Stephen Fry is never off the BBC, much favoured luvvie and yet he has come out with some comments that if made by others would see them labelled as hate-mongers and banned from the BBC. However it all depends on who the targets of such offensive comments are, of course;
Stephen Fry has delivered an insulting attack on Catholics and Poles which grotesquely misrepresents historical fact and which, if levelled at almost any other targets, would probably be characterised as a “hate crime”. Fry, who joined Labour luvvies in signing an open letter protesting against the Tories’ alliance in the European Parliament with the Polish Law and Justice Party, said on Channel 4 News: “There’s been a history, let’s face it, in Poland of a right-wing Catholicism which has been deeply disturbing for those of us who know a little history and remember which side of the border Auschwitz was on”…
It will be interesting to see how the BBC deal with this blatant racism from the odious Fry.
Fry is one of those Jews who lend their voice “as-a-Jew” to various anti-Israel petitions, letters and calls for boycott. Not only is he happy to criticise those of his own faith, he now seems more than willing to jump on the post-modern bandwagon and bad mouth all relegions… except of course that other one.
I agree entirely with the double standard that DV notes – were the writer Kilroy-Silk and the victims of the slur darker skinned than the Poles, his head would be on the block, guaranteed.
And I also agree with almost every word of Gerald Warner’s article – except that I would never be stupid enough, as a Catholic, to cast a vote at the general election based purely on whether a party had on one occasion acted against the objections of the Catholic Church or its doctrine. That would be myopic and conceited.
However, just because the Tories have made a new alliance does not mean we at B-BBC are now obligated to defend that alliance at all costs.
The Polish party to which Fry ignorantly alludes are indeed part of a deeply unpleasant strain in Polish political life. There are elements of Catholic life in Poland that are (small c) conservative to the point of being hideously reactionary. Has anyone had a chance to listen to any of the output of the popular and influential ‘Radio Mary’? Probably not, unless you’ve been in Poland and speak Polish. Any radio station making that many disgusting comments about Jews in this country would soon find itself closed down or marginalised. I hope.
The line about Auschwitz is of course garbage, and most Poles were victims of the Nazis or the Soviets, or fought alongside us bravely and brilliantly. However, that is not the entire story. Pogroms and killings of Jews at a local level continued for a while even after the fall of the Third Reich – many Poles simply believing that Jews were inevitably responsible for the disappearance of local children, or of aiding and abetting the Soviets.
None of that alters the fundamental fact that a BBC regular would not long survive as a BBC regular after making such a rant about members of another, more reactionary, more dangerously bigoted and intolerant religion.
Fry is a fool but we should be aware that Poland represents many things the liberal elite find abhorrent.
If any people or nation can help save and preserve the European spirit it will be the Poles and the good people of eastern Europe.
Family, country and a firm adherence to their past and their culture. All traits anathema to the new elites of the West
My sole objection to the Polish immigrants to this country is that their fine country needs them more than this failing state.
Fry like Peter Tatchell is given a free pass by the liberal media. Now why might that be?
Is this a case of David Vance’s often mentioned, yet rarely seen, ‘bias by omission’? It could be. Then again, maybe its just a story David wants to rant about, and has decided that the BBC needs to report on it. That is not bias, I repeat, not bias. That is called agenda setting, and you will only be happy when they play to your agenda.
The headline we won’t see ” BBC condemns anti-Polish racist attack by Stephen Fry ” !
FatFaPenSe: we have precedents by which to gauge whether there is bias, so let’s be honest enough to use them. Kilroy-Silk, in a private, non-BBC context, condemned the cultural backwardness of the Arab Muslim world. He was thrown under a bus by the BBC. Tom Paulin called for the murder of Jews who build homes in Judea and Samaria, and is still welcome at the BBC, who have never asked him to recant his actual incitement to murder. Carol Thatcher made relatively harmless (in comparison) reference to a golliwog’s hairstyle and was told by the BBC to either issue a grovelling apology for her thought crimes or face being axed.
So now Stephen Fry blames the Polish (victims) for Auschwitz. I can hardly imagine a less honest, less intelligent, more grotesquely ignorant slur against a nation. Will the BBC demand that he apologise or face being axed?
If the BBC does not demand such an apology from him, we can draw some inescapable conclusions:
a) Referincing a golliwog’s hair is a worse crime in BBC world than blaming the Holocaust on its victims and slurring an entire nation in the process.
b) Stating some home truths about the Arab world is a greater offence than telling the most despicable lies imaginable about a European country and its people.
