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Posted By Josh Rogin
Tuesday, December 15, 2009 - 11:02 PM
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Are you just sitting around waiting for the opportunity to hear a lecture and take a booze cruise with a disgraced Japanese general who is notorious for defending Japan's WWII atrocities? Mike Huckabee apparently is.
Huckabee, the former (and likely future) Republican presidential candidate, is using his down time to host a weekend show for Fox News. For that program, he is planning to interview Toshio Tamogami, the former Japanese Air Force chief of staff who was fired in October after creating an international incident by writing in an essay that Japan was "not an aggressor nation" in WWII, according to the organizers of a series of events planned for Tamogami's upcoming trip to the United States.
Tamogami has launched an international lecture tour, which will hit New York in March. There will be a dinner cruise ($150 per ticket) on March 25 and a dinner lecture at the University Club on March 26 ($140 per ticket). Tamogami's website advertising the New York speech includes a picture of Huckabee and a link to Huckabee's personal website.
"Come share with us in the dual experience of powerful oration and rich history in The University Club of New York," Tamogami's site reads.
So what's going on here? The Cable reached Yasuhiro Takasaki, representative of the "Toshio Tamogami New York Lecture Committee."
Takasaki said that Huckabee was planning to come to New York and interview Tamogami for his Fox News show, although the interview had not been 100 percent confirmed. Huckabee would also attend the dinner and lecture, he said.
"It might be a good opportunity to meet with Huckabee," Takasaki said, advertising the event as a chance to get near the former Arkansas governor.
"I talked to Mike Huckabee last week and he is very interested in meeting with [Tamogami]," Takasaki said proudly.
The Tamogami scandal and his lecture tour has been extensively covered by the blog Armchair Asia, which points out that while Tamogami's "strident, revisionist views were brushed aside as an aberration in Japan's armed forces ... he remains vocal and a hero to many."
Is Mike Huckabee one of those? Repeated requests for comment to Huckabee for this story were not answered.
Wait, Erdogan, the turkish PM comes to the U.S., goes on the Charlie Rose show and denies the Genocide of Armenians and other Christian subjects of the ottoman empire, not to mention last month he said "muslims are incapable of genocide" and this isn't news. The former head of Japan's Air Force, an impotent force at best, is making relatively trival comments which Huckabee may attend and this is worth writing an article about?
Is something wrong with this picture?
...the Armeniagenocide is like the Cuba embargo and Israel aid in one, if you stray from the party line, you have hell to pay. Erdogan have done a lot to repair the relationship to Armenia. Including accepting a international commission, that eventually will conclude, what happen, was in praxis a genocide, but will called something else. This might ease up the laws forbidding Turks to discuss and study this event freely.
Well I think, USA, the Koreas, the Philippines, China and others always have a problem, when high-ranking Japanese officers begins to rewrite history
Actually the protocols signed but yet to be ratified by Armenia and Turkey, will not create any commission to look into the Armenian Genocide. As the President of Armenia has stated on numerious occasions the fact of the Genocide cannot be discussed but only the consequences of it and discussion of land/wealth reparations.
You are exactly right.
How shameful is it that FP would cover such a story as the one above and not mention GENOCIDE DENIAL by the Prime Minister of a major NATO nation on his visit to the United States?
Step it up FP, the community wants you to show some understanding for human rights, namely in Turkey.
Also, where are the articles about the treatment of the Kurds?
is that Erdogan is not a prominent Republican.
I am used to reading well researched and nuanced reporting from Foreign Policy, especially from The Cable...but this post is based on pure conjecture.
Yasuhiro Takasaki said "It might be a good opportunity to meet with Huckabee," and "I talked to Mike Huckabee last week and he is very interested in meeting with [Tamogami]."
That's it? The post concludes with a question, "Is Huckabee one of those?"...in light of the information presented, no he's not. But your editorial nonchalance has made it appear to the contrary.
This sounds more like a thinly researched press release from a campaign rather than a piece of reporting.
Bad form FP.
Suggesting that Huckabee might subscribe to this guy's far out positions is ridiculous and way out of line. Sounds like this guy is just trying to drum up attendance at his lecture by insinuating Huckabee might be there.
BSR
John Hudson reports on national security and foreign policy from the Pentagon to Foggy Bottom, the White House to Embassy Row, for The Cable.
May/June 2013
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