|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 13, 2017 23:02:30 GMT 1
Pres Obama will be always remembered as the one who mentioned Polish death camps, causing outrage among Poles. I'm glad the Polish people were outraged by his comment...they should be...and he should have chosen his words more carefully. That was like a stab in the back, from the least expected side. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 28, 2017 19:06:50 GMT 1
|
|
|
|
Post by jeanne on Jan 28, 2017 19:43:17 GMT 1
These are great responses. They must continue to set the record straight for as long as it takes!
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 28, 2017 20:54:57 GMT 1
These are great responses. They must continue to set the record straight for as long as it takes! I thought that, as a Christian, you would show more mercy on those smart TV Germans.  |
|
|
|
Post by jeanne on Jan 28, 2017 21:58:35 GMT 1
These are great responses. They must continue to set the record straight for as long as it takes! I thought that, as a Christian, you would show more mercy on those smart TV Germans. Actually, correcting another person's errors, particularly in the moral sphere, is a mercy! |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 28, 2017 22:05:52 GMT 1
I thought that, as a Christian, you would show more mercy on those smart TV Germans. Actually, correcting another person's errors, particularly in the moral sphere, is a mercy! Smart thinking, I must remember it. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Feb 5, 2017 15:40:02 GMT 1
 ‘Nazi German camps’ mobile billboard launched in Poland 02.02.2017 07:31 A mobile billboard reading “Death Camps Were Nazi German” has been launched in Wrocław, south-western Poland headed for the UK through Germany and Belgium. Photo: PAP/Aleksander KoźmińskiPhoto: PAP/Aleksander Koźmiński The programme is to protest the use of the term “Polish concentration camps” by foreign media. The billboard trailer is the brainchild of a Polish NGO. “The idea of our campaign is simple. We demand the historical truth, we oppose the use of the term ‘Polish concentration camps’, which is commonly used by Western media,” said Dawid Hallmann, from the Fundacja Tradycji Miast i Wsi NGO which designed the billboard. The use of the term "Polish concentration camp” by international media outlets has sparked numerous complaints from Poland in recent years, prompting some news agencies to change their style guidelines. In 2007, following a Polish request, the World Heritage Committee attempted to clarify the matter by listing the Auschwitz camp as a "German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp". Internet users have taken to social media in recent days to campaign against German broadcaster ZDF's alleged failure to apologise properly to a Polish survivor of Auschwitz for the use of the term. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Apr 23, 2017 0:32:17 GMT 1
Again, Germans use "Polish death camps" when talking about their 2WW achievements. German paper says "Polish death camp", Polish consul to intervene 15.04.2017 18:36 The Polish consular office in Munich, southern Germany, intends to intervene after Mittelbayerische Zeitung, a regional daily, used the phrase “Polish death camp”. The symbolic "remains" of the railroad in Treblinka. Photo: Wikimedia CommonsThe symbolic "remains" of the railroad in Treblinka. Photo: Wikimedia Commons  The daily on Saturday wrote on its website about Holocaust survivor Israel Offman, who was sent to Auschwitz, a German Nazi concentration camp, and other concentration camps. The website said that Offman's sister was killed by Nazis at Treblinka, which it called a “Polish death camp,” the Polish PAP news agency reported. Treblinka was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germans in occupied eastern Poland. Deputy consul Robert Zadura said he was regretful that such distortions show up in German media. “We highlight that these are German concentration camps and we demand a correction,” he said. This is the latest in a string of related incidents. In March, the website of German broadcaster SWR also used the historically inaccurate term in a report on the 75th anniversary of the first deportations of Jews from Mainz, western Germany. The broadcaster later admitted to the error and corrected it. Also in March, the website of German radio broadcaster B5 Aktuell used the same phrase in a story about the extermination of Jews in occupied Poland, and after a Polish consulate intervened, replaced it with “Germany national socialist death camps in then-occupied Poland”. (vb) |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Oct 1, 2017 14:41:12 GMT 1
Another version of Polish camp phrase. British paper calls German Nazi war criminal 'Polish mass murderer' 25.09.2017 14:27 Britain’s Daily Mirror has wrongly referred to Hans Frank, the German Nazi who ruled occupied Poland in WWII, as a “Polish mass murderer” in a recent article published online. Hans Frank. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 121-0270/Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)Hans Frank. Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 121-0270/Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA 3.0)  The daily ran a story about “Hitler's address book” which was recently discovered. According to the paper, the notebook lists the details of some 200 people instrumental to the Nazi regime in Germany and noted that Hitler himself was omitted. The Daily Mirror published a handful of the names from the notebook, among them Joachim Von Ribbentrop, who was instrumental in starting World War Two, Hitler’s main propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and Hermann Goering, who set up the Gestapo secret police. The Auschwitz Museum reacted on Twitter, suggesting that the Daily Mirror might have intended to write “mass murderer of Poles” instead. The daily has since dropped the word “Polish” from the story. Frank, who was executed in Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity, has been quoted as saying: “If I had to put up a poster for every seven Poles shot, the forests in Poland would not be sufficient to manufacture the paper”. (vb/pk) Source: Polskie Radio  |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Nov 4, 2017 19:45:36 GMT 1
The German appeal court has finally decided that ZDF TV station must officially take back its words about Polish death camps. The ruling is a major precedence.
