Quote Originally Posted by cegorach
In other words Poland is anti-semitic country, perhaps also a 'bloddthirsty, imperialist regime sucking Jeiwsh blood'?
Lol. Shall we skip the rhetoric, my friend?

I have given you the information you required on Polish pogroms during the war. The Jedwabne massacre was established not by journalists but by a Polish government commission. Instead of addressing the issue, you squabble about the exact number of victims. This is typical for people in a state of denial about their history.

The commission's report concluded that 'The incomplete scope of the exhumation work and the impossibility to verify the hypothesis that a grave or collective graves exist at the Jewish cemetery do not allow one to substantiate the number of all individuals killed on the day of the events in Jedwabne.'

However, it is not the exact number that counts, it is the fact that as soon as the Germans approached, Polish inhabitants from a wide area gathered in Jedwabne in order to kill all the Jewish inhabitants. Read the descriptions of the ugly scenes, the intentional and studied way in which the Jews were herded together, humiliated, abused and killed in a day-long orgy. Then tell me - does it really matter, in the larger frame of things, whether they succeeded in killing them all?

I don't know if you are religious, but your attitude seems typical of the Polish Catholic Church. Poland's Catholic primate, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, at first denied the Jedwabne massacre. After the commission issued its findings and he couldn't deny it any longer, he called it 'a local tragedy'. When he couldn't maintain that either in view of other findings, he compared it to Katyn (where Polish officers were killed by Stalin’s troops) and 'Palestine', as if to say: see, we are all guilty of the same crimes, Jews included. And finally, he was more concerned with the image it projected abroad than about the issue itself when he deplored the upcoming English translation of Gross' book: 'Today, the release of its English-language version is being awaited with anxiety, because the truth thereby revealed to Americans is expected to unleash Jewry’s sharp attacks on Poles.'

There you go, the truth about a Polish attack on Jews is twisted into a Jewish attack on Poles. This reminds me of a funny remark by Polish-Israeli author Henryk Broder that antisemites have more trouble with the Holocaust than Jews. They want to both affirm and deny it, all at the same time. 'Oi, the trouble the antisemites have with Auschwitz!'

I referred you to Polish pogroms after the war, to the antisemitic campaigns in 1956, 1968 and in the 1980's. In the light of the above it is no surprise that there is still a considerable problem of antisemitism in Polish society. As late as 1999, the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (Council of Europe) issued a human rights report with the following conclusion:

ECRI noted that changing patterns of migration had also brought new challenges, but that Poland remained a society in which the issues of racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and intolerance were still relatively unacknowledged: the legislation in the field was insufficiently implemented, and the introduction of legislative provisions dealing explicitly with national and ethnic minorities was proving slow to realise. The general attitude of society seemed rather closed, towards difference, and feelings of antisemitism remained pervasive. The report adds that there appeared to be little concrete knowledge or monitoring of the extent and manifestations of racism and discrimination within society, which in turn meant that specific measures to combat these phenomenon were often lacking in various fields.

A notable recent incident concerns the Catholic radio station Radio Maryja (approximately 3 million listeners) with links to the governing Law and Order party. One of its commentators called restitution efforts by Polish Jews 'extortion', he belittled the Holocaust and accused 'Judeans' of 'sneaking up from the back, trying to force our government to pay protection money, concealing that fact by calling it a compensation.'

This is why the supposed case against Mr Morel is so highly politicised. Let us face it, my friend. Many Poles would love to get their hands on Mr Morel, guilty or not, in order to be able to say: 'Look, Jews were mass-murderers, too. Our father in heaven, are we absolved now?'

Israel, of course, will not play along.