The shocking, disgusting and incomprehensibly cruel case of the Austrian ‘children in the cellar’ has made some commentators look for sociological causes, in some unlikely places, for what is really the individual act of a psychopath. Even Poland’s cranky, ultra-conservative anti-Semites at Radio Maryja have been dragged into the increasingly wild comment-fest.

Many commentators have tried to explain, what I believe is almost the unexplainable, by trying to find something buried deep within small town Austrian culture. And they seem to be finding it in a place even colder and darker than the cellar under Josef Fritzl’s house in Amstetten.

The locals knew something, didn't they? So why did they look away, pretend it wasn’t happening?

Apparently, it’s all to do with Austria’s anti-Semitic past. Yup! Of course it is. But not only Austria's dark past. Look at this bit from Howard Jacobson’s column in the Independent (UK).

As chance would have it – let's call it chance, anyway – the unremarkable provincial Austrian town of Amstetten has looked away before. There was a concentration camp in Amstetten. Not a big one. Just a sub-camp of Mauthausen, of which there were approximately 50 dotted around lower and upper Austria. Since Mauthausen's speciality was extermination by means of slave labour, in particular the extermination of politically educated and vocal enemies of the Reich, we might fairly assume that Amstetten's speciality was the same. It is also worth noting that Amstetten was a camp for women.

Whether it is equally worth noting that the Polish Catholic radio station Radio Maryja [my italics] – a continual embarrassment to the Vatican on account of its nationalistic and anti-Semitic utterances – has opened several bases in the Austrian Tyrol, the first of them in Amstetten, I don't know…

Well, if he doesn’t know whether it was worth pointing that out - and I would argue that it was ridiculous to point that out in the context of this story - then why bother in the first place?

It says here (under religious antisemitism) that the founder of Radio Maryja, the anti-Semite Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, decided in 1999 to expand his operations in the Tyrol region, adding to the base already set up in Amstetten, the town where the disgusting Fritzl imprisoned his daughter and children.

That said, the small town of Amstetten (eastern Austria) is not in the Tyrol region, which is in the west of Austria, as is the district of Amstetten - which is a different place. Could this be a mix up with Radio Maria International (which Rydzyk did have an involvment with back in the 1980s in Bavaria) which does have a place in Amstetten?

Whatever. What has that got to do with this case? Where is there evidence that any lingering anti-Semitism in Austria, or anywhere else, had anything to do with such a freak case such as this?

Maybe Brendan O'Niell in spiked is right. What Jacobson and others are alluding to is this: Catholic Austrians, like those Radio Maryja listening Poles, are not like us. They are from the East and so do not think and behave as we do in western Europe. They live in a denial culture, hiding from their past, deaf and blind to their present.

That the ultra-conservative loonies at Radio Maryja can be dragged into a case so shocking - because it is so unusual - maybe shows up something a little disturbing about some western European thinking about Central and Eastern Europe. It tells us nothing, however, about what caused a psychopath like Fritzl to do what he did.

Update - maybe someone can help, here.

In the Jacobson article linked in the above post it claims that Radio Maryja had a base in Amstetten and then expanded and has now many bases in the Tyrol region.

But the town where Friztl lived is in east Austria. Tyrol is in west Austria. There is also a Amstetten district in west Austria, but very far from the eastern town of the same name.

We have also failed to find evidence that Radio Maryja has bases in Austria, as is claimed in the Jacobson article and the other link I give in the original post.

What we have found is that another radio network, Radio Maria does have a base in Amstettel.

Father Rydzyk of Radio Maryja had contact with a Radio Maria in Germany in the 1980s.

Could Jacobson be mistaking Radio Maryja with Radio Maria?

Help!!!

Gay marchers face All-Polish Youth in Krakow.

Thirteen people were detained by the police – five of them juveniles - after counter marches through the streets of Krakow, Saturday.

Rival demonstrations took place from the Campaign Against Homophobia and the ‘Catholic-nationalist’ All-Polish Youth, which was recently expelled from the League of Polish Families because their far-right antics had become a PR disaster.

About 2,000 people attended the ‘Tolerance March’; March for Culture and Tradition, organized by the All-Polish Youth, could muster just 300 supporters, according to police estimates.

The All-Polish Youth had promised they were not going to allow ‘sodomites’ to enter Krakow.

The march was part of a tolerance festival by the Polish Campaign Against Homophobia, which finishes Sunday.

Homophobia?

Of course, All-Polish Youth is made up of bigots, who’s youthful energies could surly be put to more productive use – like joining model aircraft, or stamp collecting, clubs, perhaps?. But are these guys ‘homophobes’?

A phobia is a psychological condition – like arachnophobia – in which the sufferer cannot control himself and is a victim to his fears. Arachnophobes do not choose to fear spiders.

So according to the Campaign Against Homophobia, All-Polish Youth cannot do anything about their ‘fear’ of gays and lesbians, and, presumably, need therapy.

Bull

Prejudice against gays and lesbians is caused from political ideologies, which come from the top of society.

These prejudices can only be got rid of through political argument and cultural development.

There is free will - unlike fearing spiders - shown by members of All-Polish Youth when they decide to go on a demo, and throw eggs and the usual nonsense at gays on marches.

They don't throw eggs because they have a 'phobia'. They chose to be there and bring the eggs (bottles, rocks, etc) with them. They then chose to throw them. It's not some psychological compulsion.

So All-Polish Youth are not victims of a phobia, they are holders of bigoted opinions and far right political views.

We do not need a campaign against homophobia, we need a political movement in Poland arguing for genuine equality and tolerance.

So not Campaign Against Homophobia - it should be Campaign Against Bigots.

More?
All-Polish Youth
Campaign Against Homophobia

Roman wants any new EU Constitution (yawn) to include a ban on abortion and rights for homosexuals.

Education and deputy prime minister Giertych has been justifying what he said in Germany yesterday: legal abortion is a ‘form of barbarianism’, and homosexuals threatened the future of European civilization as we know it.

‘The propaganda of homosexuality is reaching ever younger children." [Giertych said in the speech released to the Polish media Friday].

"In some countries it is even forbidden for children in hospital to talk or read about mommy and daddy, because this allegedly violates minority rights. Let's free ourselves of this unwise political correctness."

