Critics of the European Conservatives and Reformists - the first bloc of mainstream parties in the European Parliament to oppose deeper integration - have reached a new and nauseating low. In their determination to malign the only serious Euro-sceptic opposition they have encountered in 50 years, they are accusing the ECR’s leader, Michał Kamiński, of anti-Semitism.
Never mind that Michał is a lifelong champion of human rights; never mind that he is a keen supporter of the European Jewish Congress and the European Friends of Israel; never mind that both his grandfathers fought the Nazis. He’s a Euro-sceptic - and that, in the eyes of his critics, justifies attacking him with any weapons available, including those banned by the Geneva Convention.
This is going to be a longer post than usual but, believe me, it’s important. The fact is that Euro-federalists are threatened by the ECR. Until now, they have enjoyed a doctrinal monopoly: every Group in the European Parliament, from the Communists to the Christian Democrats, favoured political union. Euro-enthusiasts fear that the ECR will break their cartel. No longer will a federal Europe appear inevitable; henceforth, it will be simply one among a series of competing ideas.
From the moment David Cameron announced that he planned to establish a souverainiste alliance, the palaeo-federalists started hurling clods of manure at him. If the Conservatives left the EPP, they insisted, they would end up with Right-wing extremists.
In fact, the ECR is more respectable than either of the two big blocs, the EPP or the Socialists. The EPP contains plenty of parties that are anti-gay, anti-gipsy, anti-immigrant or anti-American (see here). On the Socialist benches you will find Stalinist nostalgics, an old IRA man, and a 9/11 conspiracy theorist (see here). And that’s not even counting this latest incident.
The ECR, by contrast, is moderate and restrained. Most of its MEPs are ex-ministers, economics professors, former IMF officials and the like. Five of its nine participating parties are in government in their home countries.
Unable to associate any serious scandals with the participating parties, Euro-enthusiasts tried to smear them by association. Person X, a member of one of the constituent parties, would be found to have co-written a letter with Person Y, who worked for a news organisation owned by Person Z, who had unsavoury views. (I’m not making this up. The Guardian ran precisely such a story as its splash on the eve of the European election: see here.) Of course, there isn’t a political party in the world you can’t traduce at fourth hand in this manner.
In order to sustain their campaign, these supposed pro-Europeans exploited differences in national political cultures in a way that was downright xenophobic. To get a sense of how tendentious their coverage has been, imagine it the other way around. Suppose a Polish newspaper set out to defame the British Tories. Suppose, further, that it did so by running stories about how about how the “anti-Catholic Conservative Party”, which had long opposed giving Roman Catholics the right to vote, supported annual demonstrations of sectarianism in which effigies of Catholics - sometimes of the Pope himself - were burned on bonfires while cheering mobs let off fireworks.
That, I’m afraid, is what (mutatis mutandis) some British newspapers are doing. How often have you read that our Latvian allies “attend commemorations of Waffen SS veterans”? In fact, Latvia holds an annual ceremony to honour all those who died fighting the Soviet Union. Some of the soldiers had indeed been conscripted - often against their will - into the German army. But the ceremony is for all who took up arms, and is attended by representatives of every party in Latvia except those that speak for the Russian minority. Let me repeat that: it is attended by every party in Latvia, from the Greens to the Christian Democrats. But, obviously, it would never do to criticise these other parties: they’re pro-Brussels, you see.
Which brings me to Michał Kamiński. I’ve written about Michał before. He’s an Anglophile and a free-marketeer, who learned English by listening to Margaret Thatcher’s speeches on the BBC World Service. He spent his teenage years in underground anti-Communist movement. His record has been consistently pro-America and pro-Israel, and he has been a defender of civic freedoms, political pluralism and religious toleration. Yet Michał is now being smeared on the preposterous grounds of being anti-Jewish.
