Polish FM: Obama's "Death Camps" statement reflects incompetence and ignorance

[Soul Crusher]

Polish Premier Demands U.S. Response to Obama Death Camp Remark
By Piotr Skolimowski - May 30, 2012 7:00 AM ET

..
Poland demanded a “strong and clear response” from the U.S. after President Barack Obama’s mention of a “Polish death camp” while honoring a Pole who told the world about the Holocaust.

“We can’t accept such words in Poland, even if they are spoken by a leader of an allied country,” Prime Minister Donald Tusk told journalists in Warsaw today. “Saying Polish concentration camps is as if there was no German responsibility, no Hitler.”

Since, 2004 Poland has sought clarifications from several news outlets for the use of a phrase “Polish concentration camps” that were run by the Nazis during the country’s occupation in the World War II, according to the Foreign Ministry’s website. The government has convinced publications including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle to stop using the phrase.

The U.S. administration regrets “this misstatement,” the Wall Street Journal’s website cited Tommy Vietor, the National Security Council spokesman, as saying. The text of Obama’s remarks on the White House website hasn’t been corrected as of today.

“The White House will apologize for this outrageous mistake,” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on his Twitter Inc. account. “It’s a shame that such a momentous ceremony has been overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence.”

Obama posthumously awarded Jan Karski the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, at a ceremony in Washington yesterday, saying the Polish officer “illuminated one of the darkest chapters of history” as he “repeatedly crossed enemy line to document the face of genocide, and courageously voiced tragic truths all the way to President Roosevelt.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Piotr Skolimowski in Warsaw at pskolimowski@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Balazs Penz at bpenz@bloomberg.net

[Irongrip400]

What a fucking baby. There must be something lost in translation here. When I hear polish death camps , I think of the ss run death camps located in Poland.  Not a camp run by poles. I don't get this guy. I'm not an Obama fan, but the dude doesn't owe an apology and wasn't in the wrong.

[Soul Crusher]

What a fucking baby. There must be something lost in translation here. When I hear polish death camps , I think of the ss run death camps located in Poland.  Not a camp run by poles. I don't get this guy. I'm not an Obama fan, but the dude doesn't owe an apology and wasn't in the wrong.

Should have said "Nazi death camps in Poland" 

[tu_holmes]

I think it goes to show the kind of pussy ass people that are hanging out in Europe these days.

Whiny bitches... Everyone knew what he meant.

[Irongrip400]

And by baby, I was referring to the Polish dude.  I get what he means, but come on, nobody thinks the country who was the first to get militarily invaded, and to jump off WW2, is responsible for the holocaust.  Seriously, we complain about being PC here in America, and this pussy takes the cake.  It's like the PC terms we have here today, and I roll my eyes when I hear them.

[240 is Back]

I think it goes to show the kind of pussy ass people that are hanging out in Europe these days.

Whiny bitches... Everyone knew what he meant.

yeah, everyone knew what he meant.  Nobody in their right mind really believes Obama was accusing the Polish of running such terrible places.


This just just another example of VITCTIMHOOD of those who dislike obama. 

yall get mad when he uses a telepromoter, since every word a president says can end up in a history book.
yall get mad when he says "polish death camps" instead of "nazi death camps located in poland".

Only someone begging to be offended would be offended here.

[Soul Crusher]

yeah, everyone knew what he meant.  Nobody in their right mind really believes Obama was accusing the Polish of running such terrible places.


This just just another example of VITCTIMHOOD of those who dislike obama. 

yall get mad when he uses a telepromoter, since every word a president says can end up in a history book.
yall get mad when he says "polish death camps" instead of "nazi death camps located in poland".

Only someone begging to be offended would be offended here.

 

[Soul Crusher]

It Wasn't a "Gaffe"
by David Frum May 30, 2012 8:59 AM EDT


President Obama just slapped in the face one of America's closest allies in Europe. I'm looking for comment in the American media, and I find … wire stories reporting a spokesman's apology for the president's "misstatement"?
 


The president intended to honor Jan Karski, a Polish-born U.S. citizen, who died in 2000. Karski was a hero of the Polish resistance, the courier who brought to the outside world the irrefutable proof of the Nazi extermination campaign against the Jews of Eastern Europe. But instead of honoring Karski, the president stumbled into the single most offensive thing he could possibly have said on this occasion:
 
Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.
 

Many of the Nazi death camps were located inside the territory that is now Poland, yes. But it was not Poland in 1942. Poland then was a conquered and enslaved territory. If we are to identify the killers by nationality—rather than by their Nazi ideology as would be most appropriate—then the camps were German, German, German: ordered into being by Germans, designed by Germans, fulfilling a German plan of murder. When they found local thugs to guard the victims and run the killing machinery, even those low-level wretches were very rarely Polish by language or self-conception: they were more typically Ukrainian, because many Ukrainians—with their own sufferings at the hands of Josef Stalin's Soviet regime fresh in mind—were willing to act as German allies in a war that was advertised as a war against the Bolshevism that had starved their fathers, mothers, and children to death in the early 1930s. But Poles? As a Polish friend of mine once bitterly put it, "The Germans despised us so much, they did not even want us as collaborators."
 

