Author Topic: Polish FM: Obama's "Death Camps" statement reflects incompetence and ignorance  (Read 3725 times)

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President Obama Shuns Lech Walesa
National Review ^ | June 1, 2012 | Rory Cooper
Posted on June 1, 2012 5:29:25 AM EDT by Innovative

According to the Wall Street Journal, Polish officials requested that Walesa accept the Medal of Freedom on behalf of Jan Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who was being honored posthumously this week. The request makes sense. Walesa and Karski shared a burning desire to rid Poland of tyrannical subjugation. But President Obama said no.

Administration officials told the Journal that Walesa is too "political." A man who was arrested by Soviet officials for dissenting against the government for being "political" is being shunned by the United States of America for the same reason 30 years later.

Meanwhile, one of the recipients of the Medal was Dolores Huerta, the honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. So socialist politics are acceptable, but not the politics of a man who stood up and fought socialism.

(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...







Speechless over the acts of this communist pofs

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Obama: I Regret Using 'Polish Death Camp' Phrase


By VANESSA GERA 06/01/12 09:07 AM ET




WARSAW, Poland — President Barack Obama has written a letter to the Polish president expressing "regret" for an inadvertent verbal gaffe that caused a storm of controversy in Poland this week.

Obama on Tuesday used the expression "a Polish death camp" while honoring a Polish World War II resistance hero rather than wording that would have made clear that he meant a death camp that Nazi Germany operated on Polish soil during its wartime occupation of Poland.

Warsaw has been waging a campaign for years against phrases such as "Polish death camps" or "Polish concentration camps" to refer to Auschwitz, Treblinka and other German killing sites. The language deeply offends Polish sensitivities because Poles not only had no role in running the camps, but were considered racially inferior by the Germans and were themselves murdered in them in huge numbers.

"In referring to `a Polish death camp' rather than `a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland,' I inadvertently used a phrase that has caused many Poles anguish over the years and that Poland has rightly campaigned to eliminate from public discourse around the world," Obama wrote. "I regret the error and agree that this moment is an opportunity to ensure that this and future generations know the truth."

"The events of the past few days and the U.S. president's reply may, in my opinion, mark a very important moment in the struggle for historical truth," Komorowski told reporters.

Obama made the verbal slip-up while posthumously awarding the Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who struggled to tell the outside world about the murder of Jews in his country. He smuggled himself into the Warsaw Ghetto and a death camp, witnessing the atrocities committed against the Jews firsthand. He then took that information to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other Allied leaders, imploring the world to act.

Karski later became a professor at Georgetown University and died in 2000.

For days, Obama's words have dominated the news in Poland. Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the entire Polish nation felt affected.

"We always react in the same way when ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions lead to such a distortion of history, so painful for us here in Poland, in a country which suffered like no other in Europe during World War II," Tusk said Wednesday.

Komorowski's reaction was more muted. He said Wednesday that he knew Obama's words did not reflect any bad intensions but that the words were nonetheless "unjust and painful." He wrote that day to Obama, and Obama's letter came in reply to that.

In his response Obama noted that "the Polish people suffered terribly under the brutal Nazi occupation during World War II."

"In pursuit of their goals of destroying the Polish nation and Polish culture and exterminating European Jewry, the Nazis killed some six million Polish citizens, including three million Polish Jews during the Holocaust," Obama wrote. "The bravery of Poles in the underground resistance is one of history's great stories of heroism and courage."

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Obama’s ‘Polish Death Camp’ Comment ‘Infuriates’ Polish Americans
 CNS News ^ | May 31, 2012 | Pete Winn

Posted on Friday, June 01, 2012 10:29:14 AM by KeyLargo

Obama’s ‘Polish Death Camp’ Comment ‘Infuriates’ Polish Americans

By Pete Winn May 31, 2012

(CNSNews.com) – President Obama not only angered the people of Poland with a comment he made on Tuesday referring to “Polish death camps” -- he also “infuriated” Polish Americans, many of whom live in Obama’s home town of Chicago.

The Polish-American Congress, based in Chicago, has sent a letter to Obama saying as much and demanding an apology.

“Our community in the United States and abroad was deeply hurt by your reference to the “Polish death camps,” Polish-American Congress President Frank J. Spula wrote.

“This is an egregiously and historically incorrect attribution of responsibility for the death camps installed and maintained by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, camps in which millions of Poles, both Jewish and Christian, perished.”

Obama touched off the firestorm of protest on Tuesday during ceremonies at the White House where he bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously on Jan Karski


(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...