"If we will not use all our power to strengthen the family, then as a continent there is not future for us. We will be a continent settled by representatives of the Islamic world who care for the family."

Of course, the image of gays ushering in the European Islamic Caliph is a delicious one and should be cherished by us all.

And it follows nicely on from the recent bizarre ramblings of his father, Maciej, whose nasty little pamphlet, Civilizations at war in Europe, proved that these are minds locked into a 1930s time-warp (see my review here).

Responding to charges that he is an anti-Semite loon, Maciej told the European Jewish Press:

‘Those who said [the pamphlet] is anti-Semitic haven’t read it. My impression is that critical comments come from people who have not read the book. They read only a few sentences".

No Maciej, I read the lot. Every word. It’s anti-Semitic tripe (and much more besides). The EJP continues:

He said his text, published in English, is an attempt to promote the teaching of Polish professor Feliks Koneczny, who has developed a "very interesting" method of classifying civilisations. "I am presenting his methods of classification," Giertych said. "It is in fact a contribution to the big discussion occurring in the world at the moment about the clash of civilisations."

I like the tense of ‘...Feliks Koneczny, who has developed a "very interesting" method of classifying civilizations.’ Note ‘who has’...but the guy died 58 years ago. Koneczny, and his ideas, are well and truly in the past (very simple) tense.

And that’s where the Gietychs should be. There has been a big fuss over the latest antics of the Giertych dynasty. But these people are no big deal, and their ideas – so antiquated – will gradually fall to bits like an old, pre-war, wardrobe.

Giertych-isms are well passed their sell by date.

Take a deep breath and come with me as we delve into a mind stuck in the 1930s.

‘Jews form ghettoes’….’they settle in our civilizations, preferably among the rich…’

That’s one of the classic lines in a just released ‘scholarly pamphlet’ you can be sure will be on all Polish school students’ reading lists, any time soon. His son is the present education minister, Roman Giertych, and the magnificent piece of scholarship is LPR Member of the European Parliament Maciej’s rambling ruminations on Civilizations at war in Europe.

I just read the whole thing. It’s…..er...

Maciej Giertych goes neo-con?

No, no, no. This tract is not the product of the pre-Iraq war neo-conservative ‘battle of civilizations’, but back, way back to the 1930s, to nationalist politics frozen in time from 1945 - 1989, now seen staggering around Poland like a man recovering from long Soviet years of frozen animation, into the blinding light of post-Communist Poland.

That was a long sentence, wasn’t it?

Civilizations at war in Europe is based on what Giertych believes was a truly marvelous writer, odd-ball Polish historian Feliks Koneczny, the founder of the so-called ‘comparative science of civilizations’, who died in 1949. It takes in garbled sociology, tongue-tied linguistics, and a bit of 1930s race biology is thrown in for good measure.

Giertych on race

Civilization is a strong marriage barrier. People normally look for a spouse from the same [culture] as their own. They expect to share civilizational norms with the spouse. As a result the covilizational barrier becomes a biological one. In biology animals and humans develop as a consequence of isolation.

In the introductionary passage he seems to use the concept ‘human race’ and the differences between races of animals, synonymously. Whites, Arabs and Africans are, for Giertych, like the biological variations between wild cats and domestic cats.

That’s something mainstream biology gave up decades ago when categorizing humans. Human races – in the plural – is not a biological concept, but a social one.

But no matter, Giertych is not using race to explain the growth of societies – at least not in this essay. Civilizations are not formed from races, he says but from culture.
.
Giertych on Civilization

He says in the ‘method’ section that the categorization of cultures:

’…will be used hierarchically. Thus within the Latin civilization there are such cultures as British, Spanish, Polish and others. Within the Jewish [civilization] one can find Sephardic, the Hassidim, the Karaim and other cultures.”

Note ‘hierarchically’… But which civilization is on top, we wonder, breathlessly?

He spends rather a long time on trying to demonstrate certain defects in writing expressed in other than the Latin script. He claims that Chinese pictorial writing inhibits abstract thought [?] and that written Hebrew, because it expresses no consonants, leaves ambiguity in meaning[!].

Arabic script, though, is good, because you can scribble it quickly[!!].

Latin civilization (and he uses civilization and culture interchangeably) is the most enduring and successful [shock!] only spoiled if it comes under pressure and does not defend itself from either the outside (historically Byzantine and Turanian cultures, - meaning basically Russia and Germany) or from Jews from within.

It’s a Rip van Winkle world view in a 1930s rain coat. And there is a hole in his sock.

Giertych has a coded go at Law and Justice.

He fights his long dead 1930s nationalist dad’s battles for him, saying that Pilsudski-ites, followers of Marshall Jozef Pilsudski – and arch enemy of Giertych’s nationalist idol Roman Dmowski - were characteristic of the Russian and German cultures, in their preferred political system of a strong leader, leaving decision making to the higher-ups. That’s why they went along, as the Dmowski nationalists did not, with the Pilsudski led coup of 1926.

It’s a historical reference with a contemporary inference: the present Law and Justice led coalition government – of which Giertych’s League of Polish Families is part – consider themselves ‘Pilsudski-ites’.

Giertych’s whole view of today is informed by the nationalist struggles of the past. By bringing up Pilsudski as some kind of example of how Byzantine strong leader culture had infiltrated Poland’s ‘Latin’ culture, he is back fighting the inter-war struggle between the nationalist Endecja movement and the Sanacja government, filled with Pilsudski-ites.

Come on Maciej, isn’t it time to move on, old boy?

Giertych on Jews

Jews are not a race. So, logically, he says, almost proudly, “It’s a mistake to think that anti-Semitism is racism”.

Er….

“We [Poles] consider the Jewish people today as a tragic community, a people that has not recognized the time of its visitation,’ he says.

The real problem with these people, writes Giertych, is that they are still waiting for the messiah, when everyone knows he turned up 2000 years ago in Jerusalem. Jews have suffered for this religious blindness ever since.

The cultures that recognized Christ flourished, but the Jews did not, and:

‘…became wanderers, jealously nurturing their Chosenness, this messianic consciousness, which gives a defining mark to their [culture].'

The essay really starts to pick up speed now, and it all just comes tumbling out.

