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From Konstanty Gebert's NYT op-ed; link below |
Bieganski
the Brute Polak Stereotype
exposes a centuries-old stereotype of Poles and other Eastern European,
Christian, peasant-descent populations as racist thugs. That stereotype is
being exploited today by world leaders like Angela Merkel in the Muslim migrant
crisis. It was also recently exploited by Konstanty Gebert in the op-ed pages
of the New York Times.
Gebert published "Poland Shouldn't Shut Out
Refugees," on September 9, 2015. Gebert's harangue was accompanied by the
above shaming illustration, whose message is clear: You racist bastard Poles,
you are such unthinking bigots that you have chosen not to take in this
suffering mother and child just because
they are not Christian. Yeah! Just like when you murdered all those Jews
during World War II!
Here's how Gebert hammers home what murderous bigots
Poles are, "The Internet has erupted with hatred: The prosecutor general
has ordered an investigation of anonymous posts recommending that Poland reopen
Auschwitz and send refugees there."
"Poland reopen Auschwitz." Consider those three
words.
Did Poland ever "open" Auschwitz? No, it did
not. Auschwitz was a project of Nazi Germany. Poles were its first prisoners
and victims.
How many Poles want to send Muslims to Auschwitz? In
fact, does one single Pole sincerely want to send Muslims to Auschwitz? The
internet is full of hyperbole. I've gotten emails from people who say they want
to send me to Auschwitz. And yet I walk around free. Is this just bluster from
some teenage troll? Gebert doesn't have to pause to consider to that question.
He has already sewn such explosive seeds of hate that conscious thought is
violently and sickeningly pre-empted.
Gebert never addresses that the UN reports that 75% of
the migrants are not women or children at all, but able-bodied, military aged
men. See here.
Gebert never mentions that Christians have been gauged
out of Iraqi and Syrian villages where they had previously maintained a
cultural presence for two thousand years. Gebert never addresses that ISIS has
promised to use this mass migration to spread jihad terror. Gebert never
addresses that Christians are being methodically slaughtered, crucified, raped,
and turned into sex slaves in the very regions producing the migration. Gebert
never mentions the many reports of the Muslim migrants he wants admitted to
Poland committing atrocities against Christians while they are en route to
Europe, or once they arrive in Europe.
"Muslim Migrants Throw Christians Overboard"
is a rather sobering CNN headline here.
"Abuse, Exclusion, and Physical Attacks for
Christian Syrian Refugee in Germany" read it here.
Gebert doesn't evince any concern that Western Europe has
become so threatening to Jews that many Jews are leaving countries like France
and England because they can't walk down the street without being harassed and
even subjected to violence. "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave
Europe?" Atlantic magazine asked
in April, 2015, reporting that "new threats from radicalized Islamists
have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice." Here.
Poland is now, as it had been for centuries before the
1939 invasion by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the safest country for Jews
in Europe. "Poland is the Safest Place in Europe for Jews Today,"
reported the Jewish Journal on
September 23, 2014, here.
If Poland's demography changes as Gebert demands that it must, Jews' safety
will also change. Why would anyone risk eliminating Europe's one safe place for
Jews?
How far Gebert strays from any facts is epitomized in
this outlandish phrase, "Poland, thriving on European funds and sheltered
by Europe’s geography…"
Really? Really? Poland
is "thriving on European funds"? Not on Poles' hard work as the
West's notorious, and often vilified, blue collar laborers, including plumbers?
See the Wikipedia article dedicated to Polish plumbers, the labors they
performed and the "threat" their hard work posed to Western Europe's
cossetted workforce here.
Poland is "sheltered
by Europe's geography"??? Poland is, largely, a geographic plain
surrounded by hostile neighbors. Germany, Russia, Sweden and Turkey have
exploited Poland's geography for invasions for centuries.
I guess when your name is Konstanty Gebert and you are
writing an anti-Polish, anti-Christian op-ed for the New York Times, an op-ed that shows zero consideration for the
physical safety of your fellow Jews in Europe, you can spout any counterfactual
nonsense you want.
You can read Gebert's op-ed here.
Blog reader Liron Rubin wrote in to alert us to a recent
article in Spiked magazine. Spiked takes the press, and the West, to
task for "Using Migrants to Bash Eastern Europe."
Spiked's article begins:
The migrant
crisis has seemingly divided Europe along moral lines. On the right side, the
side of compassion, of progressiveness, you have the states of Western Europe.
They’re the good guys, the guys standing at the head of the European Union,
drawing up migrant quotas for EU member states, allocating people here,
distributing people there, protecting people, saving people. They really care –
really care about the hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the sites of
various Western interventions, from Iraq to Libya to Syria. So much so, in
fact, that the EU’s leading power, Germany, with chancellor Angela Merkel to
the fore, and the European Commission are talking about a further
centralisation of EU member states’ border-control powers and the creation of a
‘permanent mechanism’ to ensure the speedy and compulsory distribution of
migrants throughout Europe…
But on the dark side, the side of
regress, the side of iron crosses and vestigial fascism, you have Eastern
Europe. Hungary, Poland, Slovakia… These are the bad guys, the nations with
demogogues in power and populations ill at ease with massive influxes of
non-European people …
their people have staged anti-migrant
protests…While Merkel was busy welcoming migrants into Germany, the old Eastern
Bloc-kers have fortified their borders, erecting razor-wire fences, and
stationing riot police at key crossing points.
