Excellent! I loves me your Faulkner paraphrase!
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I knew that was coming but didnât imagine it from you, @ralph_vonholst!
Above, @alyoshakaramazov1 quoted some Pew âpollingâ data out of IsraelâŚ
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Netanyahu is an authoritarian mofo, so he has a natural affinity with authoritarian mofos in Europe. The Polish law making it illegal to assert reality in the specific instance of rife antisemitism in Poland was, of course, a red flag to Netanyahuâs bull. Ole!
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He issued a statement acknowledging that âthere are certainly pockets of anti-Semitism in Polandâ but largely stressing the fact that Poles suffered and put up massive resistance to the Nazis during the war, also helping Jews.
Hereâs my anecdote (actually one passed onto me by my son, who was a teenager at the time he visited Auschwitz and some other camps as part of a Jewish youth group)âŚ
My son told me at the time that there were several instances as he traveled by train and walked the streets of a few Polish cities that people literally spit on members of the group as they walked by. Some of the kids were called angry names as they went past bystanders. He couldnât understand most of what they were saying except for those that interjected crude English insults but he did understand âzhidâ or âyidâ when it was said with all the other name-calling. He said he never experienced that kind of hostility anywhere else they had traveled. (They were also in Prague for quite some time). He told me that in Poland they love everything that is part of Jewish culture, they just donât like actual Jews. Thatâs coming from a 15 year old boy at the time, who is generally pretty perceptive. Maybe thatâs the legacy of the Holocaust on the collective consciousness of the country today.
He also noticed that many Poles had appropriated Jewish culture with bakeries, delis, and other types of shops, but that no Jews actually ran those establishments. So it was meant to be like Jewish-style, like we think of Bohemian-style. Its like how there are numerous pizza franchises in this country and a lot of them arenât actually run or owned by real Italians.
I suspect there are more than just pockets of anti-Semitism in Poland. So this was 15 years ago or so. Personally, I canât imagine with the rise of neo-nazism and rightwing nationalism across Europe that the problem of anti-Semitism has gotten any better.
SooooâŚthatâs all I got.
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Especially in that part of the world. The Balkans never forget anything. They are still killing mad over fights that broke out in the 13th century.
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Well Iâve read Isaac Bashevis Singer and what I got from him is what I always thought - Poles are anti-Semitic for the most part.
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If it wasnât for Trump, the entire world community would have its collective noses pressed up against the window, gawking at Netanyahu, with mouth gaping open, marveling at the toxic mix of brazen incompetence and thuggish behavior.
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thank you for saying the obvious while others here ramble about anything but the topic at hand. Half my family was murdered - clubbed to death - by the Poles in their town. There are photos. To pretend otherwise is a crime by itself. If you ever saw the movie âShoahâ that interviewed Poles in the early 1980s, openly admitting to supporting the murders (no, Virginia, none would say they personally did it), you would be horrified.
If you are antisemitic, go to Chan4 and not waste our time.
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Poland is like 96% Catholic. Itâs not anti-semitism, per se, they are simply a very homogenous group that doesnât particularly like anyone who is an outsider who comes in as disruptive to their lives.
If you go there and are just part of the crowd, youâll get along fine. If you want to go around waiving anything non-Catholic and making a show of yourself, youâll have problems.
And as weâve moved basically past the generation in Germany, Poland and elsewhere that actually lived through those times, the new generations are rather tired of being told that they are supposed to feel some personal or collective sense of guilt.
And these sorts of remarks from the Israelis are calculated to stoke tensions-- they didnât make them by accident.
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Insulting your allies is a key part of the Trump method of winning friends and influencing others.
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feel nothing as far as I am concerned. But denying truth is unacceptable. Outsiders? Jews and other minorities lived there for many generations at that point.
should Native Americans murder Americans who are of European descent because they are different? The Jews lived in Poland for much longer than Europeans live in the USA.
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If they donât want a personal sense of guilt, they should stop talking about how âthe jewsâ are evicting people from apartments or asking visitors from new york whether there are a lot of jews in the neighborhood where they live. Both those from people born well after the war.
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Iâm talking about now, not back then.
And there is a difference between acknowledging truth and beating people over the head with it. And quotes like this are not at all helpful, and will only stoke more backlash.
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Sounds like a personal anecdote?
In any society youâre going to run into people with prejudices. But thereâs a far leap from that to painting the entire society with that brush.
Would be akin to saying all Americans are neo-nazis because a few marched around with tiki-torches.
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Somebody needs to google the definition of âdiplomacy.â
Well after all the National Security Advisor and Vice President were touring the nation giving terrorizing speeches about the mushroom clouds over Manhattan if we didnât âbomb, invade and blow more or less everything upâ. Then the images of âShock and Aweâ appeared over and over again on American TV screens of the beautiful ancient city of Baghdad being blown to smithereens by every 2,000# bomb and cruise missile in our arsenal(big boon for our Military Industrial Complex doncha know?). Quite an impressive sight to see all that destructive power unleashed and at that time the madness was supported by the vast majority of our disinformed public. We were led to believe that awesome destruction was something to be proud of. Then the resistance formed and Iraqiâs turned to 50# suicide vests as one of their only means of fighting back against the invading forces. We were conditioned by our news media to be appalled at those attacks even as we told to be proud of the 2,000# bombs we rained down that killed countless thousands of Iraqis. We must never forget that George Bush launched the invasion of Iraq as a first choice and not a last resort as any competent Commander in Chief would have done. The invasion of Iraq was and is a war crime of the first magnitude and we must never forget that hideous fact. Bush and all his handlers are war criminals and his rehabilitation in this nation of naive and gullible people is disgusting to me as a Viet Nam veteran. We were never going to go to war again based on lies again after that fiasco right? And then Bush did it again. May he rot in hell.
,
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With all due respect, the âproblemâ with the Balkans is the legacy of divide-and-rule imperialism abetted by the Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, French, Germans, and others. Check out Ivo Andricâs Days of the Consuls for what happened during the Napoleonic Wars.
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I donât think soâŚthe disagreement seems to swirl around allegations made that canât be backed up butâŚwhatever.
Every country that the Nazis conquered had a mixed history. Every country had courageous resisters, reluctant collaborators and enthusiastic collaborators.
Which brings up a very tangential point I have thought about some: Where were the boundaries of collaboration? This was a very fraught question in the years immediately after the war - and not a simple one. If you were a senior police official and helped round up Jews for the Nazis, that seems clearly on one side of the line. But how about if you worked in a rail yard controlling a switch that sent trains down the track to the camps? Or a mechanic who kept the trains in good repair? The occupiers depended on a lot of low-level folks who had jobs in government to stay in those jobs and keep them running smoothly. To the extent they did that, they were, in some sense, helping the occupiers. Where is the line drawn?
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The optimist in me tries to explain to the pessimist sitting on my shoulder that this is all because we such amazing communications tools at our disposal now, but then I look at Theresa May and Brexit, and Donnie Dumpfkopf and, well, everything he says and does, and I start pricing housing in Canada again. 
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