On intercultural relations

Cultures – civilizations – must remain separate, otherwise they weaken.

This is why a Jew cannot be a Pole. Neither can Gypsies.

“Can a Gipsy become a Pole? Though [sharing the same language and religion] I think most Poles would tell you, and most Gypsies, that no, they cannot.’

After a brief detour into the Arabs (they are coming to get us, you know) he concludes:

‘…differentiate civilizations are mutually exclusive. Integration, middle ground, the ‘melting pot’ are not possible.'....The war between civilizations will be fought in the schools. Who will have the greatest influence on the minds of the young? Who will education our children?

He then makes a little detour back, way back, into his family’s past, to a golden age when men were men and women did what they were told. He bizarrely accuses the work of Polish Nobel prize winning author Wladyslaw Reymont of exhibiting un-Polish, un-Latin, elements.

‘In 1925 my grandfather forbade my mother of a standard text in her school, Chlopi, by Wladyslaw Reymont, because he considered it had immodest content. The whole class read it, but my mother did not…she never did read the book.

Which European school today would respect such a wish….?'

Giertych’s essay is a hymn to the ‘Latin culture’ and how it should defend itself against the invasion of other cultures; divorce, homosexuality, abortion and the EU are all symptoms of this creeping occupation. Poles, with a higher sense of national identity, have a lot to teach other Europeans, if we are to won the war of civilizations.

and so it goes on...and on...It's a pamphlet that should not be put on the shelves of the national library, but the natural history museum, where it belongs.

Maciej Giertych’s diatribe to the dinosaurs, which, in its richness and modernity, and it’s breaking of intellectual barriers, will be poured over by scholars for years, is here. Do not read just before bedtime.

One time MP, and presidential candidate, Leszek Bubel gets locked up. But is it for his anti-Semitism or is he just nuts?

Prosecutors in Bialystok have ordered that Bubel be detained for ‘spreading anti-Semitic hate speech and text’ and will be ordered to have psychiatric tests. This is not the first time that he has been charged with such offenses.

Last year he was charged under the Polish penal code (Art. 257), which prohibits ‘insulting individuals because of their ethnic, national, racial and religious affiliation,’ and carries a maximum charge of three years in prison. Bubel got off with a 5,000 zloty fine.

He had a written a pamphlet called ‘Polish-Jewish battle of the Crosses’ in which he had written gibberish such as ‘Jews brains are circumcised’ and other weirdo bullshit.

The guy is certainly very odd indeed. He was a candidate for president for the Polish National Party (Polska Partia Narodowa) during the presidential elections last year and received 0.13% of the vote (about the same as the LPR candidate got in the recent Warsaw local election, in fact).

He was elected to the Polish parliament 1991-93 as a member of the Beer Lover’s Party (until the party split into factions, as all Polish political parties inevitably do, into the Big Beer Party and the Little Beer Party).

He has run a number of magazines including Nasze Polska (Our Poland) and a bi-monthly Tylko Polska (Only Poland), both regularly and fanatically anti-Semitic and are what would be known these days as ‘Holocaust denial’ publications.

He also appears to have had some links as a publisher with Samoobrona, the party that is currently embroiled in their very own Monika Lewinsky-type sex scandal.

So, a thoroughly bad egg in everyone’s book, bar the most carpet-chewing of racists, that is.

And maybe he is a complete nutcase. But I hope the psychiatric tests he is being ordered to undergo are medical in nature and not because of his distasteful political activities.

And should an odorous nutter like Bubel be arrested and charged for ‘hate speech’? What he says is obviously so stupid and prejudiced that only the most extreme or mentally deranged would take any notice of him.

Much better would be to let him speak, let him hate, and let the rest of us deal with him as we see fit – or, even better, completely ignore him.

Is building a 400 square metre replica of the Warsaw Ghetto out of 50,000 Lego bricks ‘offensive’?

It had a wall around it. Built with bricks. The ghetto was made up of interconnecting parts. Get it? Er...well, not really. But offensive? Dan Sieradski certainly thinks so at the blog Jewschool.com.

“When I think about the senseless slaughter of 10,000,000 innocent Jews, Roma, queers, political dissidents and other undesirables, I think Lego …[sarcasm] …It makes me ill to see people trivializing the Shoah in the name of commemorating it.”

The model made of children’s building bricks was part of a history workshop on November 5 at the Alex Aidekman campus of the United Jewish Communities of MetroWest, New Jersey, US.

Lego bricks have been involved in Shoah controversies before. In 2002, Polish-born artist Zbigniew Libera’s Lego Concentration Camp Set (pictured above) a collection of seven empty boxes bearing pictures of death camps fashioned out of kiddie’s construction materials caused a small outrage. Menachem Rosensaft, founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, said that the show was “in excremental taste” and that “there can be no excuse, aesthetic or otherwise, for the crude desecration of the Holocaust inherent in the display.”

Dan at Jewshcool.com thinks that at least the Libera piece had some artistic merit – kind of - the new Warsaw Ghetto construction, he says, does not:

'Say what you will about Zbigniew Libera’s LEGO concentration camp... It at least is presented in a context which gives way to discussion, whether on the position of the Holocaust in popular culture, the marketing of violence to youth, or even the participation of mainstream German corporations (the proprietors of popular household brand names) in the Shoah. It’s supposed to be controversial.

Six year-olds reconstructing the Warsaw Ghetto with LEGO as an educational activity? That’s senseless and tasteless.'

But is Dan just being silly? Lego is a material kids relate too (and education must be ‘accessible’ nowadays, remember); any education about the Warsaw Ghetto is welcome; surly the material the exhibition is made out of is …well, immaterial? And why has left-liberal ‘identity politics’ made some people so hypersensitive to being ‘offended?

More?

What were they thinking?, New Jersey Jewish Standard, Nov 10

And if the need for education about this subject is still in doubt then see Muslim leader sent funds to Irving, Guardian, November 18. But do young Muslims play with Lego? Perhaps they should…

Old sores have been reopened once again with publication of a book based on inter-war Polish - Jewish newspaper archives. Jewish leaders distance themselves from it.