Before turning to the substance of the allegations, it’s worth considering who is making them and why. Three pieces have appeared within the past 24 hours, all making a similar point: this one in The Independent by the Labour MP Denis Macshane; this in The Guardian by Tim Garton-Ash; and this in The New Statesman by James Macintyre. None of these authors would pretend to be disinterested. Denis Macshane is a thoroughly likeable sort: one of those rare pro-Europeans who genuinely knows about other countries. He is also, as he would be the first to own, a Euro-zealot, who has a particular bee in his bonnet about the Tories being “xenophobic“. I’ve never met Professor Garton Ash, but I read him every week. He’s plainly a clever and knowledgeable man - he must, for example, know how unfounded are his constant digs about David Cameron’s “Latvian legion”. But he wouldn’t pretend, either, to be impartial about European integration. James Macintyre is the only one of the three who is a journalist, and he is widely recognised as, first and foremost, a Labour spin-doctor: Guido has the full charge-sheet here.
Beyond some very nasty name-calling, the articles make three concrete accusations against Michał: that he was once a member of the National Revival of Poland (NOP); that he campaigned against offering an official apology for the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom - a particularly horrible atrocity, even by the standards of Nazi-occupied Poland; and, according to Denis Macshane, that “Kaminski was part of the European National Front under the leadership of the Italian fascist Roberto Fiore”.
The only one of these accusations with any basis in fact is the first. When Michał was 14 years old, he joined the first anti-Communist movement he found. This was a time when there was no open opposition, and all sorts of people, some of them very unsavoury, were thrown together in the struggle for national independence. When democracy came, the parties sorted themselves out along more recognisable ideological lines, and the NOP became a fully-fledged racist and anti-Jewish movement. But Michał had left by then: he walked out before his eighteenth birthday.
The second accusation, that Michał lined up with anti-Semites over the Jedwabne massacre, is a grotesque distortion. In 2001, the President, a former Communist, proposed to offer a national apology for the crime. Michał argued that collective guilt diminished individual guilt. If crimes were said to have been a product of their place and time, then the responsibility of the criminals who had chosen to commit them was reduced. The Jedwabne massacre, he said, was not an offence by “the Poles” against “the Jews”, but by some guilty people against some innocent people. The victims, too, had been Polish citizens, recognised as such by the government-in-exile, although declared stateless by the Nazis. Blame, in all such cases, should attach to the actual malefactors. If the Communists wanted to apologise for something for which they had in fact been responsible, he added, why not apologise for their anti-Semitic campaign of 1968?
Now you can argue back and forth about collective guilt. As a conservative, I dislike the notion of group identity and believe that we must all answer for our actions, though I can see a contrary argument. What is truly scandalous is to suggest that Michał made light of the enormity of what had happened, or sought to play down the shame of the Holocaust in Poland.
As for the third allegation, made only by Denis MacShane, that Michał was a member of the 0penly fascist European National Front, either Denis knows something that no one else does, or the Indy may soon need a good lawyer.
What is perhaps most disturbing about the whole saga is the casual bigotry displayed by Michał’s detractors. Underpinning much of the coverage is the matter-of-fact assumption that, if you scratch a Polish Catholic, you’ll probably find an anti-Semite. Which is odd, really, given that prejudice is what the critics are notionally complaining about. And which, more to the point, is nonsense. Michał’s party, Law and Justice, is opposed to all forms of religious or racial discrimination. His boss, President Kaczyński, was the first Polish head of state to attend a service in a synagogue, and has been described by the liberal Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz as “long a friend to the Jewish community”. (To be fair, Garton Ash’s piece acknowledges this.)
Indeed, Michał is more accustomed to being attacked for being too pro-Likud. (I shouldn’t be surprised if his critics switch to this line next: they don’t seem especially interested in consistency.) He has long campaigned for the interests of Polish Jews. I remember a local council in his constituency passing a resolution against him because he had faced up to a genuinely anti-Semitic Polish MEP.
Imagine how Michał must feel when he reads these articles in the newspapers of a nation he has long admired. Accusations of anti-Semitism should be made, as the Prayer Book says of matrimony, “reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly”. To brandish the charge about as part of a petty domestic quarrel is disgusting.
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Originally Posted by Furunculus
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