Denying that a targeted genocide happened or saying it's exaggerated is absolutely hateful. I'm not sure how it's of limited relevance when it's within living memory. When (some) Americans start to chant "The Jews will not replace us!" I think it's very relevant to our modern era.

I would really recommend doing a cursory, bare-minimum reading of the associated Wikipedia page [0] and citations. Plenty of historians revise the events surrounding the Holocaust to provide less biased and more nuanced information. Very different from taking an assumption as fact (the holocaust did not happen) and working backwards from that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial

I think, as ever with these things, the name is misleading. It's not "hate". We've no idea what people are feeling. Why do we a) think someone feeling "hate" is enough to suspend speech, and b) think if we want to justify censorship, we can't just say it out loud?

Why not just say "we ban speech that says the Holocaust didn't happen"? Why get it classified as hate and then because somehow hate is censorable get it autocensored? It seems somehow disingenuous.

Because there's no rational or non-ideological way to deny the holocaust. The evidence is literally overwhelming.

The only reason people deny it is because of anti-semitism.

Of course there is. People might be ignorant. If a kid is just taught that the Holocaust was made up, no hate is required for them to believe it. People need to stop pretending they can divine people's emotions. What matters is their actions.

No, some haven't seen the evidence or think it's fake.

You're missing my point.

What does the word "hateful" mean? The old meaning is "full of the emotion of hate". Someone who thinks the Holocaust wasn't real could in theory have no strong feelings about it and think it has no relevance to their lives.

It is not required by definition that Holocaust denial is hateful (using traditional definition of the word "hate"). Nor is it required by human psychology (for example, you could have someone who read an unfortunate sampling of books as a child and took "disbelieve anything the victors of a war say about their enemies" as gospel and never got educated on the details).

It's a useful label to categorize and marginalize speech. This is a common tactic used in propaganda.

My goodness. That raises questions. I hope you are merely naive.

"I don't hate them! I just think they got a bit worked up over a few arrests. They're too sensitive. I don't blame them for it, but when you deal with them you've got to remember they can be prone to distorting the truth."

Come _on_

Uh, I have no idea what you're saying here. Particularly can't see any relationship between what you quote and my post.