Poland Tries to Curb Holocaust Speech, and Israel Puts Up a Fight
February 2, 2018 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
The current measure passed the lower house of Parliament on Friday. The move, on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, seemed planned to provoke a reaction.
It got one.
“The law is baseless; I strongly oppose it,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement released on Saturday. “One cannot change history, and the Holocaust cannot be denied.”
Yair Lapid, leader of a centrist opposition party in Israel and the son of a Holocaust survivor, wrote on Twitter, “There were Polish death camps and no law can ever change that.”
The Israeli journalist Lahav Harkov wrote a tweet simply repeating “Polish death camps” 14 times.
Poland was invaded and occupied by Germany in 1939, but unlike in neighboring countries, there was no collaborationist government in Warsaw. Roughly three million Polish Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and another three million Polish citizens died.
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Several international organizations have been quick to condemn the law, including Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
The United States has asked Polish officials to rethink plans to enact the bill, arguing that it is a threat to freedom of speech and to Poland’s international relationships.
But even as international condemnation poured in, the Polish Senate, took up the measure for debate late Wednesday. The body, controlled by the governing Law and Justice party, moved swiftly, ignoring all of the opposition’s amendments. The legislation passed 57 to 23, with two abstentions.
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But even some Law and Justice lawmakers thought it was reckless.
“How is it that nobody had foreseen that it was a terrible idea to accept this bill on the eve of the anniversary of International Holocaust Remembrance Day?” Senator Anna Maria Anders, the daughter of a Polish war hero, asked during the debate.
“We could have done it a week, two weeks later,” she said. “And now we have a terrible, terrible international crisis. The crisis is not just in Poland and Israel. The American Congress has begged Poland not to pass this bill. This is so unnecessary. Why didn’t anyone predict that this would be the reaction?”
The deputy justice minister, Patryk Jaki, responded that Poland “could not have predicted this reaction because the Israelis had never expressed any criticism in regard to this bill..”
Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council and a former Polish prime minister, suggested in a Twitter post on Thursday that the Polish government was guilty of the very thing the law was intended to fight.
“Who spreads false accusations about the ‘Polish camps’ damages Poland’s good name and interests,” he wrote. “The authors of this bill have promoted this slander all over the world, and have been successful in it as no one before them.”
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