Poland Upset About Israeli Cartoon Mocking Them For Enthusiastically Participating In the Holocaust
If we were in charge of Poland's public image, here's what we wouldn't do. We wouldn't demand that an Israeli newspaper elaborate on the precise extent to which Poland's citizens participated in the Holocaust:
The cartoons were republished in the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita on Thursday and caused an outrage, according to Piotr Trobniak, a spokesman for the Polish embassy in Tel Aviv."It describes the Poles as vicious drunks and in a negative way. They look very ugly and not nice. This is a very difficult issue," Trobniak told the Associated Press. The editor of the Ha'aretz supplement that printed the cartoon feature, Nir Becher, denied the charges. "We aren't saying anything against the Polish people as a whole," he said. "This is a description of the people who were there at that moment in time, according to testimony of the woman who was there."
Maybe the way media works has changed in the last 12 hours, but doesn't raising public objections about this just ensure that there are going to be dozens of stories that use the word "Poland" in close proximity to the word "Holocaust"? Let's say that this is a slam dunk in Poland's favor. Let's pretend that there's no evidence, for instance, that Poles refused to sell weapons to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto due to a thousand year history of anti-Semitism. There will still be dozens of stories using the word "Poland" in close proximity to the word "Holocaust". In reality, of course, there will be stories like that - and stories about how Poles refused to sell weapons to Jews in the Warsaw ghetto due to a thousand year history of anti-Semitism. Good job, Polish embassy.
References:
* Israeli cartoon raises Polish protest [JPost]
Previously:
* How many Poles does it take to save democracy...
* The Nation: So What If Europe Demographically ...
* The Red Line is Somewhere Behind You