It’s assumed in Poland that pogroms such as in Jedwabne and Kielce were either one-offs, or even communist conspiracies. But a book telling the story of the Warsaw based Yiddish newspaper Haynt (1908-1939) by its last editor Chaim Finkelstein, written in Yiddish but now in English, claims that Jews were under increasing attack in many parts in Poland from the end of WW I. By the mid-thirties anti-Semitism became official policy.

Using the newspaper’s archives Finkelstein shows that anti-Semitism was prevalent in Poland, even earlier than it was in Germany.

The book has naturally caused quite a storm.

In chapter 4 Finkelstein writes:

Immediately following Poland’s rapid emergence in November, 1918, the physical abuses of Jews accelerated, rapidly assuming the form of pogroms. On November 13, 1918, a scant two days after Poland declared independence, Haynt (v. 213) reported on pogroms in Galicia. The news was not issued directly, as the Polish information services kept it quiet. Information was released by wire from Berlin, dated November 12, reporting that “according to sources in western Galicia, monitored in Vienna, pogroms have broken out against Jews in several towns across western Galicia. A large number of Jews have been killed, many wounded.

Pogroms in other places multiplied:

Following the Brisk pogrom and as a protest against the pogroms and riots in the country, a general strike was proclaimed by Polish Jewry. Jewish shops closed down, mass meetings were held, and the effect on the "Jewish Street" was great, but nothing really changed. Bloody attacks, and anti-Semitic hate accompanied by cries for expulsion ("Zhidzhe do Palestineh"; "Jews to Palestine") continued until the outbreak of World War II.

But it wasn’t just physical violence. Jews were subjected to economic forms of intimidation and discrimination as well.

In January, 1921 Sunday was declared a compulsory day of closure for businesses. Haynt calculated that Jews who wanted to observe the Sabbath and Jewish holidays had to close their businesses for 134 days a year. Non-Jews only had to close up on 62 days a year. Not only was this law introduced to ruin the Jews economically, it was also intended to undermine religious practice and traditions of Polish Jews.

The Jewish Deputies did everything they could to combat this law. They called upon the Polish Deputies and the government not to ruin the Jews. Their words fell on deaf ears. The Polish Deputies and the Jewish socialists from the Polish Socialist Party united and supported the Sunday closing law.

By the mid-1930s things had become even worse, as nationalists under Roman Dmowski began to exercise greater influence with the death of Jozef Pilsudski…

The machinery of the state, the government, the officials, the press, all of society, with extremely few exceptions, were taken over by the anti-Semitic madness. Weird new ideas steadily surfaced for “rescuing” the Fatherland from the “Zhides”. The democratic faction (“Strognitsvo Democratitshne”), a small liberal group of intellectuals and professionals, under the leadership of Professor Mietshislov Mikholovitsh (1876-1965), fought against fascism and anti-Semitism in the periodical “Tsharne na Bialem” (“Black on White”), but had no tangible influence on events in the country. Those few Jews who had up to this time managed to hold onto their government jobs were dismissed, and that was trumpeted in the newspapers as something of a great accomplishment – a clear demonstration that the government was saving the state from a “Jewish flood”…..

...General Stanislav Skvartshinski (1881-), then the leader of “OZON”, introduced a proposal in the Diet, that the government should carry out a mass emigration (simply put, an expulsion) of Jews, and two hundred deputies supported this expulsion proposal……’

This wasn’t the first time the idea of mass expulsions was put forward. In 1926 several governments, including British and Polish, were looking at ways to solve the ‘Jewish Problem’. Britain, as we know, ultimately favoured Palestine, but Poland was quite keen on the French colony of Madagascar as a place to send its Jews. This was an idea - the Madagascar Plan - that had been going around for some time in Europe and was ultimately picked up be the Nazis. The French wouldn’t cooperate. In 1937, however, the Polish government remembered the idea.

‘...in 1937 the Polish government sent a special delegation to Madagascar to study the situation on the spot. It comprised two Jews and one Pole: Major Mietshislav Lapetski, a traveler and author of travel books (1897-1969), Leon Alter, director of “HIAS” in Poland (1880-1963), and Engineer Solomon Dick, officer of the “United Committee for Jewish Emigration (“Emigdirekt”). They returned with a report that with the exception of small areas, the climate of Madagascar was not suitable for Europeans.

The Polish historian Vladislav Pobug-Malinovski writes about the expulsion plans in the second volume of his Spiritual [Intellectual?] History of Poland (pp. 817-818). He recounts also that a band of speculators and weapons dealers saw the Polish expulsion plan as an opportunity to profit at the expense of the persecuted Jews. The account then went silent.’

Read the whole book online here.

He doesn’t like going abroad much – but this week the President of Poland is visiting a key country for Polish foreign policy.

Lech Kaczynski likes to stay at home. But one of the draw backs of being head of state is that you have to keep packing your passport.

Since becoming president last autumn he still hasn’t done much traveling. He has made the short hop to Brussels and Germany and back in February he was in Washington. But now he is begining to seriously clock up some frequent fly miles by going to Tel Aviv .

The EU, US, Israel – these are the key destinations for a new Polish president to make an impact and give some character and purpose to diplomacy.

Israel is far from being an easy trip.

The inclusion of the League of Polish Families (LPR) in the governing coalition this year, a party which Tel Aviv thinks is anti-Semitic, prompted the Israeli government to protest via their Ambassador in Warsaw. So the Polish president is going to be very eager to please.

Today a joint declaration on the visits of youth delegations to Poland was signed by Israel’s Deputy Director-General for Eurasian Affairs Mark Sofer and Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Kowal.

These youth visits were under the control of LPR’s Roman Giertych as education secretary, before the government removed them from his department after complaints from Israel.

President Kaczynski told Haaretz before he left for Israel:

"Giertych is not anti-Semitic, He only grew up in an anti-Semitic tradition. He is the son and grandson of Polish politicians. But recently he has undergone a change. Today he is certainly not anti-Semitic. There is no problem with him. The problem lies in the extremist elements in his party."

But what about the statue Kaczynski unveiled last month dedicated to WW II Polish resistance fighter Jozef Kuras, who not only fought the Nazis and then the communists but also found time to attack an orphanage full of Jewish Holocaust survivors?