German broadcaster refuses to apologise for ‘Polish death camp’ reference: report
25.07.2017 11:22
German public broadcaster ZDF has launched an appeal against a court order to apologise on its homepage to an Auschwitz survivor for use of the phrase “Polish death camp”, according to a report.
Polish public broadcaster TVP Info reported on its website that ZDF is arguing that courts in Poland are not independent.
At the beginning of February a court in Mainz, Germany, issued a decision obliging ZDF to publish an apology on its home page, according to TVP Info.
A court in Kraków, Poland, earlier ruled that an apology previously published on the broadcaster's website did not meet a requirement that the message be visible on ZDF's homepage for 30 days.
The German broadcaster has now argued in its appeal that Poland’s conservative government, formed in late 2015, has an active policy aimed at protecting the good name of the Polish state and Poles, a policy which includes legal as well as diplomatic moves, according to TVP Info.
According to ZDF, the Polish government wants such a policy to be implemented by Polish courts, TVP Info said.
Auschwitz survivor Karol Tendera launched legal action over the promotion of a ZDF documentary about the liberation of Majdanek and Auschwitz, WWII German Nazi death camps located in occupied Poland.
In the promotional material on the zdf.de website, the expression “Polish death camps” was used. The description was changed after Polish authorities protested.
In April 2016, a Kraków district court found that ZDF had damaged Tendera's dignity and national identity by referring to WWII German Nazi concentration camps Majdanek and Auschwitz as “Polish death camps”.
The use of the term "Polish concentration camp” by international media outlets has sparked numerous complaints from Poland in recent years, prompting some news agencies to change their style guidelines.
In 2007, following a Polish request, the World Heritage Committee attempted to clarify the matter by listing the Auschwitz camp as a "German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp". (pk)
|
|
|
|
Post by jeanne on Nov 17, 2017 21:26:57 GMT 1
The German appeal court has finally decided that ZDF TV station must officially take back its words about Polish death camps. The ruling is a major precedence. Yay! |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 28, 2018 4:16:27 GMT 1
A new Polish law about penalties for using the phrase Polish death camps caused incredible uproar in Israel. Israelis claim there WERE Polish death camps and Poles participated in Holocaust. www.timesofisrael.com/decrying-new-bill-yad-vashem-says-polish-death-camps-a-misrepresentation/www.dw.com/en/israel-says-polish-death-camp-rephrasing-bill-amounts-to-denial/a-42338752www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Israel-strongly-opposes-Polish-bill-outlawing-term-Polish-death-camps-539972www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/world/middleeast/poland-holocaust-law-israel.htmlThe first claim is false because there weren`t Polish death camps for Jews. The second is true - yes, some Poles participated in Holocaust, like it happened everywhere in Europe.
MPs back jail terms for references to 'Polish' death camps
26.01.2018 16:46
Polish deputies on Friday voted through a law under which anyone who uses the phrase "Polish death camps" would face up to three years in prison or a fine.
The new law would also allow criminal proceedings to be launched against anyone who denies crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists between 1925 and 1950, such as the Volhynia Massacre during World War II, a black page in Polish-Ukrainian relations.
The use of the term “Polish death camp” by international media outlets in reference to camps runs by Nazi Germans in occupied Poland during World War II has sparked numerous complaints from Warsaw in recent years.
Deputy Justice Minister Patryk Jaki told MPs on Friday: "Non-governmental organisations indicate that every other day the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ is used around the world."