FFPS, you can state – and repeat, and repeat again if you wish – that it’s not bias, but unfortunately for you, stating that does not make it true. We have precedents by which to judge the BBC’s response, or its lack of response. I prefer to do that than to simply accept your denials.
Fair enough?
Good post leadtinyellow.
Stephen Fry? He’s no Benny Hill:
Surpised there were no references to his sexuality – he normally manages a good number during any espousings.
Imagine Fry had said something about the Germans having a poor record reference jews. There would have been an outcry at his atitude for being backward and there would be hundreds defending the Germans as being not to blame for their parents crimes.Yet its ok to have a pop at the Poles because they are mostly practicing Catholics. Forgetting the Millions who died fighting the Nazis forgetting the priests imprisoned for defending the helpless.
If it wasnt for the brave Poles who fought in the battle of Britain we may not have had enough trained pilots to repulse the Germans. how would Frys family have survived. If it wasnt for the uprising in Warsaw more German troops would have been available to fight the allies.
If you go to Warsaw and see where the old town used to stand and realise that all you see is a 40 yearold fake because the Germans leveled it you will see how pro nazi the Poles were and how much they collaborated.
Go and have a look at the statue of the Boy soldier and if you are not moved to tears then you have no soul. What about the 180,000 civilians killed during the uprising.
With no heavy weapons just rifles and will power they held off the might of the German army for 2 months.
Why does fry not campaign against labour. Ken Livingstone is a Labour party member and while he was Mayor he invited countless Muslim leaders who would have strung up his jewish hide from the nearest lampost. If they didnt feel annoyed enough at the unfunny Jew they surely would have been driven to Jihad by his sexual tendancies.
So as usual one law for the homosexual BBC elite another for everyone else. Its ok to have a go at a senile old lady but not a one eyed jock.
Its ok to disparage the nation of one of our closest allies but wrong to make naff comments about an athelete.
Gay ok Pole go away.
Paddy, Livingstone is not Jewish. Your anti-Semitism reflects badly both upon you and upon this website.
the jew I refer to is Fry. Livingstone IS an anti semite. When I use such strong language as regrds Fry its is to emphasise the contempt thatsome of red Kens friends have for people of Stephen Frys ethnicity not my feeling about jews.
I hate anit semitism. I have visited labour camps and I thorughly resent your remarks
“Time of An Ordeal: The Story of Polish Clergy Imprisoned and Killed at Dachau. Half of the Polish priests imprisoned by the Nazi’s died at the Dachau concentration camp. The death of more than 2,000 Polish clergy, including five bishops, at the start of World War II seems to be forgotten by many history books..”
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2288269929627190583#
Even a broken watch is right twice a day. So, too, the biased Beeb can be right. So, too, can Fry.
Both the Catholic Church and Poland have long histories of virulent, violent anti-Semitism going back centuries.
Priest James Carroll has documented the two-millennia-long theological and racial war of hatred and near-extermination conducted by the Church against the Jewish people, which – in Carroll’s own opinion – was a core contributing factor to the Holocuast. The only exculpatory fact for the Church is its belated regret expressed in Vatican II’s “Nostre Aetate”.
Poland has formally recognised and apologised for one of the instances of Poles murdering their own Jewish neighbours and citizens, at Jedwabne. The IPN (Naational Histrical Institute) is investigating another two dozen such cases of Polish towns murdering their Jewish inhabitants.
Both the Church and the Polish state have a moral obligation to continue self-examination of their historiical persution of the Jewish people (much as Australia has to its treatment of aboriginal peoples, and the USA has to its treatment of African-Americans.)
Accusing Fry of anti-Catholic or anti-Polish bias is merely a disgusting way for the Chruch, and for Poland, to dodge that historic responsibility.
Sinemente – Fry implied that Auschwitz was a Polish camp, that its location was chosen because it chimed with Polish aspirations and the national mentality. Do you concur?
If you do, please share your evidence for this remarkable piece of historical revisionism.
And you say – let’s get this clear – that to be appalled at Stephen Fry for implying that Auschwitz was as much a Polish as a Nazi extermination and concentration camp, is a disgusting act of evasion…. ?
Had he detailed historical acts of pogrom as a tool to use against the Conservative Party, that would have been odd enough. But he lurches from the odd to the revolting, in what was either stunning ignorance or truly despicable deceit.
Paddy/Tooke:
Poland may at once have suffered at the hands of the Nazis, yet still oppressed and persecuted its Jewish citizens.