"I heard about Kuras as an anti-Communist activist," he says, "but I was not aware of all the other aspects relating to him. This is a subject of historical controversy. Accordingly, I have ordered an examination of the matter so that the historical truth will come to light."

So keen was the President to impress Israeli journalists he occasionally went over the top a little.

"I am fond of Israel, Poland has a special relationship with Israel," Kaczynski told Haaretz, "Arik Sharon is one of my big heroes."

Maybe not a great thing to come out with. Sharon is not a popular figure in either Palestine or Lebanon. Poland has promised to send over 500 troops as part of the UN peacekeeping force in Hezbollah territory. Polish forces might have to confront them if they see any breach of the ceasefire. He is also going to have meetings with the President of the Palestinian authority, Mahmoud Abbas.

But there was no stopping Kaczynski. On his personal view of Jews he gushed:

“I love Jews. I had many Jewish friends in the different periods of my life. I understand today what I did not understand as a child: that my attitude toward the Jews was that I viewed them as Poles in every respect, albeit as special Poles. [?] At home and in my milieu I heard that Christos was actually a Jew. It is true that I also heard other voices, which claimed that the Jews crucified Christ."

Er...yeah.

Kaczynski is in Israel for four days, the longest time he has spent in a country abroad. Such is the importance of Israel to Polish foreign policy.

More?
Polish president: We're Israel's best friend in Europe, Jerusalem Post, Sep 11

At 5 pm, Monday, (low ranking) politicians and dignitaries will be in Kielce to unveil Poland’s tribute to all those died on 9/11 five years ago, the Homo Homini monument.

It’s a work by artist Adam Myjak.

Representatives from all the world’s will be in attendance.

George Bush has sent a letter to the organizers of event which thanks Poland for its support in the ‘war on terror’.

The monument is not just to commemorate the 3,000 who died on 9/11 – including 6 Poles - but also as reminder of the destructive power of hatred in general. Kielce was where a a pogrom against Jews in 1946.

This week we have been buried under the weight of ‘anniversary journalism’ coverage of the nihilism, five years ago. And maybe the way we react to this kind of thing is more dangerous to us than the thing itself.

Simon Jenkins, a British columnist who writes for the Times and Guardian, has been the most realistic over the years. He wrote this week:

Terrorism is ten per cent bang and 90 per cent an echo-effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and knee-jerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated as collectively responsible. This response has become a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week amplification by the new "politico-media complex", especially shrill where the dead are white people. It is this that puts global terror into the bang. While we take ever more extravagant steps to ward off the bangs, we do the opposite with the terrorist aftershock. We turn up its volume. We seem to wallow in fear.

Let’s honour the monument in Kielce and then move on, a little more confidently

The Ripper was a Polish Jew. That was the opinion of the head of the investigation into the Whitechapel murders in 1888, according to ‘evidence’ released today.

Handwritten notes by Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson, just put in the Crime Museum at Scotland Yard, identify Aaron Kosminski as the man who butchered at least five women in the one of the most infamous unsolved cases of all time.

This is Local London reports:

‘JACK The Ripper was a Polish immigrant who died aged 54 in a Hertfordshire mental asylum - 31 years after he terrorised the dark streets of east London.

Mr Swanson wrote in the margins of the memoirs of the retired assistant commissioner Robert Anderson, "The Lighter Side of My Official Life", that the killings stopped after Kosminski realised detectives had identified him as the prime suspect.

Kosminski, who worked as a barber after arriving in London in 1882, was never interviewed because he was insane.

The only eyewitness to The Ripper murders was alleged to have identified Kosminski in an identity parade at a Metropolitan Police convalescent home in Brighton.
But Swanson wrote that the witness refused to testify against Kosminski because they were both Jewish.’

Aha! Another Jewish conspiracy theory.

Kosminski has always been identified as one of the numerous suspects of the grizzly murders. But many feel that the guy was only included in the list due to the wide spread anti-Semitism in London at the time.

But it still hasn’t stopped local journalists, apparently, from rehashing the story.

In fact many of the suspects were Polish Jews. Apart from Kosminski there were:

David Cohen (1865–1889). A Polish Jew whose incarceration at Colney Hatch asylum roughly coincided with the end of the murders.

John Pizer (1850-1897). Pizer was a Polish Jew who worked as a bootmaker in Whitechapel.

According to the great casebook.org, widespread social unrest in the East End of Victorian London led to:

‘...the belief that this “rising tide of Jewish immigration was reducing native Englishmen to destitution [and this] led to an increase in popular anti-Semitism”.

This anti-Semitism found its expression in a deliberate attempt to connect the Jews with the Whitechapel murders.'

Jack the Ripper, who ever he was (and who really cares?) was of more use as an anonymous monster than as someone who could be identified.

Much like today’s terrorists it is comforting, perhaps, to think of them as from an alien culture ‘over there’ – as a threat from outside.

Which is why it was such a horrible shock for Londoners to discover that the 7/7 bombers were not from ‘over there’ at all, but seemingly normal British Asians who played cricket at the weekends and plotted their weird trip to London on a white water rafting trip in Yorkshire.

For what it is worth, one of the most promising suspects was actually a Catholic Pole, Seweryn Antonowicz Kłosowski. A trained doctor from Warsaw medical school, he took the English alias George Chapman when he came to London from Nargornak in 1887.

He was convicted of murdering three women, including his wife. So, undoubtedly a very nasty man indeed who had all the skills to do the darstedly deeds.

But there again, Polish Catholics can make convenient folk-devils, too.

Roman Giertych, chief of far-right League of Polish Families calls off counter demonstration to the gay rights march in Warsaw this weekend.

The two marches, led by the Campaign Against Homophobia in Poland and the counter demo, organized by the youth wing of League of Polish Families, were to walk the same route Saturday lunchtime, only in different directions.

But now the counter demo has been called off. Why? “We are going to celebrate Poland’s participation in the World Cup, instead”, said Giertych.

And a much better use of the young men’s time it will be, too.

Poland’s first game is against Ecuador on Friday.

So the far right, All-Polish Youth, think that football is more important than intimidating gays, lesbians, trans-gendered individuals and human rights campaigners? What is the world coming to?