'Insults to the Polish nation'
He said: “In other words, German Nazi crimes are attributed to Poles. And so far the Polish state has not been able to effectively fight these types of insults to the Polish nation.”
The new law would apply to both Polish citizens and foreigners "regardless of the rules in force in the location where the act was committed,” according to the official wording.
But artists and academics would be exempt from prosecution.
Under the rules passed on Friday, anyone who publicly ascribes blame or joint blame to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by Nazi Germany or for war crimes or other crimes against humanity would be liable to penalties.
The new law was backed by 279 deputies on Friday, while five were against and 130 abstained. The bill will now go to the Senate, the upper house of Polish parliament, for further debate. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 28, 2018 20:03:35 GMT 1
Interesting explanation of the term: www.timesofisrael.com/do-the-words-polish-death-camps-defame-poland-and-if-so-whos-to-blame/
Murky origins for ‘Polish’ death camps
The term “Polish death camp” appeared before the war’s end, while Poland was still occupied by the Nazis and operations at the death camps were winding down.
In his 1944 magazine series called “Courier from Poland,” Jan Karski wrote about his discovery of death camps operating in Nazi-occupied Poland, and his attempts to alert Allied governments. Despite having used the term “Polish death camp” in the articles for Collier’s magazine, Karski did not intend to implicate Poles as their creators.
It would be inaccurate to blame Karski for pushing the label “Polish death camps,” but responsibility for doing so can be assigned to former Nazis operating in West Germany during the Cold War, and decades during which secret services undertook to whitewash history.
Until the mid-1960s, West Germany’s government declined to pursue Nazi war criminals. During these years, an intelligence-affiliated “Agency 114” worked to “clean” the records of such men who wanted to obtain intelligence work. A good deal of these job applicants had served at concentration and death camps, hence the need to “re-brand” them and implicate Poles.
It should be noted the US Army worked closely with Agency 114, largely for the purpose of obtaining intelligence on Soviet spies in the American occupation zone. Protected by former chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the agency also sought out leftists and pacifists. Simultaneous to the Soviet KGB becoming a household name in the late 1950s, Agency 114 expanded its mission to hunt down “Bolshevik Trojan horses,” and to prevent a “subversive takeover by Communists.”
Led by former Nazi secret police sergeant Alfred “Fatty” Benzinger, Agency 114’s propaganda strategy was to slip the term “Polish death camps” into discourse about the war. In Germany, the group was so successful that when the US-made miniseries “Holocaust” had its 1979 airing, a TV panel of historians was overwhelmed by the number of Germans who believed Poland was responsible for the genocide.
It took another decade for Poland’s government to begin systemically lodging complaints against use of the term. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, a new era of truth-telling swept across Europe. As Soviet-initiated crimes were “uncovered” in the east, history-focused Poles looked west — to a united Germany — in an attempt to fix what they saw as that country’s defamation of Poles. |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 28, 2018 20:28:31 GMT 1
Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog called on Netanyahu to recall the ambassador to Poland for “urgent consultations” over the law and “to make our protest against it clear to the Polish Government and Parliament.” Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked called the legislation an attempt to “rewrite history” and to absolve Poland of any responsibility for what took place on its soil during the Holocaust.
Going even further, Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid Party, wrote on Facebook that “Poland was complicit in the Holocaust,” adding that “Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered on its soil without them having met any German officer.” According to Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, no more than 2,500 Jews were killed by Poles during the Holocaust and directly thereafter. Lapid got into an argument on Twitter with the Polish Embassy in Tel Aviv over the legislation.
“I utterly condemn the new Polish law which tries to deny Polish complicity in the Holocaust. It was conceived in Germany but hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German soldier. There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that,” Lapid tweeted on Saturday afternoon.
The embassy tweeted the link to a statement from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance which stated its support of refraining from using the term Polish death camps.
“Your unsupportable claims show how badly Holocaust education is needed, even here in Israel,” the embassy tweeted. “The intent of the Polish draft legislation is not to ‘whitewash’ the past, but to protect the truth against such slander,” it also tweeted.
“I am a son of a Holocaust survivor. My grandmother was murdered in Poland by Germans and Poles. I don’t need Holocaust education from you. We live with the consequences every day in our collective memory. Your embassy should offer an immediate apology,” Lapid responded.