Moreover, Polish suffering under the Nazis in no way mitigates the suffering Poland inflicted upon Jews, beginning centuries earlier.
Is those too complex concepts for your simple minds?
The camps in Poland could have been placed anywhere convenient for the Nazis.
If Poland was such a bad place for Jews in the run up to the war why then was there such a large Jewsih Population. Many of the Polish jews were themselves refugees from Russia and other Eastern states from pogroms in the preceding 100 yrs. True Warsaw wasnt immune to the waves of antisemitism across eruope in the 19th and early 20 century but the Jews in Poland were better treatedthan in Russia the Ukraine and other neighbouring states.
ForFry to single out the Poles is to ignore most of that part of europe and Germany. The UK itself does not have an unblemished past as regards jew including a notable massacre in York.
Fry is wrong to paint the Poles in his convenient way while ignoring many othe countries and ethnic groups whos treatment of the jews was far worse and as i stated above why select the tories/poles antisemitism whie rejecting labour/hesbollah antisemitism
Paddy:
“why select the tories/poles antisemitism while rejecting labour/hesbollah antisemitism”
Simple – because the Poles are institutionally anti-Semitic and homophobic, whilst Hezbollah are merely….
er, no. Damn it. Thought I was onto something there.
So, Sinemente – any answers to Paddy’s question? Why was Poland’s anti-Semitism so much worse than any other country’s that Fry feels the need to single it out for condemnation? And what makes Catholicism’s anti-Semitism worse than, say, Martin Luther’s?
How very selective you are being. How very selective and deceitful Fry is being. And all because the Tories are involved. What sad garbage.
“Is those too complex concepts for your simple minds?”
Insults now – you do not even deserve a response.
I’d like to hear Stephen Fry or similar decry the French, then, for similar reasons.
Why doesnt Fry have a go at the French for Drancy our belgie friends forBreendonck in Belgium the clogg hoppers for Amerfoort in Holland why single out the Poles?
This is why Fry singles out the Polish Catholics —
“WARSAW, June 19, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Poland may soon consider passing a new law, similar to the one passed this week in neighboring Lithuania, that bans the media and schools from promoting adverse behaviors to the development of young people, including violence, suicide, and homosexuality.”
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/printerfriendly.html?articleid=09061905
Mindless, where you go?
Am I the victim of a drive by trolling?
ignavus
solum incommodo
Paddy/Lead:
Sorry, you are still supplying nothing but apologia for centuries of Polish oppression of Jews – and trying to excuse it by comarison to violent, genocidal Hizbullah!
Fortunately, modern Poland takes anti-Semitism a bit more seriously than do you; as I have said, the IPN is conscientiously investigating.
As for the location of the elimination camps, proximity to Jewish populations was one reason – but so was proximity to a population sympathetic to the goal of killing Jews. Try Lanzmann’s film if you don’t understand that.
Sorry, Fry is absolutely correct. Poland’s past behaviour towards the Jewish people has been one of centuries of brutality, subjugation, discrimination, and persecution. Denying it only makes those here look as morally obtuse – in fact, as evil – as supporters of apartheid or of Holocaust denial.
Hang on, Poland was for a long time more tolerant and safer for Jews (the urban areas, really) than any other place in Eastern Europe, never mind the rest of it. From the 14th Century or so onwards, Krakow and later Warsaw were centers of Jewish knowledge and had vibrant cultures. Poles in the countryside weren’t any better towards Jews than their Ukranian and Cossack brethren, to be sure. But the Jew was well tolerated in the major cultural centers by the 19th and early 20th Centuries.
The insidious anti-Semitic influence of Russia when they basically controlled much of Poland in the 19th Century, and the heavily anti-Semitic Italians running the Catholic Church at key periods* have probably more to do with the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Poland than anything indigenous.
* Try reading about the plight of Jews in the Papal States, if you want to read about an anti-Semtiic culture. Even the French were appalled when Napoleon’s army rolled in. Then let’s see Stephen Fry insult the Italians like he did the Poles. Or is his thing about the Jews merely a convenient smoke screen?
Incidentally, it is a trivial matter to document the extent and viciousness of Polish anti-Semitism:
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASInt_13/4890_13.htm
http://books.google.com/books?id=J40gNC7cxfYC
http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,413976,00.html
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1642.html
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/CXXII/499/1460
More on the location of the elimination camps:
The RHSA had quite a difficult time obtaining co-operation from Danes, Dutch, or French without visible crematoria chimneys. It had little such trouble in Poland. Yes, proximity to major Jewish populations was a factor – but a sympathetic population was also a factor. The Germans knew they could not site elimination camps in Denmark, Holland, or even Italy, and instead shipped Jewish victims to Poland.