A cynic would say that Giertych, now that he is deputy prime minister, wants to put forward the best image he can. He likes his place in the coalition. So members of his party brawling in the streets would not go down too well with the new image - Giertych the Statesman.

He's also got the other problem of having at least 137,000 students signitures on a petition demanding that he be sacked as education minister.

But I am just an old cynic. I am sure he loves football as much as me.

But what if Ecuador beat Poland tomorrow? Will he still want to celebrate the World Cup then?

The Tolerance Parade will still be taking place Saturday.

There is a feeling that the All-Polish Youth know that the Tolerance march, which will be joined by thousands of people from outside Poland – particularly from Germany – was just going to be too popular to compete with. This, coupled with the fact that Giertych does not want bad publicity at the moment, contributed to the cancellation of the counter demonstration.

Whatever, this is a defeat for the far-right here and a victory for tolerance and modernity.

For more see Tolerance Parade web site

Krakow’s students, feminists, gays and academics have been put on the internet “black list” of fascist organization “Blood and Honour”.

By Robert Kusek at Radio Polonia

Blood and Honour is an international fascist organization which collects and keeps information on people who are well known for their leftist and anarchist sympathies. The founders of the organization trace the members of anti-racist and left-wing groups all over the world and, subsequently, put the names of their “enemies” with all the data – including photos, telephone numbers and addresses – on their internet lists called Redwatch.

But this is the first time the fascists from “Blood and Honour” have drawn up a list of so many people from a single Polish city – namely, from Krakow.

On their website, they have displayed the photographs and personal details of over 20 individuals – most of them living, studying and working in Krakow. The list includes the academics from the Jagiellonian University, students of the city’s colleges and members of Krakow’s feminist and gay organizations.

Redwatch has also published a number of photos which show ordinary people who participated in Krakow’s March of Tolerance in April 2006. The website encourages everyone to assault those people physically and gives all the details by which the human rights’ activists can be recognized – including the clothes they wear and the pubs and cafes they usually go to.

Several of the people have already lodged complaints with the public prosecution office against the website. They also hope to be protected by the police – especially after it turned out that last week one of the leftists activists from the Warsaw list of Redwatch was attacked and stabbed with a knife.

Robert Kusek, Krakow

Polish Foreign Ministry seeks US help to close down Blood and Honor website

The Polish Foreign Ministry has addressed a note to the U.S. authorities, asking for help to closedown a nationalist website, the government said on Sunday.

Poland's government spokesman Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz said the site signed by a self-claimed group of Blood and Honor can be found on the American server and that the Polish services cannot erase it...more

More?
Gay visibility inspires international supremacist attacks, Washington blade, May 16

The official line on the attack on Saturday, twenty four hours before the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz, was that it was a left wing ‘provocation’. Few are taking the claims seriously.

Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, was attacked in the street at the weekend by a young man, who pushed him in the chest and sprayed him with what many think was pepper gas.

Rabbi Schundrich, a US citizen, told Radio Polonia:

'We were walking in the street and somebody just yelled out ‘Poland for Poles’, and when I hear that I am not inclined to let it go. So I confronted him and I said why do you say that, why do you believe that. He reacted by punching me in the chest and I was going to react in kind and I was going to respond in the same fashion. Before I was able to, he pulled out some pepper gas or mace and sprayed me in my face. And when he finished spraying, he took off and started running. I started running after him, but he ran faster and I didn't catch him.

Prime Minister Marcinkiewicz called me last night [Saturday] to ask what happened, how I was, I said O.K. He said that his government would be fighting very vigilantly against anti-Semitism.'

The assailant has not yet been identified or found by the police. But who was he? The most obvious suspect would be someone from a racist organization such as Młodzież Wszechpolska (All-Polish Youth), a bunch of thugs attached to one of the coalition government partners, the far-right League of Polish Families.

But the government is trying to get a rather weak conspiracy theory going about the attack. CNN reported that:

‘Schudrich was attacked in central Warsaw on Saturday in what the Interior Ministry said might have been a provocation meant to portray Poland as anti-Semitic during Pope Benedict's visit.’

Provocation? What they mean, possibly, is that someone from leftwing circles planned the attack to make Poland – and more particularly the current nationalist, populist government – look bad.

That the Interior Ministry, with very little evidence, should come out with such rubbish is shameful and ridiculous. If they want to show the world that they are a modern, civilized government then they should just get on with investigating the incident and let the far-right cranks develop their conspiracy theories where they belong – on far-right, cranky blogs.

More?
Jews in Poland Wary of Ruling Coalition, Forward.com, May 12
Organizing against the Radical Right in Poland, anarckismo, May 21

Benedict tells ultra-catholic broadcasters: ‘lay off the politics’. The highlight of the pilgrimage will be tomorrow when the Pontiff makes a highly symbolic visit to Auschwitz. Radio Maryja won't be pleased.

Pope Benedict has been getting good crowds for his first visit to Poland since taking over the pontificate but nowhere near as good as what John Paul II could muster. In Pilsudski Square in Warsaw yesterday about 250,000 turned out (in the pouring rain) for mass and homilies. Whenever JP II turned up in the same place, however, he could expect around one million.

Still, half way through the four-day pilgrimage, attended by over 4,000 accredited journalists, it can be said that the visit has already been a success.

Pope Benedict is aiming to do three things with the trip:

1) To try and fill the very large shoes of John Paul II and make sure that Poland remains the most Catholic country in Europe.

2) To come down hard on the anti-Semitic and politically motivated Radio Maryja. Benedict has said on this trip: “The priest’s work is to know humanity and God, not politics” – making it clear that the close involvement between Radio Maryja and the current Polish government must end.

3) To visit the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz as part of the Vatican’s attempt to bridge the divide between Judaism and Polish Catholicism.

Pope Benedict also made the comment that the “aggressive pose of attacking behavior of previous generations must stop”, or words to that effect. Many have interpreted this as to mean Germans; but many more think that he is referring to the present governments attack on communists and liberals in Poland (the now infamous uklad).

Anti-Semitism in Poland and the rest of Europe

There has been a bit of a hot discussion on this blog as to the extent of anti-Semitism in Poland and other European countries. So, just to put the record straight, here are the results of an international survey of 12 countries in Europe by the Anti Defamation League on attitudes to Jewish people.

