Could Japanese "holocaust-deniers" be arrested in Europe ?
BBC News : Austria holds 'Holocaust denier'
Quote:
Originally Posted by BBC
British revisionist historian David Irving is being held in Austria under laws against denying the Holocaust.
An interior ministry spokesman said police in the province of Styria acted on a warrant issued in 1989 to arrest him last Friday.
Mr Irving was on his way to give a lecture in the capital, Vienna.
In his books, Mr Irving has argued that the scale of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis in World War II has been exaggerated.
He also claimed that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler knew nothing of the Holocaust.
He told a libel hearing in London in 2000 that there had been no gas chambers at the Auschwitz camp.
...
The chairman of the Holocaust Educational Trust, Lord Greville Janner, said he hoped the move would "lead to a successful prosecution".
The head of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said denial was not a matter of opinion.
"Austrian law demands incisive action to protect its citizens from a repeat of the past," he added.
Many Japanese people, including high-ranking politicians, deny or play down the scale of many of the Japanese atrocities committed during WWII, the most famous of which (but accounting for only about 1% of the victims) is the Nanjing Massacre of 1937. Some Japanese historians writing government-approved school textbooks talk of "Japanese advance" rather than invasion, of the "Nanjing Incident" rather than massacre, and completely leave out most or all other atrocities, which left more casualties than the Nazi holocaust. Such Japanese also insist that the Japanese Emperor (Hirohito) was completely unaware of what was happening, or if he knew he had no power to stop it (which is of course false, given his divine status, and as explained by his biographer Herbet Bix in his book Hirohito and the making of modern Japan).
In my view, such people are as much holocaust deniers as David Irving, and more dangerous to society, as they proseltise their ideas in schools, reaching millions of teenagers with little critical sense.
Governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara has long played down the scale of the Nanjing Massacre and uttered many racist comments. Yesterday, the newly appointed Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe declared that "The government should not look into the responsibility of the accused Class-A war criminals honored at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine" (see article).
It would be utterly hypocritical for the Austrian, British or any other country's government to arrest and prosecute people like David Irving, but not Japanese historians, politicians or other individuals denying or playing the Japanese Holocaust, the responsibility of the emperor or paying homage to convicted class-A war criminals. If the Austrian authorities have the power to arrest a British citizen for what he says about the German Holocaust, then they have the power to arrest Japanese citizens on the same grounds. I want to see all Japanese holocaust deniers arrested when they set foot in Europe, or the immediate release of anybody held for similar charges.
I think that Germany, Belgium and several other European countries have similar laws against holocaust deniers. The Japanese holocaust is no exception. It was part of the same war, and Japan was allied to Nazi Germany, and exterminate more people than the Nazi did according the the most reliable estimates. (=> see thread Japan is worse than Germany and Has Japan killed more foreign civilians in WWII than any other country in history ? )