When one writes this way, one hears much about the Polish history of anti-semitism. Polish anti-semitism is of course a very real thing. But boycotts, insults, and street-fights are not genocide. And alongside Polish anti-semitism has to be set the other history, the history that explains why Jews migrated to Poland in such huge numbers during the Middle Ages, and stayed there for so long. When my own grandfather emigrated from Poland to Canada in 1929, he was leaving a land where his ancestors had likely lived for at least 400 years, and very possibly 600.
 

There's a tragic bias in the Jewish remembrance of Poland. The Jews who suffered discrimination and poverty in the newly independent Poland of the 1920s, and who—like my grandfather—succeeded in emigrating have left descendants. We carry in our memories their stories of discrimination and harassment. But the much larger number of Jews who found conditions tolerable—the many who flourished in business, the professions, and the arts—the many who regarded Poland as their home and carried arms for her in war—those Jews stayed. They were murdered. And they left no descendants to remember their version of the story.
 

Few organizations have been more vocal against the "Polish death camp" slur than the Anti-Defamation League. Its president, Abe Foxman, was born in what was then Poland. His story exemplifies the complexities of the Polish-Jewish relationship. When Foxman's parents were deported to a ghetto, they entrusted him to his nanny. She raised him—not only saving his life, but risking her own, for the Nazis killed Poles who sheltered Jews. But she interpreted "raising" to mean raising him as a Catholic, and after the war—which Foxman's parents amazingly survived—she refused to give him up until after some nasty custody battles. (By then, the border had shifted, which is why many biographies of Foxman describe him as born in the Soviet Union.)
 

What North American Jews who originate in Poland need to learn from Foxman and those who have stories like his to tell is that Poland was not only a place where Jews were murdered, but also a place where Jews lived—and at every level of society. The Foxmans had a nanny! Other Polish Jews owned factories, shops, and country houses. There were Jewish chaplains in the Polish Army. (The head chaplain was murdered by the Soviets in the Katyn Forest, alongside his brother officers.) That story needs to be rediscovered too, and since 1989, it has been.


I took my family on a long visit to Poland two summers ago. And yes, we toured the camps. We also stayed in a beautiful hotel in the historic center of Krakow, whose lobby was filled every day with the sounds of Hebrew: visitors from Israel who had come not only to see the sites of Auschwitz and Belzec, but also to see the Schindler museum in Oskar Schindler's one-time factory, the preserved Jewish quarter, and the rebuilt grand synagogue. The state of Israel has had few better allies in Europe than democratic Poland. That's part of the story too.
 
The honor to Jan Karski was intended to memorialize all this. Instead, an ignorant error by somebody who could not be troubled to understand the story he or she was telling has offended Poles and thrown discredit on Karski's own memory. It's not a big story in the United States, but it won't soon be forgotten in Poland.
 

You may say the Poles are over-sensitive. One might as well say that Americans are under-sensitive. The U.S. has had such a comparatively happy history that it's hard to think of a domestic analogy that would capture what Poles feel when the worst crimes of their worst oppressors are attributed—not to the authors—but to them. "The Hawaiian sneak attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor" is a pathetically inadequate approximation, but at least it gets the grammar of the insult. "The Belgian massacre of U.S. prisoners at Malmedy"? No, still not it. Aside from being morally inadequate, such analogies also miss the moral intensity of World War II for Poles. Their war did not end until 1989: they continue to live more intimately with the war's legacy even now, more than almost any other European nation. The medal to Karski was to be part of the process of laying painful memories to rest. It was intended too to strengthen the US-Polish relations that the Obama administration has frayed in pursuit of its "reset" with Russia. Instead, this administration bungled everything: past, present, and future.
 
Shame.

[OzmO]

dumb

[Soul Crusher]

dumb

True - Obama is the most historically illiterate and incompetent joke ever to hold office.   

[OzmO]

True - Obama is the most historically illiterate and incompetent joke ever to hold office.   

It's dumb on both sides.  Fucking get over it everyone. 

[Soul Crusher]

It's dumb on both sides.  Fucking get over it everyone. 

Can't tell the Pols how to feel.  They feel offended by Obama's demonstrated ignorance and incompetence, so be it. 

[OzmO]

Can't tell the Pols how to feel.  They feel offended by Obama's demonstrated ignorance and incompetence, so be it. 

Yeah we can we do it all the time.  The only difference here is that for you it OB. 

[Soul Crusher]

President Obama misspoke on 'Polish death camp' during Medal of Freedom ceremony: White House
 
Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called it a matter of 'ignorance and incompetence'
Comments (120)
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Tuesday, May 29, 2012, 10:38 PM.