…You only
have to listen to Merkel to hear the moral self-aggrandisement at work. It is
as if the migrant crisis is a chance to demonstrate the virtue of the EU, a
golden PR opportunity to conjure up the EU elite’s moral authority. ‘Europe
must show it is a continent of values, a continent of solidarity’, she said
recently. European Council chief Donald Tusk echoed Merkel when he warned
against ‘populism and xenophobia’ in
Europe’s midst, and then declared: ‘Our
political aim should be to strengthen Europe against right-wing extremists…
More
sinister still has been the suggestion that Eastern Europe’s migrant problem,
its refusal to let them all in, has its roots in its unconfronted past – the
past of pogroms, of persecution, and,
more pointedly, a barely suppressed fascism. Never reckoned with, this past
is now erupting all too easily into the present. Merkel herself riffed on
Eastern atavism when she accused the region of failing to learn from history.
Austrian chancellor Werner Faymann, speaking to Der Spiegel, was more
explicitly allusive: ‘Piling refugees on
trains in the hope that they go far, far away brings back memories of the
darkest period of our continent.’ The
Polish-born Princeton historian, Jan Gross, went even further in an article for
Die Welt, when he asserted that eastern EU states had ‘proven to be intolerant,
narrow-minded, and xenophobic’: ‘German society, which has become conscious
of its historical crimes, has learned through them how to approach moral and
political challenges like the current influx of refugees. Eastern Europe, on
the other hand, has yet to come to terms with its murderous past.’
It’s a
striking vision of a Europe divided between the drivers of progress in the
West, and the prisoners of the past in the East. In this story of the migrant
crisis, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and
assorted Balkan states appear to be in desperate need of the West’s
21st-century moral instruction…"
You can read Spiked's
article in full here
And if you haven't already, please have a look at my
FrontPage magazine article, "Western European vs. Eastern European Responses
to Mass, Unvetted, Muslim Immigration Compassion vs. Intolerance? Don't Believe
the Propaganda" here
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Konstanty Gebert, evidently not thinking deep thoughts. Source |
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Hey, Konstanty Gebert, perhaps you have heard that Europe is less safe for Jews? |
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Hey, Konstanty Gebert, perhaps you have not seen this photo of ISIS persecution? CNN published it. |
I read Gebert's article a few weeks ago and was left baffled. Surely Gebert knows that after arriving and recovering that many joined Ander's army. Just because they were refugees did not mean that they could stop fighting. Taking thousands of able bodied men and not organizing them into a fighting force to deal with ISIS and Assad seems ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteSpiked also wrote something similar about the Euro 2012 issue
http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/12520#.VjZkCCu_mpo
Chris Helinsky
"Baffled" good word. What is he thinking?
DeleteThe agenda behind all this is clear: To weaken Poland's Catholic culture.
ReplyDeleteOne way this is being done is by the constant attacks on the Catholic Church.
Another way that this is being attempted is to flood Poland with non-Christians. The more of them, the better.
Yes, I too see this as a political attack Jan. Not being a Catholic, I take no sides in the matter of Catholic culture. And wonder why Mr.Gebert does, and why he feels entitled to.
DeleteBut I do note the venue, and that his opinions are mainstream and so tell us where the PC is - at the moment. And I can only continue to hope and pray that we won't be goaded into taking any sides, but will think seriously about the Godly advice to be "no part" of the world. It certainly is not hiding its true self from us!
I like the way you phrased your question:
ReplyDelete"And wonder why Mr.Gebert does, and why he feels entitled to."
That is the standard mentality of the Holocaust establishment. They think that they are morally superior to Poles, and therefore feel entitled to moralize about Polish conduct, and to talk down to Poles.
Jan I'm offended by your comment, and I don't think it's helpful.
DeleteYou refer to Gebert as a member of the "Holocaust establishment." This term is offensive.
You refer to Gebert as if he is something other than a Pole. He is a Pole. He was born in Warsaw. He has lived his life in Poland. He lives in Poland now. He was a member of Solidarity.
You perhaps refer to him as something other than Polish because he is Jewish. That's not accurate. Jews can be Polish just as much as Catholics, and Konstanty Gebert is certainly Polish.
Being born in Poland, and living in Poland, does not necessarily make one a Pole. Being in Poland, and being OF Poland, are two different things.
ReplyDeleteThe Solidarity movement had brought many disparate elements of people together--people who had nothing in common except opposition to the then-current Communist policies. The left-wing of the Solidarity movement, notably Michnik and Gebert, had no problem, in principle, with the anti-Christian aspects of Communism, only with its totalitarianism.
I think that we need to finally call a spade a spade. Gebert, and others of his circle, are acting with open enmity to Polish interests. Whether they are "Poles" in some sense, or not, can be debated, insofar as.they are supporting a Pole-attack position.
You brought up Gebert's Jewishness, not I. In fact, I prefer too use the term "Holocaust establishment" instead of "Jew" precisely because not all Jews promote the standard narrative on the specialness of the Holocaust and the Poles' "fault" in it, and precisely because some Jews had been ardent Polish patriots.
Gebert, unfortunately, is not one of them.
Finally, I think our sense of being offended should be directed were it belongs--against those who defame Poland.
A blog reader sent the link for this blog to Konstanty Gebert via email and invited him to comment.
ReplyDeleteMr. Gebert declined to comment.
I hope he has read the blog though.
DeleteHe did, Sue. He said it was a "hatchet job."
DeleteI can't say that I am surprised. Gebert is one of a number of people on the Left who do not like addressing their critics.
DeleteChris Helinsky
So Gebert is now complaining about hatchet jobs. Look who's talking!
DeleteA hatchet job... well, it really is beyond satire!! Glad he read it though. The fact is that you never know. It might have made him think - even if he doesn't want to acknowledge that.
Delete