In responding "probably true" to the statement, "Jews have too much power in the business world," the 2005 survey found:

Hungary – 55%
Spain – 45%, down from 47%
Poland – 43%
The United Kingdom – 14% down from 20%

In responding "probably true" to the statement "Jews have too much power in international financial markets," the survey found:

Hungary – 55%
Spain – 54%, up from 53%
Poland – 43%
The United Kingdom – 16% down from 18%

You can read the whole report yourself here

While it has been noted that anti-Semitism is on the wane in Poland (and about bloody time too) with 43% of Poles still apparently believing nonsense of international Jewish conspiracies there is still lots of work to do here, to say the least.

For more on Pope Benedict's trip to Poland check out b16.pl

Andrzej Lepper says he is not. Everyone else thinks he is – including anti-Semites!

Deputy PM Lepper, the leader of the rural based, populist Self defense party, is now Dr Lepper!

Last week he received an honorary degree from the private, Ukrainian college, MAUP.

Lepper has lent support to the college in the past, which has a rather dubious reputation politically.

The Anti Defamation League has been concerned about the place for some time:

‘MAUP is the main source of anti-Semitic agitation and propaganda in Ukraine. It organizes anti-Semitic meetings and conferences, regularly issues anti-Semitic statements and publishes two widely-distributed periodicals, Personnel and Personnel Plus, which frequently contain anti-Semitic articles.’

Other personalities to have received honorary degrees at MAUP include one-time member of the Klu Klux Klan, David Duke, who also teaches a course on history and international relations at the college (I’d love to be a student on that course!).

Andrzej Lepper denies being an anti-Semite and claims that the accusations are part of the liberal media agenda in Poland, which is against his appointment into the government.

This blog has pointed out Lepper’s dubious, far-right connections before.

Whether he is, or is not, an anti-Semite doesn’t really matter. More important is that he is perceived to be one, even by fellow anti-Semites.

On the UK skinhead forum, about which I reported on in the previous post, one meat head greeted the news that Lepper was now in the Polish cabinet with glee.

Good News, Lepper, the Polish anti-Semitic populist similar to Zhirinovsky in Russia, has just today become a central figure in Poland's new coalition government.
Lepper's ''Self Defense Party'' has today been given three ministerial cabinet posts. The jews are furious.’

Lepper is right about the Polish media being out to get him. In fact, he doesn’t have many friends outside of his own party...and a few racists in the United Kingdom.

More?
Human rights group concerned about 'extremist' parties in Poland's new coalition, Kyiv Times, May 2
Foreign Minister resigns, Turkish Weekly, April 29

Long laughed at by liberals as just a bunch of anti-Semitic nutters, the group of ultra-catholic nationalists at Radio Maryja have now angered the Vatican. Shame then that the Polish government seems to regard Maryja as its own private news agency.

NCTimes.com reports:

A committee of Polish journalists has condemned a broadcast by an ultra-Roman Catholic radio station for making "very nasty, anti-Semitic" remarks accusing Jews of making a business of Holocaust reparation payments.

The Media Ethics Council, a non-governmental watchdog, on April 4 lambasted remarks made by Stanislaw Michalkiewicz, a commentator for the Catholic station Radio Maryja, who on March 27 condemned international Jewish groups.

Michalkiewicz accused Jews of "trying to force our government to pay extortion money disguised as 'compensation payments"' for property lost during and after World War II, according to a report in the daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

He referred to such restitution attempts by Jewish groups as the "Holocaust business," the newspaper reported.

Of course, there is nothing new in anti-Semites claiming that there is a Holocaust ‘industry’ cooked up by Jews to continue their quest for world domination (snigger!).

But last week, a letter was sent from the Vatican through its nuncio in Poland asking Polish Church authorities to intervene in the activity of Radio Maryja. The Vatican was blunt: stop getting involved in politics.

Radio Maryja was set up in 1991 by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk. It immediately attracted a large following among the extremely alienated part of the Polish population, which fears secular capitalism as much as it hated atheist communism.

The station – listened to by maybe 1.2 million - has grown into a small media empire, which now boasts its own television station, TV Trwam and a daily newspaper, Nasz Dziennik.

The station sees a conspiracy (but of course) between ex-communists and Jews. It also has a problem with gays, foreigners in general and secularism in particular.

The Polish Catholic Church and the Vatican seemed to tolerate this sort of stuff for over a decade. What has changed recently is that the present Polish government, the social conservative Law and Justice, has been giving the station unique and exclusive coverage of news conferences, and the radio’s studios in Torun, northern Poland, are regularly ‘blessed’ by none other than Prime Minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, who gives lengthy interviews to the ‘faithful’.

This has meant that Radio Maryja and the government are now seen to be joined at the hip.

Mainstream media here, which has long complained that Radio Maryja has been given preferential treatment when applying for broadcasting licenses, etc, are now hostile to the government's programme. This in turn makes the government rely more and more on positive coverage from Radio Maryja. and so the self-fulfilling prophecy goes on.

Can we expect the government to act on the Vatican's behalf and crack down on its only friend in the media?

Is the Pope a Buddhist?

Update - 13 April: Radio Maryja apologies for offense over antiSemitic remarks but doesn't sound very convincing.

Polish reactionaries and EU liberals have more in common than they think.

It’s becoming a bit of a habit. Local authorities in Poland, this time in the mid-west city of Poznan, have banned a Gay Pride march, scheduled to take place this Saturday. The reason the local council give for denying people the right to free assembly and expression is that the march would be a, ‘serious danger to social order and property.’

A similar excuse was given by the then mayor of Warsaw, and now president of Poland, Lech Kaczynski, when he banned (for the second year running) a similar parade through the centre of the capital this summer.

Of course, if you asked these politicians what the real reason is for such authoritarian behaviour they would tell you that they just find homosexuality offensive and ungodly, and don’t want to see such a parade in their city.

Polish human rights campaigners have argued that banning gay pride marches goes against the Polish Constitution. The European Union has warned President Kaczynski that he is going against human rights agreements signed by Poland.

Meanwhile, down at the EU parliament…

An anti-abortion exhibition entitled Life and Children in Europe ended in fisty-cuffs yesterday. Sponsored by MEPs from the League of Polish Families (LPR), the exhibition showed photos of unborn foetuses, and children in WWII concentration camps.

