Jerzy Popieluszko was a Polish priest who was supportive of the Solidarity movement. Communist police beat him badly, tied him and put him in the trunk of a car, and then dropped his body in the Wisla River. His statue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was desecrated with garbage and a graffito reading "No Polish." This story was reported on May 6, 2021 here.
Thank you to Izabela for alerting me to this news.
My book, "Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype" is about stereotypes of Poles. I'm qualified to talk about that topic.
I'm not qualified to talk about reparations, or PiS, so I don't talk much about those topics. I sometimes talk around these topics if they impinge on stereotypes of Poles.
The meme, below, just came through my Facebook feed. I'm not sharing this meme to endorse it.
In fact there's a problem with the meme. "YOU have one cow." In fact, the cow in question belonged to a Jewish family, no? It wasn't YOUR cow. It was another family's cow. That family wants reparations.
I'm sharing this meme to show how some process the reparations debate. Again, I'm not qualified to comment on the meme's accuracy. It does interest me, though, as a reflection of some people's thoughts on this matter.
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If Polish Jews were looked down upon it
was because they were "greenies" as my father would say, meaning
greenhorns, immigrants from the OLD country.
When I was in grade 12, I think, I was
in a class with a few non-Jewish guys and they would joke back and forth with
some of the Jewish guys about being "goys". I didn't know these guys
well but a year or two later I used to run into one of them, D--- C-------, at
university.
One winter's day in the early seventies,
we were walking outside together from one class to another and talking about
music. He said he like the blues. I wanted to say something funny that would
fit in with the kind of humour I had seen these guys use in high school so I
said "That's because you're a goy." I said this in an ironic way,
purely as a joke but he got offended and asked me never to say that again. And
I still cringe a bit when I think of it.
A few years later, I think I used this
joke again in similar way with a guy I'd met at my summer job. He also got
offended and asked me to not say that again. And, for the most part, I don't
think I have. We had been very friendly and continued to be so. I visited his
home and went out with him and his girl friend.
Once, though, later, in the early 1980s,
I was sharing a house with three other people. One girl was Jewish and had a
non-Jewish boyfriend. He was a regular visitor and one day he and I were
sitting together in the living room while she was getting ready to go out. We
were watching SCTV, the well-known comedy show, on TV.
A skit with the two "hosers",
Doug and Bob Mackenzie, came on and it was very funny. These two guys were
supposed to be rural bumpkins from northern Canada who lived for beer and
cigarettes and said "eh" at the end of every sentence.
I said that we didn't call them hosers;
we called them "goyim". I thought that was hilarious. But I don't
think Bruce did and I was very embarrassed because I didn't mean that all
non-Jews were uncouth louts. The hosers do, in many ways, typify what I think
is meant by the word "goyim". But while they are drunk and irresponsible
but loveable, the latter have a tendency to be violent as well.
I remember wondering what
"goy" really meant and trying to justify its use in my own mind. A
possible answer seemed to be that the Jews in Eastern Europe had been
surrounded by peasants who were uncultured and had religious prejudices against
Jews which sometimes, even often, led to violence.
When I was about 14, my friend Norm used
to tell me jokes made by people like David Steinberg, then a young comedian
from Winnipeg and Mordechai Richler, a novelist from Montreal. I know that he
used the word Polaks. And I think he told me a joke by David Steinberg that
something to do with goyim being ready to sell their children for a bottle of
whiskey. And I used to think that this idea of people to whom whiskey was so
important was very funny. Even though I didn't know anyone like that myself.
Informant was a male from Toronto whose
maternal grandparents were Jews from Poland and whose paternal grandparents
were Jews from Hungary
"I
Have Always Been Afraid to Get Close to Any 'Real' Jews"# 12
"Germans.
I don't Like Hearing the Language" #14
"Those
Shoes Kick My People to Death" #15
"Why
Get Your Hopes Up?" # 16
"Goyim Sell Their Children for a
Bottle of Whiskey" # 17
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| Mourners and local residents watch as pallbearers place the coffins of the victims of the Kielce pogrom in a mass grave at the Jewish cemetery. Source: USHMM The Kielce Pogrom was sparked by a blood libel. |
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| Father Tadeusz Guz Source |
Algemeiner March 24, 2021
Polish
Catholic University Professor Who Endorsed Violently Antisemitic ‘Blood Libel’
Exonerated by Disciplinary Committee
By
Ben Cohen
A
professor at Poland’s leading Catholic university has been spared from
disciplinary action and exonerated for a lecture he delivered in 2018 in which
he claimed that Polish Jews had engaged in ritual murder — one of the deadliest
antisemitic falsehoods to have persisted over the centuries.
Fr.