[/i][/quote] www.timesofisrael.com/its-complicated-inaccuracies-plague-both-sides-of-polish-death-camps-debate/
Centrist politician Yair Lapid, head of the Yesh Atid opposition party — and according to some recent polls, the lawmaker likeliest to replace Netanyahu if elections were held now — had a lot to say on the topic on social media.
In a series of posts, Lapid said, “There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that,” adding: “Hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered without ever meeting a German.”
Yesh Atid chief Yair Lapid leads a faction meeting at the Knesset on November 6, 2017. (Miriam Alster/Flash90)
“Poland was a partner in the Holocaust,” he also wrote.
Lapid’s statements were historically inaccurate on several levels, according to Efraim Zuroff, a prominent historian on the Holocaust and the Eastern Europe director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
“I understand his anger, but Lapid fell in the trap that the Poles made for him, in a sense,” Zuroff said.
The claim that there were Polish death camps is “misleading,” Zuruff said. The statement is true only in that there were Nazi death camps on Polish soil.
“Polish individuals may have been responsible for the deaths of many thousands of Jews, but Polish state apparatuses were not integrated into the Nazi machine of genocide against the Jews, and, in that, Poland is actually an exception to many other countries in Nazi-occupied Europe,” Zuroff said.
Claiming that “Poland was a partner in the Holocaust” is also untrue, because “there was no Poland” under German occupation. Polish sovereignty was dismantled and the country’s territory was co-opted under Nazi rule.
Chief Nazi-hunter of the US-based Jewish rights group Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Efraim Zuroff, gestures during a conference in Jerusalem on January 26, 2017. (AFP/Thomas Coex)
The claim that hundreds of thousands of Jews died in Poland without seeing a German is “absurd,” Zuroff said.
“I don’t know where Lapid got that figure from,” he added.
According to Polish Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich, no more than 2,500 Jews died at the hands of Poles during the Holocaust or immediately after it. Zuroff disputes this estimate: He believes the correct figure is “many thousands” of people, including in at least 15 towns and cities in eastern Poland, where non-Jews butchered their Jewish neighbors.
Lapid’s claim is also offensive to many Poles, Zuroff said. That is because, in addition to killing three million Polish Jews, the Nazis killed three million Polish non-Jews (the remaining millions of Jewish Holocaust victims were either killed in the former Soviet Union or camps outside Poland).
“The Nazis considered the Poles lesser-humans,” Zuroff noted.
Which is part of the reason that the “Polish opposition to the term Polish death camps is justified,” Zuroff added, though he also said he does not support criminalizing it.
So why are Israeli politicians and authorities on the Holocaust so outspoken in opposing it? |
|
uncltim
Just born
I oppose most nonsense.
Posts: 73
|
Post by uncltim on Jan 28, 2018 23:22:54 GMT 1
So why are Israeli politicians and authorities on the Holocaust so outspoken in opposing it?
Easy, they are plotting to extract wealth from the Polish state as "reparations." Before the obligatory and ridiculous accusation of antisemitism, let me state that as a goyim I am indifferent to the opinions of the Jewish. I see history through the lens of my people not theirs. Especially when the real holocaust was the 100MM killed under communism. Their 6MM should be little more than a footnote.
|
|
|
|
Post by jeanne on Jan 29, 2018 0:33:02 GMT 1
So why are Israeli politicians and authorities on the Holocaust so outspoken in opposing it? Easy, they are plotting to extract wealth from the Polish state as "reparations." Before the obligatory and ridiculous accusation of antisemitism, let me state that as a goyim I am indifferent to the opinions of the Jewish. I see history through the lens of my people not theirs. Especially when the real holocaust was the 100MM killed under communism. Their 6MM should be little more than a footnote. Tim, I must disagree with you. To say that something was the "real" holocaust implies, of course, that something else was not... Six million human beings can never be just a "footnote." Both were unspeakable tragedies and both should be recognized as such. Perhaps in the future, by the grace of God, there will be just one "lens" used by humankind. |
|
uncltim
Just born
I oppose most nonsense.
Posts: 73
|
Post by uncltim on Jan 29, 2018 3:24:47 GMT 1
Let me change that to "the considerably larger crime against humanity" then. Besides, Holocaust is a term that applies exclusively to the Hebrews. I would also recommend studying the Talmud (and Koran) to allow you to fully appreciate the cultural and principle differences that exist.
So what say you with regard to the plan of wealth extraction?