Charles Dharapak/AP
 

President Obama awards the Medal of Freedom to former Polish Foreign Minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld, who is accepting for Jan Karski, a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II, during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, May 29.
 


WASHINGTON — The White House said President Barack Obama misspoke on Tuesday when he referred to a "Polish death camp" while honoring a Polish war hero.

 The president's remark had drawn immediate complaints from Poles who said Obama should have called it a "German death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland," to distinguish the perpetrators from the location. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called it a matter of "ignorance and incompetence."

 Obama made the comment while awarding the Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. Karski died in 2000.

 During an East Room ceremony honoring 13 Medal of Freedom recipients, Obama said that Karski "served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action."

 Sikorski tweeted that the White House would apologize for "this outrageous error" and that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk would address the matter on Wednesday.

 "It's a pity that such a dignified ceremony was overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence."

Alex Storozynski, president of the Kosciuszko Foundation, said Obama's comment "shocked the Poles present at the White House and those watching on C-SPAN. ... Karski would have cringed if he heard this."

 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."

 Anxious to quell the controversy, the White House also noted that the president had visited the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial while in Poland and that he has repeatedly discussed the bravery of Poles during World War II.

 The Polish Embassy in Washington, on its website, has a "how-to guide" on concentration camps that states that references to Polish death camps are "factually incorrect slurs" that should be corrected.

 The Associated Press Stylebook states that when referring to "World War II camps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, do not use phrases like Polish death camps that confuse the location and the perpetrators. Use instead, for example, death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland."


Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/president-obama-misspoke-polish-death-camp-medal-freedom-ceremony-white-house-article-1.1086465#ixzz1wO7KU0lE





Maybe obama was high on drugs? 

[Soul Crusher]

"Polish death camp" controversy


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


 Jump to: navigation, search


This article is about the controversy over the use of the term. For actual camps, see German camps in occupied Poland during World War II.
 




Auschwitz camp badge with the letter "P", required wear for Polish inmates.




Durning WWII the nazi concentration camps were located in many European countries: Poland, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Slovakia, Belarus, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Italia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Macedonia




Auschwitz, Nazi German death camp built in a part of pre-war Poland that was annexed by Nazi Germany.




"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", note of Republic of Poland addressed to United Nations, 1942
Polish death camp and Polish concentration camp are terms that occasionally appear in international media in reference to Nazi German concentration camps built and run by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust in the General Government and other parts of occupied Poland. Usage of the term has been condemned as insulting by the Polish foreign minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld in 2005, who also alleged that it—intentionally or unintentionally—shifted the responsibility for the construction or operation of the camps from the German to the Polish people.
 
The use of terms explicitly mentioning "Poland" or "Polish" has been monitored and discouraged by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Polonia organizations around the world as well as by all Polish governments since 1989.
 




Contents
  [hide]  1 Historical context
 2 Use and reactions
 3 See also
 4 References
 5 External links
 

[edit] Historical context
 
Main articles: List of Nazi concentration camps, German camps in occupied Poland during World War II, The Holocaust in Poland, and Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)
 





Poland was occupied and divided between Germany and the USSR in 1939
 






Occupied Poland, 1939-1941
 






Occupied Poland, 1944
 

After the German Invasion of Poland, unlike in most European countries occupied by Nazi Germany — where the Germans sought and found true collaborators among the locals — in occupied Poland there was no official collaboration either at the political or at the economic level.[1][2] Poland never officially surrendered to the Germans.[3] Polish government, administration and army was able to partially evacuate to France and United Kingdom to continue struggle against Nazi Germany abroad, with a new Polish Army quickly rebuilt.[4] The Polish government in exile was represented on the occupied territories through the extensive structure of the Polish Underground State,[5] and its military arm, Armia Krajowa, formed the major part of the Polish resistance movement in World War II, which was actively engaged in fighting the German occupiers and was the largest resistance movement in all of occupied Europe.[6]
 
Part of former territory of the Second Polish Republic was annexed by the Third Reich and on the second part was used to create General Government with complete German administration lead by General-Governor Hans Frank. The General Government had no international recognition. The territories it administered were never either in whole or part intended as any future Polish state within a German-dominated Europe. According to the Nazi government the Polish state had effectively ceased to exist, in spite of the existence of a Polish government-in-exile.[7] Its character could be compared to a type of colonial state, combined with many characteristics of a police state. It cannot be seen as a Polish puppet government, as there were no Polish representatives on any administration level.[citation needed]
 
The most popular explanation[citation needed] for the use of the phrase "Polish death camp" is that German Nazi concentration camps were built in Poland; however, only few of them were actually located in Polish territory. Most German Nazi concentration camps were located in the territory of Nazi Germany. A complete list, drawn up in 1967 by the German Ministry of Justice, names about 1,200 camps and subcamps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany.[8] During WWII, Nazi concentration camps were also located in many European countries such Germany, Austria, Poland, Bohemia, Slovakia, Belarus, France, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Italia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Norway, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Macedonia. Unlike with "Polish death camps", the media did not attach geographical context in reference to camps located in other countries (for example "French concentration camps" or "Norwegian concentration camps").[citation needed]
 
