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Poland seeks apology for Obama Holocaust comments
U.S. President Barack Obama pauses during remarks at the Memorial Day observance at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, May 28, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
WARSAW |
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland has demanded an apology from Washington after President Barack Obama spoke of a "Polish death camp" while announcing an award to a resistance fighter for alerting the world to the Nazi Holocaust, largely perpetrated on Polish soil.
The matter is a delicate one in Poland, which suffered a brutal Nazi occupation during World War Two and has long campaigned against suggestions it bore any responsibility for the slaughter of some 6 million European Jews.
"The White House will apologize for the outrageous mistake," Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on his Twitter account on Tuesday. "It's a pity that ignorance and incompetence overshadowed such a momentous ceremony."
On Wednesday, Sikorski said he did not suspect Obama of ill will and blamed the "grave mistake" on the White House's speech writers and press service.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said: "The president misspoke - he was referring to Nazi death camps in Poland. We regret this misstatement, which should not detract from the clear intention to honor Mr. Karski and those brave citizens who stood on the side of human dignity in the face of tyranny."
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, speaking after the issue filled Polish media on Wednesday, said: "When somebody says 'Polish death camps' it is as if there were no Nazis, no German responsibility, no Hitler."
He urged Washington to make up for the mistake by actively supporting Warsaw's drive against such rhetoric.
The posthumous award for Jan Karski was to honor him for bringing some of the first eyewitness testimony of the Holocaust to the outside world, after he was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Nazi camp.
Karski travelled to London, Washington and elsewhere urging action to prevent the mass extermination of Jews.
Israel's Yad Vashem institute has awarded Karski the Righteous Among the Nations title for his efforts to aid Jews, and to more than 6,300 other Poles, more than any other nationality, despite the fact that Poland's history is littered with anti-Semitism.
Some 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland before 1939. Most perished during World War Two, among nearly 6 million Polish deaths in total.
A museum dedicated to the history of Polish Jews is now under construction in the capital Warsaw.
"We should use this huge gaffe to make sure nobody, nowhere in the world, ever says that again," said Lech Walesa, Poland's sole Nobel Peace Prize winner.
(Editing by Janet Lawrence)
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At the time the Soviets were allies and the Nazis the defeated enemies, so these manipulations were looked at differently. It risks distorting history though, which will inevitably mean it is not possible to learn from past mistakes.
Building on a false foundation will not produce good results.
you need to quantify your facts, or use a comparison
let’s see
“One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.”
–Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, Feb. 27, 1994
“Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”
– Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, as reported on Kol Yisrael radio.
In 1923, radical Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky– spiritual father of not only of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin but of Brooklyn Rabbi Meir Kahane– wrote that the “sole way” for Jews to deal with Arabs in Palestine was through “total avoidance of all attempts to arrive at a settlement”-which Jabotinsky euphemistically termed the “iron wall” approach. Not coincidentally, a picture of Jabotinsky graces Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s desk. Source: The Village Voice, “Death Wish in the Holy Land,” Dec. 12, 2001
During a sermon preceding the 2001 Passover holiday, the influential Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef exclaimed: “May the Holy Name visit retribution on the Arab heads, and cause their seed to be lost, and annihilate them.” He added: “It is forbidden to have pity on them. We must give them missiles with relish, annihilate them. Evil ones, damnable ones.” Source: Ha’aretz April 12, 2001
“We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel…Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.”-Rafael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, quoted in Yediot Ahronot, April 13, 1983, and The New York Times, April 14, 1983.
“[The Palestinians] are beasts walking on two legs.”-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the ‘Beasts,”‘ New Statesman, June 25,1982.
“We must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinian refugees] never do return.”-David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, July 18, 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s “Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet,” Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”-Israel Koenig, “The Koenig Memorandum.”
“We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters.”-Uri Lubrani, Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs. Source: “The Arabs in Israel” by Sabri Jiryas.
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