behind her falls down. This gets a smattering of ironic applause among the confused and scared looking audience. I don't blame them for being scared. I am scared for her. The protesters keep breaking into the hall at intervals, interrupting Malkin's train of thought. She hunkers down and keeps going, tough and diligent. She is a lot like me I think, an "Anti-Cho." They chant "SHAME!!!SHAME!!!SHAME!!!" but she refuses to be shamed by their taunts.
I feel kind of proud, that racial politics have progressed to the point where we can have a young Asian American woman who doesn't have to live within the constraints of a minority identity, which presumes liberal bias just by nature of the fact that if you are oppressed by the majority, you would want to place yourself against the majority. Malkin's position is actually a kind of genius, and a new way to look at our role in American politics. We don't have to take on the mantle of distressed minority. We can be as prejudiced as whites!
Race really doesn't matter. Malkin is both a revelation and revolution. It is fairly obvious that she is being courted by conservatives, fussed over and groomed as the all new Manchurian Candidate. She fits their need to diversify like an orthopedic shoe. It is a match made in GOP hell. The unholy union works to everyone's advantage. The right wing gets a brand new bag, a Skipper to Ann Coulter's Barbie. Not only that, she's Asian, so that liberals will have a harder time calling her a racist even though she has completely racist views. Malkin gets a lot of publicity and talk time for her book, which will generate sales on both sides. The right will buy it to support their own, the left will buy it to see what all the screaming is about. Boy, there is a lot of screaming. Not since Salman Rushdie released The Satanic Verses have people been so pissed off at an author. I would love to issue a fatwah against her, but I am not sure how to go about it.
The protests are counterproductive, because the right wing loves it when the left gets angry. The off camera shouting makes us look like savages, and that is the exact image that they love to show again and again. Malkin bravely pushes forward. She seems like an intelligent and interesting young woman, albeit misguided, and I feel protective towards her. I hope the right treat her well, and don't throw her away once the fury has died down. Perhaps she will write a follow up book about how the Holocaust didn't happen.
(I rather doubt Malkin will say the Holocaust didn't happen, and I think that gratuitous assertion was tossed out by Cho for her crowd.) While I am opposed to detention based on racial grounds, Malkin's complaint that Americans are not being given the full story about internment is correct. German and Italian Americans were also interned, yet you'd never know it.
I'm writing this as I watch a tape of Malkin on C-SPAN2, and it's a bit shocking to see an obviously sincere young Asian woman being shouted down in a free country by people who cannot tolerate having anyone even hearing her. The Berkeley audience actually listening to Malkin applauded periodically, and quite a lot at the end. Ms. Malkin was just asked whether "if all the 9/11 hijackers had been short Filipino American women" (she's that!) she would support racial profiling. The audience applauded enthusiastically. Her answer was that she'd be screaming for it, and angry if she wasn't profiled. More audience applause. (I guess I'd say the same thing about short middle aged Americans of Norwegian descent.)
Nice to see the audience show annoyance with the hecklers who regularly make it into the room with the sole purpose of disrupting.
Berkeley. Much as I love the place, I hate the intolerance of the leftist ideologues (and their unthinking followers) there.
The irony is that Berkeley was the birthplace of the Free Speech movement -- something originally joined by student conservatives. It wasn't long before it became a "free speech for me but not for thee" movement.
MORE: Just heard that Malkin's book signing had to be canceled for security reasons.
Welcome to the world of free speech in Berkeley, folks.
MORE: If I could add a tidbit, I would note an often-overlooked historical fact: J. Edgar Hoover opposed the internment program:
There was one lonely voice in the Roosevelt administration opposed to the Japanese internment - that of J. Edgar Hoover. The American Civil Liberties Union gave J. Edgar Hoover an award for wartime vigilance during World War II. It was only when he turned his award-winning vigilance to Soviet spies that liberals thought Hoover was a beast.
This was because the FBI knew who the spies among the Japanese-Americans were. I would have agreed with Hoover, and I have long stated my annoyance with the national kindergarten approach to government.
posted by Eric on 10.09.04 at 09:27 AM
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://classicalvalues.com/cgi-bin/pings.cgi/1563
Comments
" This was because the FBI knew who the spies among the Japanese-Americans were." I doubt it, although they were probably less in the dark than the OSS was.
Oscar · October 9, 2004 11:52 AM
I admire J. Edgar Hoover. He was a great man, a homosexual conservative anti-Communist as well as anti-Nazi. I admire his stand against Communism. His book "Masters of Deceit" should be read by every thinking American that all may understand what the Cold War was all about.
I admire his stand against the internment of the Japanese, and it is to the credit of the ACLU that they gave him credit for it. I must also note that J. Edgar Hoover also opposed the idea of outlawing the U.S. Communist Party -- which, by the way, was proposed by a liberal, Hubert H. Humphrey. Hoover's argument was that outlawing the Communist Party would make it harder for the FBI to keep an eye on it.
The idea that Michelle Malkin is a Holocaust denier is just stupid, and therefore par for the course for the Left. Her whole point in defending the internment of Japanese (as well as Germans) during World War II is that we were right in fighting that War and in doing whatever we thought necessary at the time in order to fight it successfully.
The Holocaust deniers, including Pat Buchanan and some "libertarians", on the other hand, believe that we were wrong in fighting that War, that we should have allowed the Japanese to rule Asia and the Pacific and the Nazis to rule Europe and Africa. Which, in addition to making most of this planet one vast concentration camp, would have enabled the Nazis and Japs to get their mitts on the vast land, populations, and populations to sooner or later, and sooner rather than later, finish off the United States as well. Isolationists wanted to replace the American eagle with the ostrich.
Today, to hear the radical Leftists tell it, not only was America wrong, wrong, wrong, evil, evil, evil, throughout the Cold War and most of our other Wars, but even also in what even they formerly called "the Good War", i.e., the War against Hitler. Now, even that War is tainted, as are the American Revolution (George Washington, Jefferson, et alia, were just rich white male elitist slave-owners) and the Civil War (Lincoln was really a white male racist and sexist and probably a homophobe, too). The radical Leftists today are nothing but America-hating, West-hating, Jew-hating totalitarian nihilists who invariably take the side of our country's enemies. I have had it with them and I dare call it treason. Harsh, I know. That's the way I am.
The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Don?t bang your head!
" This was because the FBI knew who the spies among the Japanese-Americans were." I doubt it, although they were probably less in the dark than the OSS was.