[edit] Use and reactions
 
Non-Polish media and notable figures have been known to make references to the German-run extermination program in Nazi-occupied Poland such as the "Polish death/concentration/extermination camp", "Polish Ghetto", "Polish Holocaust", "Nazi Poland", and so on.[9]
 
Opponents of these terms argue that they are inaccurate, as they may imply that the camps—located in Nazi-occupied Poland—might have been a responsibility of the Poles (i.e. Polish), when in fact they were designed, constructed and run by Nazi Germany with no collaboration from Poland or Poles; and, used to exterminate millions of Poles alongside Polish Jews, including Jews transported by the Nazis from across Europe.[10][11]
 
The use of terms explicitly mentioning "Poland" or "Polish" has been monitored and discouraged by the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Polonia organizations around the world as well as by all Polish governments since 1989. The Ministry catalogs the use of the term and is involved in the actions asking for correction and apology.[12] Polish Foreign Minister Adam Daniel Rotfeld in 2005 suggested that there are instances of "bad will, saying that under the pretext that “it’s only a geographic reference”, attempts are made to distort history and conceal the truth."[13][14] Adding adjective "Polish" when referring to concentration camps or ghetto`s located in occupied Poland, or to the world Holocaust in general, can suggest, often unintentionally and always counter factually, that the atrocities in question were perpetrated by Poles, or that Poles were active helpers of the Nazi rule in Poland during World War II.[13][14]
 
In 2008, due to the continued usage of the term term Polish in regards to atrocities committed and camps built and operated by the German state under Nazi leadership, the chairman of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) issued a letter to local administrations with a call to add German before Nazi in all monuments and tables that commemorate the victims of Nazi Germany.[15] As stated by the IPN official, while in Poland 'Nazi' is definitely connected to 'German' this is not the case everywhere in the world, and the change will help avoid any misinterpretation that the responsibility for the crimes against humanity committed in war-torn Poland wasn't specifically German.[15] At the time several places of martyrology underwent renovations, and the new plaques were to make clear that the nationality of the people responsible for atrocities was not only German, but also Soviet Russian.[15]
 
The American Jewish Committee has also rejected the usage, stating that:
 

Auschwitz-Birkenau and the other death camps, including Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka, were conceived, built and operated by Nazi Germany and its allies. The camps were located in German-occupied Poland, the European country with by far the largest Jewish population, but they were most emphatically not "Polish camps". This is not a mere semantic matter. Historical integrity and accuracy hang in the balance.[16]
 
The government of Israel has also deprecated the usage of this phrase.[17]
 
Concerns about the use of the term Polish death camp led the Polish government to request that UNESCO change the official name of Auschwitz from "Auschwitz Concentration Camp" to "former Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau" in order to make clearer that the concentration camp was built and operated by Nazi Germany. [18][19][20][21][22] On 28 June 2007 at its meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand, the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO changed the name of the camp to "Auschwitz Birkenau. German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)."[23][24] Previously, some media, including Der Spiegel in Germany, had called the camp "Polish".[25] The New York Times regularly refers to Auschwitz as Polish rather than German.[26]
 
An example of the controversy occurred when an April 30, 2004 CTV News report made reference to "the Polish camp in Treblinka". The Polish embassy in Canada lodged a complaint with CTV. Robert Hurst of CTV, however, argued that the term "Polish" was used throughout North America in a geographical sense, and declined to issue a correction.[27] The Polish Ambassador to Ottawa then complained to the National Specialty Services Panel of the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. The Council did not accept Hurst's argument and ruled that the word "'Polish'—similarly to such adjectives as 'English', 'French' and 'German'—had connotations that clearly extended beyond geographic context. Its use with reference to Nazi extermination camps was misleading and improper".[28]
 
Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita has criticized international media outlets, including Haaretz from Israel, as "holocaust deniers" over usage of the term. However, all foreign media articles so criticized by Rzeczpospolita (as of November 2008) make clear that the perpetrators were German, and none claim Poles built the camps.[29]
 
The incorrect phrase Polish concentration camps is used in school textbooks outside Poland to refer to the Nazi German concentration camps on occupied Polish territory.[30]
 
On December 23, 2009, writing in The Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash said:
 

Watching a German television news report on the trial of John Demjanjuk a few weeks ago, I was amazed to hear the announcer describe him as a guard in "the Polish extermination camp Sobibor". What times are these, when one of the main German TV channels thinks it can describe Nazi camps as "Polish"? In my experience, the automatic equation of Poland with Catholicism, nationalism and antisemitism – and thence a slide to guilt by association with the Holocaust – is still widespread. This collective stereotyping does no justice to the historical record.[31]
 
