The anti-cult journalist believes that Akie Abe should have offered “something akin to an apology” to her husband’s assassin.
by Massimo Introvigne
There are scandals, and then there are moments when the floor of decency itself collapses. Japan’s anti-cult journalist Eight Suzuki has long accused Shinzo Abe of “crossing a red line” by sending a congratulatory message to an event connected with the Unification Church (now called the Family Federation for World Peace and Unification). That message, Suzuki insists, somehow provoked Tetsuya Yamagami into assassinating the former Prime Minister.
But in a recent broadcast of the online streaming program “Nico Nama,” Suzuki himself crossed the ultimate red line. Commenting on the presence of Abe’s widow at Yamagami’s trial, he mused that perhaps Akie Abe might have begun by offering “something akin to an apology” to the assassin “for the fact that these circumstances [the message Shinzo Abe sent] led him [Yamagami] to think and feel the way he did.”
Yes, you have read it correctly: according to Eight Suzuki, the widow of a murdered leader should apologize to the murderer.
History knows appeals to forgiveness. Families of victims sometimes, heroically, extend mercy to those who have wronged them. Forgiveness is voluntary, sovereign, and beyond judgment.
But apology presumes guilt. To demand that Akie Abe apologize to Yamagami is to declare that her husband’s assassination was, in some sense, his fault. It is to invert the moral universe: the victim’s family becomes the guilty party, while the assassin is cast as the wronged soul. It is grotesque victim-blaming disguised as moral sophistication.
What explains such a deformation of thought? Suzuki’s obsession with the Unification Church. His hatred has now metastasized into a worldview where any association with the group—even a routine congratulatory message—becomes a mortal sin.
Never mind that the Church was lawfully operating in Japan. Never mind that politicians across the globe, from Donald Trump to José Manuel Barroso, sent similar messages. In Suzuki’s imagination, Abe’s gesture becomes the original sin that not only explains the assassination but supports the demand that the widow apologize to the assassin.
This is zealotry rather than journalism.
Suzuki’s rhetoric is obviously offensive to the memory of Shinzo Abe, to his widow, his family, and his friends, not to mention to hundreds of thousands of members of the Family Federation who have not committed any crime. But Suzuki does more than offend. It risks complicity. By framing Abe’s assassination as provoked, even understandable, Suzuki normalizes the assassin’s worldview. He shifts the blame from the terrorist to the victim. When hatred of a minority religion becomes so consuming that it erodes the basic categories of guilt and innocence, critique morphs into insult. Worse, it prepares further violence.
On December 7, Suzuki posted on X that his statement had been “taken out of context” or “interpreted” maliciously. The predictable “out of context” defense is the oldest trick in the book, the usual argument of those caught red‑handed issuing words they later realize they should never have uttered. In truth, what he said is perfectly clear and requires no interpretation. And the “context” he invokes is not exculpatory at all—it is his decade‑long campaign of hate against the Unification Church and anyone who dares to support it.
Later, he posted a convoluted “explanation,” arguing his statement was “hypothetical.” “If, hypothetically,—he wrote—defendant Tetsuya Yamagami had clearly responded with anger toward former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe personally, regarding things like his video message, and if it turned out that Abe’s words, actions, or behavior had hurt victims of the Unification Church, then given Akie Abe’s character, she might express her intent to apologize for that, and then ask the defendant something like, ‘But did my husband do anything deserving of being killed?’—I thought such a development was possible.” This looks like a fish’s desperate attempt to get off the hook. And, in the case of Suzuki, it is a hook of his own making. Obviously, he has spent years arguing that “Abe’s words, actions, or behavior had hurt victims of the Unification Church.” For Suzuki, it was never a mere hypothesis. It was a given fact.
In fact, the issue is no longer whether Suzuki has offended and insulted Abe and his family, and, in the process, morality and decency as well. He certainly did. The question is how society should respond when journalists and others abandon ethics and embrace a rhetoric that implicitly excuses terrorism.
Media must expose the distortion and call out the inversion of victim and perpetrator. Hatemongers should be exposed and isolated. Public opinion should challenge the narrative and resist the framing that Abe’s assassination was provoked by his legitimate opinions and lawful gestures. Religious and political leaders should defend pluralism and clearly state that hatred of minority religions cannot be allowed to warp a society’s moral compass to the point of “explaining” violence and demanding that the widow of an assassinated leader apologize to the assassin.
This is no longer legitimate controversy. It is moral vandalism. And it should be treated as such.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