Frankly, western Europe has little to be proud of, in its refusal to acknowledge its anti-Semitic and collaborative past; France took four decades to do so. But eastern Europe trails even further behind; the Fry matter is proof that the disease of anti-Semitism – and whitewashing of the local role in it – is alive and well.
Finally, Fry is right to take to task reactionary Polish Catholicism – after all, the Pope himself has already done so.
Mindless, I am not denying or trying to deny the past of Poland. In fact I feel it important to every country to go through self examination of its past to help it plot is course for the future. Many populations have very horrific and regretable histories regarding the treatment and lack of aid to the jews.
There is not a nation in the west and east that can look back to the time of the holocaust with an unblemished soul. But as I have stated above in a world where many share varying degrees of guilt it seems totally wrong to single out one nation when they neither built nore manned the camps. French railway companies suppplied carriages german/belgian chemical companies supplied materials germany supplied the soldiers guards designers builders managers planners descision makers The UK and US flew over some of the camps with full bombers knowing of there existence and not dropping bombs.
British and US governments denied assitance to the Jews. Cuba and the US rejected jewish refugees.
In the previous 100-150 yrs most of eastern europe fell victim to waves of antisemitism with pogroms in many regions and yet Mr Fry decides to attack Poland. Not Austria not Germany not Romania not Czechia not Hungary not the UKraine. Why?
I suspect it has nothing to do with his religion /ethnicity and everything to do with his sexuality.
I take great offence to your accusations that I am an anti semite and I ask you politely to withdraw your remarks. By all means debate your points but please dont resort to extreme attacks.
Mindless,
There were ugly/horrific/immoral thing perportrated on the Jews by the Poles but the same could be said for the French Austrians Romanians Italians and Czechs why choose the Poles over these?
You still havent answered
Mindless, Why not also add to your list the systematic planned demonisation of the state of Israel by our state broadcaster.
It may not be able to be described as anti semitic but at the very least it seems a bit coordinated and sinister. Mr Fry works for the Beeb. Should he boycott his own shows?
“the same could be said for the French Austrians Romanians Italians and Czechs why choose the Poles over these”
False. Instances of entire French towns murdering their own Jewish citizens, do not exist. Quite the opposite – a French town named Chambon tried to hide thousands of Jews.
Further, your defence seems to be “all of Europe murdered Jews so Poles get to do so too.” Fucking disgusting Eurotrash. Too bad you didn’t all die of mad cow disease.
‘Further, your defence seems to be “all of Europe murdered Jews so Poles get to do so too.” Fucking disgusting Eurotrash. Too bad you didn’t all die of mad cow disease.’
You have a bloody warped mentality. First you accuse me of anti semitism when I was trying to illustrate how some of Red Kens mates hate jews NOT ME wake up I AM NOT An ANTISEMITE.
If you read many of my previous posts you will see countless defenses of Jews and Israel from me. Yet you accuse me of antisemitism.
The only anti I am is anti BBC Bias particularlywhen it pushes its usual anti christian anti jewish pro gay pro muslim world view.
Bias to me is where one side of an argument is expressed to the detrement of another to push a political agenda.
Mr Fry regularly expresses left wing views. He talked about people pissing on Thatchers Grave he contnuosly sucks up o other left wing panelist.
He is also a proffessional gay. That is a person who perpetually rams his own sexuality down your throat. He is a gifted and funny man who I enjoy watching but his politics I find challenging. So when he joins Stonewall at an anti tory protest and plays the jewish card I think he is being an opportunist and his using his ethnicity/race /religion as an extra stick to beat the tories. In this I think he is doing great discredit to his community.
I applaud your passion I am sorry I f my words have offended you but I feel you have got the wrong end of the stick. Please take time to reread the above.
My beef is not with the jews but with the attack singling out Poland to help promote Mr Frys Party Labour.
Mr Vance will back me up I am no anti semite
Mindless,
I reiterate, I am not excusing the Poles from blame just asking in as polite way as possible when Mr Fry hasn’t campaigned against Austrians Germans Hungarians and Romanians why he targets the Poles. There is nothing wrong with his choice to raise awareness but why choose the Poles as the first Target. As I have suggested above and as yet you havent answered i susect Mr Frys choice of target has got much more to do with the Polish conservatives attitude to gays than their attitude to jews.
Have you personally any evidence of the party being linked with the tories being linked to any antisemitism.