In 2009 Zbigniew Osewski, grandson of a Stutthof prisoner, announced he was suing Axel Springer AG for calling Majdanek a 'former Polish concentration camp' in article from November 2008 published in German press "Die Welt".[32] In 2010, The Polish-American Kosciuszko Foundation launched a petition demanding that four major U.S. news organizations endorse the use of the term “German concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland”.[33][34]
 
"Globe and Mail" informed on September 23, 2011 about “Polish concentration camps”. Canadian MP Ted Opitz and Minister of Citizenship Jason Kenney supported Polish protests.[35]
 
In May 2012, U.S. president Barack Obama referred to "a Polish death camp" while posthumously awarding the Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski. After complaints from Poles, including Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski and Alex Storozynski, president of the Kosciuszko Foundation, a representative of the Obama administration said the president "misspoke. He was referring to Nazi death camps in Poland."[36]
 
[edit] See also
 Anti-Polish sentiment
 Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles
 Polenlager
 
[edit] References
 
1.^ Carla Tonini, The Polish underground press and the issue of collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, 1939-1944, European Review of History: Revue Europeenne d'Histoire, Volume 15, Issue 2 April 2008 , pages 193 - 205
 2.^ Klaus-Peter Friedrich. Collaboration in a "Land without a Quisling": Patterns of Cooperation with the Nazi German Occupation Regime in Poland during World War II. Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 4, (Winter, 2005), pp. 711-746.
 3.^ Adam Galamaga (21 May 2011). Great Britain and the Holocaust: Poland’s Role in Revealing the News. GRIN Verlag. p. 15. ISBN 978-3-640-92005-1. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
 4.^ Steven J. Zaloga; Richard Hook (21 January 1982). The Polish Army 1939-45. Osprey Publishing. p. 15. ISBN 978-0-85045-417-8. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
 5.^ Józef Garliński (April 1975). "The Polish Underground State 1939–1945". Journal of Contemporary History (Sage Publications, Ltd.) 10 (2): 219–259. DOI:10.1177/002200947501000202. JSTOR 260146.
 6.^ Norman Davies (28 February 2005). God's Playground: 1795 to the present. Columbia University Press. p. 344. ISBN 978-0-231-12819-3. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
 7.^ [Majer, Diemut (1981). Non-Germans under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe with Special Regard to Occupied Poland. Harold Bold Verlag, p.256
 8.^ List of concentration camps and their outposts (German)
 9.^ Polish Embassy in Spain protests against "Nazi Poland"[dead link]
 10.^ Piotrowski, Tadeusz (2005). "Project InPosterum: Poland WWII Casualties". Archived from the original on 18 April 2007. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
 11.^ Łuczak, Czesław (1994). "Szanse i trudności bilansu demograficznego Polski w latach 1939–1945". Dzieje Najnowsze (1994/2).
 12.^ Interwencje. MSZ
 13.^ a b Piotr Zychowicz, Interview with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland, Prof. Adam Daniel Rotfeld Rzeczpospolita daily, 25th January 2005.
 14.^ a b Government information on the Polish foreign policy presented by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Prof. Adam Daniel Rotfeld, at the session of the Sejm on 21st January 2005
 15.^ a b c (Polish) Akcja IPN: Mordowali "Niemcy", nie "naziści" (IPN initiative: "the Nazi Germans" committed Holocaust, not "the Nazis.") Fakty. Interia.pl, December 9, 2008.
 16.^ American Jewish Committee. (2005-01-30). "Statement on Poland and the Auschwitz Commemoration." Press release.
 17.^ Two nations fed with the same suffering
 18.^ Tran, Mark. The Guardian. (2007-06-27). "Poles claim victory in battle to rename Auschwitz."
 19.^ Auschwitz Might Get Name Change, The Jewish Journal, 27th April 2006.
 20.^ Yad Vashem for renaming Auschwitz, The Jerusalem Post, 12th May 2006.
 21.^ "UNESCO approves Poland's request to rename Auschwitz". The Europe Channel. 27 June 2007. Archived from the original on 8 July 2007.
 22.^ UN to rename Auschwitz death camp[dead link] Adelaide Now, 28th June 2007.
 23.^ UNESCO World Heritage Committee. (2007-06-28). World Heritage Committee approves Auschwitz name change". Press release. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
 24.^ Lilley, Ray. (2007-06-28). "UNESCO committee renames Auschwitz."[dead link], Associated Press, Guardian Unlimited.
 25.^ BBC News. (2006-03-31). "Poland seeks Auschwitz renaming."
 26.^ Frank Milewski (January 1, 2010). "Will the N.Y. Times ever get it straight". Canada Free Press.
 27.^ "Polskie czy niemieckie obozy zagłady?" (in Polish). Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau w Oświęcimiu. 23 July 2004.
 28.^ Canadian CTV Television censured
 29.^ Thomas Urban: "Populisten lassen googeln" (German)]
 30.^ Thenews.pl :: News from Poland (soft redirect) http://www.thenews.pl/international/artykul122671_poland-in-foreign-eyes.html
 31.^ "As at Auschwitz, the gates of hell are built and torn down by human hearts". The Guardian (London). 2009-12-23. Archived from the original on 26 December 2009. Retrieved 2010-04-18.
 32.^ Marcin Wawrzyńczak, "'Polish Camps' in Polish Court," Gazeta Wyborcza, 2009-08-14, at http://wyborcza.pl/1,76842,6928930,_Polish_Camps__in_Polish_Court.html
 33.^ Petition against "Polish concentration camps," Warsaw Business Journal, November 3, 2010, at http://www.wbj.pl/article-51918-petition-against-polish-concentration-camps.html?typ=ise
 34.^ Petition against "Polish death camps" The Kosciuszko Foundation
 35.^ Canadian MPs defend Poland over 'Polish concentration camp' slur
 36.^ "White House: Obama misspoke by referring to 'Polish death camp' while honoring Polish war hero". The Washington Post. May 29, 2012. Retrieved May 30, 2012.
 
