© REUTERS/Kacper PempelMateusz Morawiecki speaks at the former Nazi German extermination camp Auschwitz II-Birkenau
Amid a simmering political row between Warsaw and Tel Aviv, Mateusz Morawiecki told Haaretz that Poland "will no longer give in to a pressure to accept lies, misleading phrases, let alone racist insults."
Morawiecki was apparently directing the comment at Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who upped the ante last week by saying that every Pole "suckled anti-Semitism with his mother's milk."
The Polish PM said the controversial quote "seemed totally unbelievable," and that such words "could be used by a radical extremist, but not by a Foreign Minister." He added that "some politicians want to make headlines" ahead of the elections in Israel.
Morawiecki said that "tens of thousands of Poles, perhaps even more, were helping their Jewish brethren," and that Poland was the only German-occupied country "in which a person helping Jews faced death penalty at the hands of the Germans."
On the back of last week's exchange, Warsaw pulled out of a summit of Eastern European countries in Jerusalem, with Junior Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski demanding that Israel "reject this declaration... and apologize." The Israeli ambassador to Poland was summoned to the Foreign Ministry twice in a week.
Poland has been bombarded with accusations of stirring up anti-Semitic sentiment since it passed its controversial Holocaust law last year. The legislation, which prohibits implicating the Polish government in the historical crimes of the Nazi regime, sparked outrage in Israel, with senior official claiming that Poles collaborated with the Germans en masse.
Reader Comments
The Poles are being pushed and prodded like the rest of us cattle here in PUrgatory... their resolve or choice is being tested... are they aware of what joining the American empire and its Axis of Evil really means? It means bowing down to these Satanists... Jewish, Aryan, whatever... same in WW2..... some join others resist.
But the fairy tale that is the Book of Esther is written by a Jew asserting that the Persians were planning officially to exterminate all the Jews of a great empire, for a totally trivial reason. The theme is universal in Judaism. Everyone hates the Jews so the Jews must stick together and hate everyone. The religion of hate, whose representative, Netanyahu, accuses the Poles of hate.
According to the Code of Maimonides, Jews have an obligation to kill Christians. According to the Talmud Jesus of Nazareth is eternally boiling in a vat of excrement in Hell. But Christian religious literature nowhere expresses hatred of Jews.
I wonder why the PM didn't just announce that all Holocaust denial laws were rescinded, offer the Auschwitz bricks free, grow grass on the site and rent it for sheep grazing.