Wisenthal Center supports the POWs

The Simon Wiesenthal Center a global Jewish human rights organization that teaches the lessons of the Holocaust has long championed the justice for the American POWs of Japan. Imperial Japan’s systematic, state-sponsored program of death through work for the POWs has resonance for those who study the Holocaust. Japan’s failure to abide to even the most basic components of the Geneva Convention is important lesson for future generations about human rights and dignity.

Recent activities of support include:

Wiesenthal Center offers Museum of Tolerance for possible meet between ex-slave laborer POWs and Japanese companies,  Press Release, December 10, 2010.

Lester Tenney, a tenacious 90-year old survivor of World War II’s infamous “Bataan Death March” met with California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger this week in San Diego to seek his support in getting Japanese firms bidding on California’s high speed rail project to apologize for their use of American POWs as slave labor during the Second World War.

Japan is responsible for teaching, Op Ed Orlando Sentinel, December 3, 2010,  by Alfred Balitzer, chairman of Pacific Research & Strategies, Inc., a California-based government-affairs and public-relations firm and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

....Time does not heal all wounds. Sixty-five years after the end of the Second World War, we are reminded that while history tells a story, it does not automatically bring justice. From the Nazi death camps to the Bataan Death March to the American POWs and others who suffered at the hands of Imperial Japanese, the scale and scope of barbarities inflicted on humankind during the World War II era remain beyond our full comprehension....

....It behooves the consortium of 11 Japanese companies led by Central Japan Railway Company (JR Tokai), which includes Mitsubishi and Sumitomo, to come clean about their abuse of American and Allied POWs during WWII....

Japanese bidders on high speed rail should have to apologize to World War II POWs, Op Ed, San Jose Mercury News, September 9, 2010 by Alfred Balitzer, chairman of Pacific Research & Strategies, Inc., a California-based government-affairs and public-relations firm and Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

....We believe that the overwhelming majority of citizens on both sides of the Pacific agree that now is the time to finally do the right thing. With just seconds to go before the written record replaces living memory of the period, we must unite in bringing a symbolic measure of justice to those few survivors of humankind's most brutal hour.