[edit] External links
 Polish minister's speeches on the phenomenon
 Appeal against "Polish death camps" in Rzeczpospolita
 Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Against "Polish Camps"
 Article on Irena Sendler but discusses issue of calling German camps as Polish
 Article on history of Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland but discusses issue of calling German camps as Polish
 Article which discusses irresponsible accusation against Poland including reference to German death camps as "Polish" death camps.
 Punishment for “slandering Polish nation” unconstitutional
 (Polish) Report of the Polish ministry on foreign usage of "Polish death camp" argument

[Irongrip400]

You'd think poles would be more concerned with getting to stop telling polock jokes. Seriously though, give us the cliff notes 33, it's hard to scroll/read that shit on an iPhone.

[Soul Crusher]

You'd think poles would be more concerned with getting to stop telling polock jokes. Seriously though, give us the cliff notes 33, it's hard to scroll/read that shit on an iPhone.

Obama's morons who wrote his teleprompter speech made a historically offensive mistake that offended the pols. 

[Vince G, CSN MFT]

Obama's morons who wrote his teleprompter speech made a historically offensive mistake that offended the pols. 

Oh shut the fuck up......everyone knew what the fuck he meant....   Europeans are so fucking whiny about things....not only that a lot of Polish people signed over to the Nazi Party so fuck them and fuck you too.

[Soul Crusher]

Oh shut the fuck up......everyone knew what the fuck he meant....   Europeans are so fucking whiny about things....not only that a lot of Polish people signed over to the Nazi Party so fuck them and fuck you too.

[Vince G, CSN MFT]

Ha...you're the one crying over every thing that Obama does with your 10 billion posting

[Soul Crusher]

Ha...you're the one crying over every thing that Obama does with your 10 billion posting

Once he loses in November I will cease the post rampage.

[Soul Crusher]

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Poland: This Time, The President Should Apologize
Free Republic Exclusive! | May 30, 2012 | William Russell
Posted on May 30, 2012 9:51:41 PM EDT by Bill Russell

Picture a scenario, where members of your family helped a new neighbor establish a household. Just after helping that neighbor, your family experienced a long illness which caused your entire family to be quarantined and your home foreclosed upon. Then, after several years, you were finally able to return home, plant a garden, and rebuild your family’s life. Just as your household was beginning to prosper again, a heavily armed neighbor named John Wayne Gacy took over your front yard. Instead of using his own house and its crawl space to commit his horrific crimes, he used your yard and included some of your family among his victims. Then, as you risked life and limb to tell all of your neighbors about the terrible crimes Gacy was committing in your front yard, your other neighbor, named Ted Bundy, took over your back yard and your house. Mr Bundy then grabbed the best educated of your family, took them to his yard, and killed them.

While members of your family helped other, long established neighbors keep Mr Gacy out of their yards, Mr Gacy decided he wanted the rest of your house and some of Mr Bundy’s yard. Soon everyone was fighting with Mr Gacy. Finally, the new neighbor, whose family has grown rich and large, joined the fight against Mr Gacy. In doing so, the new neighbor made a deal with Mr Bundy to help win the fight. The new neighbor and Mr Bundy agreed that your back yard would belong to Mr Bundy, and that Mr Bundy would exercise control over your household decisions after the demise of Mr Gacy. For many years, Mr Bundy insisted on taking all the credit for getting rid of Mr Gacy, and acted insulted if anyone remembered the sacrifices of your family. But finally, years later, the new neighbors and others finally got around to paying tribute to the brave members of your household who were instrumental in telling the neighborhood about the terrible crimes of Mr Gacy. But in delivering the honors to your family members who fought so bravely against the evils of the Gacy crimes, the new neighbor attributed the evil of those crimes to YOUR family’s name.

Few people reading this metaphor would imagine such a wild scenario involving some of history’s most notorious serial murders could happen in real life. The sad thing is, it is based on the real world experience of America’s most loyal ally, Poland.