So far everything I have read has been guilt by association and if that is the route used to condemn them and the tories then no political party will survive. Remember every person is connected to another by seven degrees of seperation. So we should all boycot ourselves.
“In the previous 100-150 yrs most of eastern europe fell victim to waves of antisemitism with pogroms in many regions and yet Mr Fry decides to attack Poland. Not Austria not Germany not Romania not Czechia not Hungary not the UKraine.”
Pre-1939 Poland was the worst. Try talking to a Jew occasionally, you fucking Eurotrash bastard.
Paddy’s Eurotrash logic: “We ALL killed Jews, so none of us should be blamed.” Putz.
A picture of Poland’s wonderful treatment of Jews:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/media_ph.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005366&MediaId=1369
Pogroms in Poland once every few months:
http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?_r=1&res=9D0DE4DE173AE03ABC4F51DFB3668382609EDE
Anti-Jewish apartheid in Poland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghetto_benches
France had the decency which Poland lacked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_League_against_Racism_and_Anti-Semitism
I take it you are American
OK heres Left wing Politics Uk style 101
Red Ken a man who accused a Jewish reporter of being a concentration camp guard. Ken Livingston is the ex-labour mayor of london. He also invited numerous Hesbollah supporters to talk in the UK when he was mayor.
He belongs to the same Party as Stephen Fry.
Stonewall activist extreme gay rights organisation.
The left in this country are systematically anti all religions with the exception of islam. The BBC follow the same route. Any jew to them is a murderer anti palestinian a freedom fighter. Catholics are all protrayed as Kiddy fiddlers where as gays are always perfect in every way. (BTW I am not anti gay just anti gay agenda being rammed down my throat)
You may call me eurotrash but I am on your side. Just dont like one of your fellow jews using the hollocaust to further his political aims. Cheap tacky insulting.
above should read any palestinian
Before you swear and insult me one more time please reread my comments from the top of the page I am no anti semite and I apologise to you for giving you that impression
POLAND”S SHAME:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,929473,00.html
http://users.stlcc.edu/rkalfus/PDFs/115.pdf
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/poland-attempts-to-lay-pogrom-shame-to-rest-1327348.html
Kielce was not the only site of a post-war pogrom – such as the Kraków pogrom on August 11, 1945.
The Church in all this:
http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_holocaust/studies/vol33/AleksiunEngPrint3.pdf
POLAND’S SHAME:
http://www.ce-review.org/01/14/orlet14.html
Cardinal Hlond, the Prelate of Poland, called for a boycott of Jewish businesses, saying, “There will be a Jewish problem as long as Jews remain (in Poland).”
… Meanwhile, many Poles, including those well-educated, continue to insist that Jews caused the Second World War, believing most Jews were Communist sympathizers who (paradoxically) grew rich by taking advantage of poor, hard-working peasants.
POLAND’S SHAME:
http://www.zolynia.org/poland.html
“The new nationalist Polish National Democratic Party openly urged economic and social boycotts against Jews that would force them to leave the former Galicia and other Polish provinces altogether. … There was anti-Jewish violence in more than 100 other towns throughout Poland.
http://newdeal.feri.org/nation/na38146p379.htm
April, 1938: “The [sgregated] ghetto which the “Real Russians” only proposed and the Czar’s government did not introduce for the Poles, the Polish Nationalists are now demanding for the Jews, and the government has actually started to introduce it. …
Their ultimate aim is, of course, to segregate the Jews from the Poles in every walk of social, cultural, and economic life, in railways, theaters, cinemas, concert halls, cafes, and restaurants, in the professions, in business enterprises, and in residence districts. Nor is this a theoretic program only. Already there are hundreds of ghetto markets in Poland where Jewish traders and stall-keepers are separated from the Poles; already in certain cities Jewish coachmen and taxi drivers are segregated in stands and zones of their own; already nationalistic Polish lawyers demand separate benches in the courts for their Jewish colleagues; and nationalistic doctors demand similar segregation for Jewish doctors. In some places even Jewish porters are made to wear special badges announcing that they are not members of that new aristocracy of the human species, the Polish race.