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 29, 2018 10:33:01 GMT 1
|
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Jan 31, 2018 13:19:14 GMT 1
So why are Israeli politicians and autochoria on the Holocaust so outspoken in opposing it? Easy, they are plotting to extract wealth from the Polish state as "reparations." I see history through the lens of my people not theirs. Especially when the real holocaust was the 100MM killed under communism. Their 6MM should be little more than a footnote. Not all of them, there are voices of reason too, by people who understand Polish motives. See an article below: As for plotting to extract wealth, I suppose some Jews might have such an intention. But certainly not all. It is like Polish antisemitism - some Poles are antisemitic, most aren`t. Seeing history through one nation`s lens as you said is wrong. People are equal, no matter of faith, origin, race etc. I thought US schools teach such things to students? Each Jewish victim of Holocaust in Poland is to me a Polish victim. Jews were Polish citizens and most felt like that. www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Setting-history-straight-Poland-resisted-Nazis-540092 Setting history straight – Poland resisted Nazis
By Seth J. Frantzman
January 29, 2018 05:30
Historical truths are a good start, and the truth is that Poland was one of the countries that sent large numbers of men and women to resist the Nazis.
On September 1, 1940, a year after Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the German-appointed governor of Warsaw District renamed Pilsudski Square as “Adolf Hitler Platz.”
Eleven-year-old Julian Kulski wrote in his diary about that day: “A great wooden frame now covers the statue of Prince Poniatowski. No patriotic Pole attended the ceremony.” Poniatowski had been a famous Polish leader and close ally of Napoleon. Covering up his image and renaming the square was an attempt by Germany to erase Poland.
Today, Poland and Israel are involved in an angry controversy over a law that could punish those who claim Poland was responsible for Nazi crimes. “I strongly oppose it, one cannot change history and the Holocaust cannot be denied,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement. President Reuven Rivlin, Yair Lapid and others have harshly condemned the law.
However, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki pointed out that “Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a Polish name and Arbeit Macht Frei is not a Polish phrase,” referencing the German phrase that “Work makes freedom” written above the entrance to the death camp.
The two sides seem to be talking past each other. Poland is not denying the Holocaust through a law designed to punish those who describe the death camps as Polish. The proposed law may be misguided and a bad way to go about dealing with history, but Poland is right: It is not responsible for the Holocaust and the Polish people resisted Nazism valiantly, more so than many other countries that ran to collaborate.
The Polish resistance was active from the early days of the Nazi occupation. Julian Kulski, who published his diary in 1979 and then again in 2014 as The Color of Courage, recalls how in May of 1940, slogans against the Germans began appearing by “Polska Walczaca” (Fighting Poland). German propaganda signs were torn down and burned by individual citizens. The Polish resistance was so spontaneous and unexpected that, Kulski wrote, Germans put up posters “calling on Polish people to stop killing the Germans.”
This history is often forgotten in our memory of the Holocaust. It’s not surprising. A few posters being put up and torn down pales in comparison to millions of Jews sent to death camps. But the posters were part of a much larger resistance. It was a resistance that also opposed the German crimes against Jews in Poland. “Today’s information bulletin carries the underground announcement that any participation by Poles in anti-Jewish actions is traitorous and will be punishable by death,” Kulski wrote on March 6, 1941.
POLAND WAS subjected to the most vicious policies of the Nazi German regime. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, between 1939 and 1945 at least 1.9 million non-Jewish Poles were murdered. In addition, up to 1.5 million Polish citizens were sent to Germany for slave labor. This is in addition to the three million Jewish Polish citizens murdered in the Holocaust. The destruction wrought on Poland was also extreme, with Warsaw razed to the ground in 1944 during the Polish Home Army uprising. The Warsaw Ghetto had already been destroyed during the 1943 uprising.
Poland is right to be angry when it is made to appear that Poles were somehow responsible for the Shoah. Unlike most other countries occupied by Germany during the war, Poland did not provide a ready recruitment base for Nazi collaboration. For instance, the Waffen-SS recruited local units in Albania, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Romania, Sweden and other countries. It didn’t find recruits among Poles. According to a 1993 letter from the War Crimes Office in Ludwigsburg, an office that had collected material relating to Nazi war crimes in West Germany, “There was no Waffen-SS unit similar to the Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, etc. divisions that would have consisted solely of Polish volunteers.” This account is published in Tadeusz Piotrowski’s Poland’s Holocaust: Ethnic Strife, Collaboration with Occupying Forces and Genocide in the Second Republic, 1918-1947.