Shortly after Generals Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski fought so valiantly under George Washington in America’s War of Independence, their own home country of Poland was erased from the map and partitioned between Austria, Prussia, and Russia. It was 125 years before the Polish nation was re-established by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. On September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland from the west. On September 17, 1939 Russia invaded Poland from the east. Hitler and his SS (Gacy) immediately began establishing the NAZI death camp system, including the notorious Auschwitz. Stalin and his NKVD/KGB/FSB (Bundy) systematically arrested and deported nearly 26,000 military officers, policemen, and cadets and murdered them at a place called Katyn, near Smolensk, Russia. The Russians also arrested hundreds of thousands of Polish teachers, intellectuals, civic leaders and students and sent them to the gulags in Siberia, with the intent of working and starving them to death.

Contrary to popular characterizations, the Nazis did not enjoy a cakewalk into Poland. The fledgling Polish Army and Air Force inflicted over 60,000 casualties on the Germans during the initial invasion. Poland never surrendered during the Nazi occupation and the Polish Home Army maintained an active resistance throughout the war; there was no “Vichy” Poland. The Polish pilots who escaped to England formed the two highest scoring squadrons of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain. The Polish underground smuggled the German secret code machine ENIGMA to the Allies.

When Stalin decided to use the Poles he was starving in his Gulags to fight against the Nazis, they revolted as soon as they were armed. They marched out of Russia, and across Iran and Iraq to fight under British command in Jordan. They formed the Polish II Corps and later routed the Nazis from the mountain top of Monte Casino in Italy.

America entered the war in Europe in 1941. True to the form of the “new neighbor” in our metaphor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Yalta Agreement with the affable “Uncle Joe” Stalin. This deal gave nearly half of Poland’s territory to the Soviet Union and doomed two more generations of Poles to Soviet oppression.

Finally, our metaphor culminates in the incompetence of President Obama in delivering the Medal of Freedom honors to Jan Karski, one of the many brave Poles who risked death by torture to tell the world of the Holocaust. In doing so, Mr Obama referred to the Nazi death camps as POLISH death camps.

There are those who will argue that it was just a slip of the tongue and the Poles are just being too sensitive. However, this is not the first time Mr Obama has directly insulted Poland and its brave people. It was less than three years ago that Obama announced his agreement with Mr Putin to cancel the missile defense shield in Poland, on September 17, 2009: the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in World War II.

I am no fan of Mr Obama’s foreign policy by apology. I believe that his penchant for apologizing to America’s adversaries, when no apology was warranted, has denigrated America’s image on the world stage and has made Mr Obama appear weak and unwise. But Poland has been a true and faithful ally to the United States and has stood by us in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mr Obama has directly insulted them in a way which strikes at the very core of the Polish psyche. Poland deserves an apology from the President. Unfortunately, Mr Obama has weakened himself so much that he cannot do anything that will open him to more criticisms of weakness in this election season, especially after the way Putin has given him such a thorough diplomatic smack-down in just the last two weeks. In the short term, all Poles can do is to hope Americans will work towards electing a President this November who can distinguish between friends and adversaries. Then, maybe, we can get back to being a good neighbor.

William T Russell is a former Republican Congressional Candidate in the 12th Congressional District of Pennsylvania. He is an internationally published columnist and has been a featured guest on a number of national television and radio news shows. He is a retired Lieutenant Colonel from the US Army and has served in Desert Storm, the Iraq War, and the Balkans. His wife, Katarzyna (Kasia) Russell, is the granddaughter of a Polish survivor of Stalin’s gulag, and the daughter of a regional leader of Solidarity in Poland. Both Bill and Kasia were in the Pentagon on 9/11. Email him at Bill_Russell@hotmail.com.

[240 is Back]

everyone knows what he meant.  white house clarified and apologized.   poland STILL MAD.

it's just playing up the victim thing now - his statement wasn't intended with malice, just showed some insensitivity for not knowing how sensitive they are about it.  Dumb move by obama.   

But when the most powerful man in the free world apologizes, you accept with grace and be the bigger man.  "We're still offended and want a better explaination" - just take the win, brah.

[Fury]

One would think that the man who is too smart to be president wouldn't make such a glaring error.

Further proof that without a teleprompter the champion of "uhhs" comes off as borderline retarded.

everyone knows what he meant.  white house clarified and apologized.   poland STILL MAD.

it's just playing up the victim thing now - his statement wasn't intended with malice, just showed some insensitivity for not knowing how sensitive they are about it.  Dumb move by obama.  

But when the most powerful man in the free world apologizes, you accept with grace and be the bigger man.  "We're still offended and want a better explaination" - just take the win, brah.

I don't see where he apologized. Are you lying again, you shill c*nt? Yes, you are.



It's comical considering Obama spent how long apologizing for US actions during his apology tour when he took office?

[Soul Crusher]

Obama the Gaffe Master Strikes Poland
 scottfactor.com ^ | 05/31/12 | Gina Miller



How can we ever be surprised at anything that comes out of the mouth of Barack Obama (or whatever his name is)? Yet, his latest, gaffe almost leaves me speechless. Almost.