For the last two years the Jews have suffered almost incessant physical assaults and pogroms…. In one month there were 3 major and 79 minor pogroms against Jews in various parts of Poland. … This outburst of anti-Semitic bestiality has no equal in Europe, not even in Nazi Germany.”
http://isurvived.org/Frameset4References/-Poles-massacres.html
From the BBC:
“At least 30 organised massacres of Jews in Poland during World War II were carried out by local people rather than occupying German Nazis, a new report has revealed. The investigation by Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) was carried out after allegations made two years ago that Poles killed 1,600 Jews in the north-eastern village of Jedwabne in 1941. The report – due to be published on Monday – says the Jedwabne pogrom was not an isolated incident, and that hundreds of Jews were murdered in similar attacks by Poles in more than 20 towns in the same region.”
http://isurvived.org/Frameset4References/-Poland-holocaust.html
From the Economist:
“it was Poles, admittedly incited by Germans, who exterminated their neighbours. Tongues were sliced off, eyes poked out. After the adults had been herded into a barn and burned, the exterminators scoured Jedwabne for hidden Jewish children who, when found, were roped together and pitchforked alive on to the embers of their parents.”
To summarise, the Jews in Poland endure centuries of sub-human status, of discrimination, persecution, segregation, oppression, subjugation, slicing tongues out, gouging out eyes, mass murder – and what gets Europeans (whether Polish or British) in a huff? When one half-Jewish comic makes a (justifiably) embittered, half-line wisecrack!
Is the entire European continent one of indifferent, anti-Semitic monsters? You give that impression. Have the Poles never read Catholic theology, recommending self-criticism, remorse, compassion, repentance? Have the British?
Obviously not.
Fucking monsters, you are.
Semi-mental, speaking as the first person on this thread to allude to the very real and very revolting problem of anti-Semitism in Poland, and as someone who violently detests anti-Semitism every bit as much as you evidently do, I’m sad that you couldn’t conduct a debate without resorting to crude insults and irrationally intemperate accusations – (all of which seem to stem from some deeply mistaken belief that you are the only person on this thread to have studied the Holocaust, European anti-Semitism, Catholic history and theology, and the history of Auschwitz. Believe me, you have no monopoly on knowledge of those subjects. I have visited Auschwitz several times and have a small library of books on the history and operation of the complex).
It’s just not worth debating anything with people who can’t behave like adults and can’t keep it together mentally. Nothing to do with the fact that we disagree over Stephen Fry; that I don’t mind at all. It’s simply that you’ve whipped yourself into a bit of a frenzy of self-righteousness and have started writing like an angry teenager.
You might prove yourself an adult by apologising for your stupid language and entirely – entirely – unfounded character slurs. Otherwise you’re not worth responding to.
As I said at the outset – Fry’s crude generalisations and deeply unfair accusations should not blind anyone to the real existence of a deeply unpleasant strain of anti-Semitism in Polish culture, and should not lead us on this site into a knee-jerk embrace of Poland as the saviour of Europe etc. Perhaps if you could apologise for your infantile language and radically self-righteous name-calling, the conversation might be worth continuing.
Mindless,
As I have stated above. I have no ill will to the Jewish people. I am not an anti semite.
I abhorr all that has been done by misguided and evil people of my Religion against the Jews.
But to tar us all with the same brush is as pointless as tarring every American with the Lynching in the 1960s. It is a pointless as calling every yank a monster because of segregation of Black people in the south.
The majority of Americans had nothing to do with the sins of their fathers in Mississippi or Alabama. So should we in Europe boycot all Americans because of hideous wrong doing since the war. No we should not.
Equally the poles have a bad record against the Jews for which they should be ashamed but it was Germans Austrians and Romanians who designed and implemented the Holocaust. They were not subject nations invaded by another.
To boycot Poland now would be as pointless as boycotting german goods now.
The US has done much to redress it history of slavery and its segregation i feel happy visiting the states and although racism exists do not feel it is a racist country.
Equally I travel to Poland about twice a year on business and I have never witnessed any open anti semitism. If it exists which it probably does it is in a minority
You mention many Poles believe the Jews were to blame for the second world war,well many people believe that Princess Diana was killed by Prince Philip but that doesnt mean that they are right or that that is the view of the majority.
Calling people eurotrash or pigs does not help your cause. You have enlightened me on the detail of many of the bad things done to the Jews in Poland and you have given me much food for thought however i still believe characterising a nation based on one extreme is just what got people into this mess in the first place.
I am not an hollocaust denier or an antisemite apologist just as you are not a member of the Klan or an apologist for racial segregation in the south.
And at the risk of winding you up further Mr fry is quite happy to drive around in a Mercedes take picture using film from agfa and yet he campaigns against a nonantisemite party connection with the conservatives not because they are anti jew but because they are catholic and therefore by his definition all jew haters. Just because he is blinkered and bigotted doesnt mean you have to be.