Tadeusz Guz, a professor of philosophy at the John Paul II Catholic University
of Lublin (KUL), endorsed the “blood libel” during a May 26, 2018 public
lecture in Warsaw, in which he falsely alleged that Jews in Poland had engaged
in the slaughter of Christian children for ritual purposes.
“We
know, dear people, that the facts of ritual murder cannot be erased from
history,” Guz told his audience. “Why? Because we, the Polish state, in our
archives, in the surviving documents, have had over the centuries — when Jews
lived together with our Polish nation — we have legally valid sentences for
ritual murders.”
After
a complaint was filed by the Polish Council of Christians and Jews, both the
Archdiocese of Lublin and the academic authorities at KUL distanced themselves
from Guz, but notably refrained from taking further measures against him. “The
lecture activities of Fr. Guza outside the university are undertaken and
carried out by him on his own responsibility, and the theses he proclaimed are
not the position of his superiors,” a joint statement from the two institutions
proclaimed at the time…
“Contrary
to the KUL committee’s claims, the whole lecture was antisemitic. He argued
that Jews as a community have failed God by not converting to Christianity,”
Rafał Pankowski, NEVER AGAIN’S director, told The Algemeiner on Wednesday…
According
to Pankowski, Guz has been a regular guest on Radio Maryja — a major Catholic
broadcaster that frequently transmits antisemitic content — and has delivered
other antisemitic lectures in the past. In one such lecture, he accused
powerful Jews of having financed Hitler’s regime and the Holocaust.
Read
full story here
Polish
News
Monday,
April 12, 2021
KUL.
Father professor Tadeusz Guz about the ritual murder. The position of the
director of the POLIN Museum
I
cannot be silent when the world receives a message straight from the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion – this is how the director of the POLIN Museum of the
History of Polish Jews, Zygmunt Stępiński, reacted to the decision of the
Disciplinary Commission of the Catholic University of Lublin, which upheld the
discontinuance of the proceedings in the case of a university employee, Rev.
Professor Tadeusz Guz. It is about his statement about ritual murders…
On
April 1, a statement on the decision of the Disciplinary Committee was issued
by the director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Zygmunt
Stępiński, who wrote, inter alia, that “with amazement and indignation he
received the decision of the Disciplinary Committee of the Catholic University
of Lublin regarding the scandalous statement by Rev. Prof. Tadeusz Guz
regarding the so-called ‘ritual murder'”
“Respecting
the autonomy of the university, I cannot remain silent when the world receives a
message straight from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Nazi or Stalinist
propaganda” – he emphasized. He also lodged a protest with the rector of the
university, priest professor Mirosław Kalinowski.
Read
full story here
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| Kasia Strek for The New York Times |
Two years ago, the Polish town of Krasnik, like many other municipalities in Poland, declared itself an LGBT-Free Zone. Krasnik has paid a heavy financial and reputational cost. A sister city cut off relations. Millions of dollars in foreign aid disappeared. The town has become "a synonym for homophobia," the mayor says. "We have become Europe's laughingstock." The mayor wants the anti-LGBT resolution repealed.
Openly gay Cezary Nieradko said the town pharmacist refused to fill his prescription for a heart medication.
PiS chairman Jaroslaw Kaczynski alleges that LGBT ideas are "weakening the West." One wonders if he has heard of Michelangelo, George Cukor, Martina Navratilova, Douglas Murray, Sappho, or Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Full story here.
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| Source |
I was just scrolling idly through Facebook when I read a post that caused my jaw to drop. An entire Hasidic Jewish family, father, mother, and baby, were slashed on the street in New York City.
This news shocked me. Who pulls a knife on a baby in a stroller? An entire Jewish family? Why?
I was shocked, again, when I saw that the attack happened last week. I live within eyeshot of New York City. I get most of my news from WNYC, the NYC and New Jersey NPR affiliate. I can't say that they never reported this news story, but I heard not a word of it from WNYC. I learned about it from Facebook.
I also never heard anything on WNYC about the horrific murder of Mohammad Anwar, an honorable immigrant from Pakistan, 66 years old, who was killed by two girls in Washington DC. Those two girls will not serve a day behind bars. I learned about this story exclusively from right-wing talk radio.
I also did not hear anything about Christine Engelhardt, a 24-year-old woman who was drugged, raped, robbed, and left for dead in Miami.
These are three shocking and significant stories. Why am I not hearing about them from my normal news sources?
There was another shocker to the story about the slashed Jewish family. I wanted to know who did this. What kind of a sick person would just walk up to an innocent family and start stabbing a young husband, wife, and little baby?
I spent some minutes searching Google and then Duck Duck Go and I found only the name of the attacker. No photo. No reason why he would attack Jews. Who is this person? Why is he being shielded?
What is going on?