It was at a ceremony at the White House on Tuesday where Obama was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the late Jan Karski, a Polish officer of the resistance during World War II who gave early eyewitness reports of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews.

Obama said this,

“For years, Jan Karski’s students at Georgetown University knew he was a great professor; what they didn't realize was he was also a hero. Fluent in four languages, possessed of a photographic memory, Jan served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action. It was decades before Jan was ready to tell his story. By then, he said, ‘I don’t need courage anymore. So I teach compassion.’”

Although I am not used to hearing or reading it, apparently there are people who have incorrectly called some of the Nazi death camps “Polish” because of their physical location in German-occupied Poland, but for a sitting US President to do so is astonishing to me. Does he have a hard time saying “Nazi”? I notice that in the whole passage, not only does he not say “Nazi,” but he does not mention Germany at all. He says, “Jews were being murdered,” but he does not say by whom. Was he avoiding the use of the words Germany and Nazi in order to not offend the Polish people? If so, his substitute was a terrible choice that landed him in much hotter water than if he had just called the camps by their correct name.

Of course, we all know that almost everything Obama says in public is what he is reading off a teleprompted script, which he most likely did not write. What does this say about the intelligence level of his speech writers? Or, was that wording chosen deliberately? Either answer is not good.

Regardless of who writes what he says, the words belong to Obama; he owns them when they come out of his mouth. And, if this were an isolated gaffe, it might be written off as a bizarre aberration, but ever since Obama was first shoved in our faces, he has let out a steady, unrelenting stream of verbal and behavioral flubs that would have caused a Republican to be driven out of Washington on a rail of ridicule.

Newsbusters has a compilation of Obama’s word and deed blunders that is more than a year old, but it is still staggering to see dozens and dozens of the most outrageous statements and goofs by Obama. You will likely remember most of them as you see them, but here is a short list of Obama’s lowlights: He “confuses” his “Christianity” for his Muslim faith, he says ATMs cause unemployment, he referenced the “bomb that fell on Pearl Harbor,” he “saw” dead people at a Memorial Day ceremony, he called Europe a country, he claimed that his election would slow the rise of the oceans, he thinks “Austrian” is a language, he did not want his daughters to be “punished” with a baby, he called them Navy “corpsemen,” he said he had visited 57 US states, and that is only a fraction of his gaffes.

This latest Obama blunder has managed to outrage the people of an entire nation and Poles all around the world. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk expressed his outrage on Wednesday as reported by Bloomberg,

“We can’t accept such words in Poland, even if they are spoken by a leader of an allied country. … Saying Polish concentration camps is as if there was no German responsibility, no Hitler.”

Prime Minister Tusk is right, and I wonder how anyone could call the death camps anything other than Nazi or German. Bloomberg also reported that Poland has been on a campaign to rid the media of the term “Polish concentration camps,” and has called on major newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to quit referring to the death camps as Polish. It is truly disgusting that so-called “reputable” news outlets like these would mischaracterize these Nazi death camps and defame Poland this way; it is nearly unimaginable that a US President would also do it.

Yet, in its typical, callous style, the Obama White House brushed off the outrage of the Polish leadership, and spokesmouth Jay Carney was trotted out to declare that Obama just “misspoke.” He misspoke?! No. That was an example of either stunning ignorance or deliberate misrepresentation, and considering Obama’s pathetic history in dealing with Poland, I will guess the latter.

As Nile Gardiner wrote in a column posted at the UK Telegraph,

“President Obama has a long track record of insulting the Poles. In 2010 he chose to play golf on the day of the funeral of the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, the Polish First Lady, and 94 senior officials who perished in the Smolensk air disaster. Eight months earlier he humiliated Warsaw by pulling out of the agreement over Third Site missile [defense] installations in Poland and the Czech Republic.”

So, once again Obama is treating one of our allies like trash, by wrongly tying Poland’s name to the Holocaust. He continues his track record of being a no-class, socialist, scourge on the US Presidency.

As I wrote back in August of 2010,

“Almost from the moment he was inaugurated, he began showing his contempt for the position and his disdain for our country, whether it was sending the bust of Churchill back to Britain, or snubbing some of our closest allies, or apologizing all over the world for our great nation, he has been nothing but a shameful worm infesting the Oval Office. I say this with anger and sadness at what Obama and his administration have visited upon our country to date—you know the laundry list; I don’t have to remind you of it all.

 

This man is not what most of the poor, wrong-thinking Democrats and Independents imagined they were getting when they stupidly cast their vote for him. He is now revealing himself to be the far left radical we warned you about before the election. He has surrounded himself with like-minded minions, all of whom wish to destroy the foundation of America and rebuild it on the shifting sands of socialism.

 

… Truly, our country is currently being run by a group of enemies of America; there can be no question about it to anyone with even one eye half-open. And at the head of the treacherous pack is Barack Obama, a man without an ounce of class.”