I recall reading Maus, the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman that shows Jews, illustrated as mice, being sent to their deaths. Poles are depicted as pigs in the novel. The novel’s Jewish main character fights the Germans with the Polish army and is later sent to a series of concentration and death camps. Maus made me feel that Poland was somehow responsible for the Holocaust, or at least that many Poles collaborated in it. It was only years later, reading books like Kulski’s that I realized, in fact, the opposite was true. Poland and Poles were major victims, alongside Jews. It’s not a surprise that Maus encountered protests in Poland because the author depicted Poles as pigs. The German Nazis were depicted as cats.
History has an odd way of giving us the sense that Poles collaborated with Nazism, while whitewashing the real collaboration in Western Europe. We are often taught that Denmark saved the Jews. However it is often forgotten that an estimated 6,000 Danes volunteered for Nazi collaborationist units, including SS units like the SS Division Wiking and SS Division Nordland.
THERE WERE 40,000 Nazi volunteers in Belgium, according to George Stein’s 1984 book The Waffen SS. And the Germans found willing collaborators in many other countries as well, where they had no problem staffing local units. In France, they had an entire regime under the Vichy government willing to help expel Jews and do their bidding. Almost everywhere in Europe, except for among some groups such as Serbs and Poles, there was distinct collaboration. By contrast, in most Western countries there was almost no resistance to Nazism. Compared to the Polish Home Army, which had hundreds of thousands of recruits to resist the Nazis, other resistance movements had trouble finding a handful of volunteers.
Charles Kaiser, who wrote a book on a family in the French Resistance, wrote for CNN in 2015: “Most Frenchmen were neither collaborators nor resistors; they just kept their heads down and tried to get enough to eat.” He writes that French resisters were often seen as fanatics by their own countrymen.
In Poland, however, the resistors were not seen as fanatics, but as nationalists and the norm. Individual Poles may have collaborated and after the Holocaust in 1946 there was the infamous and despicable Kielce pogrom, but the record in Poland is one of resistance to Nazism.
The Holocaust is too often used today as a political tool and rhetorical device. Not only is it invoked almost everyday in Israeli political discussions, but its memory is abused throughout Europe and elsewhere. It is universalized or overly particularized, warped, and its victims forgotten. It serves political agendas.
Poland’s decision to want to legislate how the Holocaust can be discussed is misguided. However, equally misguided is the anger directed at Poland and the distortion of history regarding Polish resistance. Yad Vashem, in a statement, said that the Polish law is “liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust.”
Historical truths are a good start and the truth is that Poland was one of the countries that sent large numbers of men and women to resist the Nazis. If this whole controversy should have one effect, it should not be for chest-beating Israeli politicians to attack Poland but rather to look into this history and perhaps learn from it. One can oppose the Polish law and give thanks to the Polish people who stood against the Nazi menace in Europe’s darkest hour. In that hour, in 1940, when too many were welcoming the Germans quietly, the Poles were tearing down Nazi propaganda and storing weapons for the next round. |
|
|
|
Post by jeanne on Jan 31, 2018 17:08:18 GMT 1
Let me change that to "the considerably larger crime against humanity" then. Hi Tim, This wording is a bit of an improvement, but is still not the best choice of words. Perhaps "a crime against humanity with a larger scope" might be better. The crimes were equally egregious, but the numbers were not equal. How does one calculate the value of a human life? It can't be done. But you used it in reference to the victims of communism! The origin of the term is from Jewish culture, but I'm not sure that it hasn't taken on a more general meaning in our world today to refer to any large-scale annihilation of people of common race, culture, religion, nationality, etc. I'm not sure how the Koran fits into this particular discussion...perhaps you could enlighten me on that. Since studying the Talmud is an exercise in difficulty for many Jews themselves, I won't be taking that on. I am well educated in Jewish culture from other sources, and do appreciate the differences in culture and principles that exist, but I also appreciate the equality of the value of all human life. Jeanne |
|
|
|
Post by Bonobo on Feb 4, 2018 15:16:43 GMT 1
Some Jews are afraid that with the new law, such writers as Jan Gross who reveals certain facts about Polish complicity in Holocaust will be persecuted by the Polish government.
Here, an old demo by US Jews on behalf of Gross and freedom of speech. At the same time, it shows considerable prejudice and incredible ignorance of basic facts.
|
|