Enraged by the connection between terminations and Nazis, liberals and social democrats in the parliament, where the exhibition was being displayed, tried to take down the photographs. Security guards intervened when LPR members tried to keep the photos just where they were, and a fight broke out.

But the liberals succeeded in getting the offending material taken down.

Leader of LPR in the EU parliament, Maciej Giertych, said that he “never thought that the exhibit would be censored. I thought parliament was the place where controversial opinions were expressed.”

And, of course, he’s right. Just because someone doesn’t like opinions being expressed, or finds them offensive – like I do - is no reason to ban those opinions.

And that includes the actions of bigots in the local council in Poznan. Just because they find homosexuality offensive is no reason to ban a Gay Pride march.

Both the League of Polish Families and the liberals in Strasburg seem to agree that freedom of speech and expression is only permissible if that speech is not offensive to anybody.

But freedom of speech is not divisible. Both gays and anti-abortion activists have the right to press their case. And if people don’t like that case then they should be free to oppose it. Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is becoming increasingly unfashionable, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum.

If I was the security guard at the EU parliament I would have left the MEPs to it. These days, bigots and 'liberals' deserve each other.

It’s not been a good week for European liberty.

A new book by award winning American journalist, Mark Kurlansky, 1968: the year that rocked the world, unravels the connections between the revolutionary events of that year in Paris, Prague, America and Poland.

Like 1945 or 1989, 1968 is one of those years that are seen as pivotal to the history of the 20th century.

We were only one year away from the first human being walking on the moon. It was a time of civil rights and anti-war protests, of new and inventive music and sub-cultures, of scientific and social experiment. A very different time, then, from the one we live in today, characterized as it is by aversion to risk and a fear of the new.

The motor of this movement for social change were young, mostly middle class sons and daughters of the old ruling elites. It was a time when students were concentrating more of sit-ins and love-ins than they were on their studies. It was a time of hallucinogenic drugs, which my granny used to tell me made one want to jump from the top of multi-story car parks in the mistaken impression that one was an albatross.

Most people, except perhaps for the most historically challenged, will have heard of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Abie Hoffman in the US; or in France, Henri Comte and Jean Paul Satire; or in the Czechoslovak capital, the students and Alexander Dubcek. All over the world, ruling elites had lost their legitimacy and were under pressure.

But few in the West have heard of the names associated with events in Poland of that year: Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik…

Radical theatre
In Warsaw, it all started in March with an evening at the theatre. The Polish National Theatre decided to stage a new radical interpretation of Dziady. – which is sometimes translated in English as Forefathers’ Eve – by Poland’s most celebrated poet, Adam Mickiewicz. The play, written in the early nineteenth century, tells the story of Polish political prisoners under czarist Russia. As well as a being a political play it is also interpreted by theatre and literary critics as being a mystical, religious piece of work.

The communists had no problem with the political content, but they weren’t too keen on all the religious stuff. They saw this version of the play as being subtly subversive, and with a stupidity characteristic of the regime, decided that they were going to ban it.

On the last night of the performance, about 300 students from Warsaw University picketed outside the theatre and then marched through the center of town in protest. They were met by police and so-called workers-militia (who were basically a bunch of thugs) who beat them up and the police arrested anyone trying to get away from them.

The next day thousands of students joined in the demonstrations on the university campus, refused to go to classes, called for more freedom of expression and held sit-ins outside the Dean’s office, just as they had seen American students do on television. Before long, students from other universities had joined the struggle. All were met by the workers militias, and were beaten and arrested.

These protests had a similar character to those in Paris, or New York; mostly middle class kids from good homes, connected to parents who were part of the establishment. Another thing that the leaders of these protests had in common was that many of them were Jewish.

But in Poland, as ever, there was an extra twist.

Scapegoats
The communist party in the late sixties was divided into two factions: those who had fled Poland as the Nazis invaded, or lived in areas in the east of the country grabbed by Stalin in 1939. Many of these people were taken to the gulags, only to team up with the Soviet army as a way of freeing themselves from Stalin’s grip. Many of these, not surprisingly, were Jews. The other group, more nationalist in their outlook – the self-styled Patriots – came from communist cells within the underground movement, who fought the Nazis from within Poland.

Many of the ‘Patriots’ were anti-Semites and wanted to get rid of Jews from the party, who they accused of being ‘Zionists’. Remember, 1968 came just a year after the Israeli-Arab conflict, in which Moscow sided with the Arab states.

Jews in Poland had become communism’s scapegoats. And with many sons and daughters of Jewish members of the party taking part in the student protests, the opportunity for an anti-Jewish purge was just too tempting to be turned down.

The ‘Patriots’ organized counter-demonstrations, leading chants such as: “Zionists go back to Zion.” Unfortunately, the mob that the party had assembled were simple folk who had never even heard of Zionism. In fact, they thought that the militias were shouting, “Siamists go back to Siam”, and chanted along with gusto.

Yul Brynner would have been proud of them.

Meanwhile, the communist regime had given most of Poland’s remaining Jews one-way tickets to the West, stripping them of their passports.

Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik and many of the other protest leaders were arrested again and thrown in jail. The demonstrations gradually ran our of steam, and a potentially dangerous ‘counter-revolutionary’ movement was snuffed out.

One of the failures of the demos in Poland, as elsewhere, was that the intellectuals failed to make connections with the workers. It was only when, in the late 1970’s, intellectuals such as Kuron connected up with workers such as Lech Welasa that the opposition movement really gained steam. And that is why the name of Solidarity was chosen for the first independent trade union in the communist bloc: it was a solidarity between workers and intellectuals – two parts of Polish society that were finally, and mutually, dependant on each other.

In the book, 1968, the year that rocked the world, American journalist, Mark Kurlansky tells this story well, and captures the spirit of adventure that was so characteristic among university students all over the world back in 1968.

Fast forward to today and look at the university students. Do you see that same idealistic, adventurist spirit? If you do, then maybe you have been ingesting some of those chemicals that make you want to jump off the roof of multi-story car parks.

Read on:

See review of 1968: the year that rocked the world

This article originally was published on the Radio Polonia web site