Comments

I haven't seen any comments for a while. I contacted a previous blog reader and asked him what was up. He said he tried to comment but his comment did not appear. Is anyone else having this experience? If so, could you contact me directly? The "contact" icon is somewhere on this page.

I just went to the settings page for the blog and found a bunch of backlogged comments. I went through and published them all. I have no idea what's going on. I will continue to try and figure it out. I apologize. I thought everyone died. I'm Polish. That's how we think. 

"The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS" Robert Spencer's New Book

"The History of Jihad from Muhammad to Isis" by Robert Spencer

Friend, this is what you need to do. Go to your favorite brick-and-mortar store, or your favorite online site, and purchase a copy of Robert Spencer's, "The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to Isis." Producing this book was a tremendous act of courage by Spencer and Bombardier Books. The same opponents of Western Civilization who rioted over the Danish Muhammad cartoons, who slaughtered the team at French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo, who murdered 37 innocent Turks at the Sivas Massacre, and who stabbed and shot the Japanese and Italian translators, and the Norwegian publisher, of Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" – those same dark forces want to riot and stab and bomb and slaughter over the words on these pages. Spencer and Bombardier deserve at the very least your investment in its full purchase price.

Free Polish Books

I have about fifteen Polish books to give away. They are maybe about forty years old. They are from Poland, and Poland back then didn't have great paper, so the paper is brittle and yellowed, and they do smell like old books. 

Most of the text is in Polish. Some are in English. Topics include Polish folk tales, folk architecture, every day life, and a couple of basic readers for those studying the Polish language. Some are picture books. One is a novel. I want to send them all to one person. I don't want to provide any more details. If you want these books, you'd be getting a bunch of general, introduction-to-Polish-culture books from communist-era Poland. 

All I ask is that you pay for postage. I've not yet had them weighed so I don't know how much it would cost. I'm guessing about ten dollars but that's just a guess. Media mail is very cheap. 

Let me know. If' I don't hear in about a week, I will recycle them. 

Interview about Bieganski

Recently I was contacted by Polish journalist, Aleksandra Rybinska. Her questions and my full answers are below. You can read the interview in Polish, here. 

I'm a Polish-American. I was born in the US of immigrant family. My parents were from peasant families. My dad was Polish. My mom was Slovak. My dad mined coal as a child. This was a typical job for Polish immigrants. My mom cleaned houses. This is also a typical immigrant job.

I went to graduate school and earned a PhD, which is not a typical thing for a Polish-American of my generation to do. I was supposed to become a house cleaner or factory worker.

In grad school, I was often treated with hostility and contempt. This surprised me. Professors insulted me openly in class, or one-on-one in private meetings. Not all professors, but plenty.

The insults' theme was that Poles are ignorant, bigoted, primitive, anti-Semites.

The prejudice I faced in grad school inspired my dissertation and book, "Bieganski, the Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture."

In that book, I talk about how American, Western European, and Israeli culture cultivate and disseminate an image of Poles and other Eastern Europeans as brutes. We are supposed to be stupid, brutal, hateful, dirty, and anti-Semitic. This image is found in films, in novels, in TV shows, in poetry, in memoirs, in news accounts, and in academic writing.

Claude Lanzmann 1925-2018 by Filip Mazurczak

Claude Lanzmann 1925-2018 

by Filip Mazurczak 

French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, whose works primarily dealt with the Holocaust, has died at ninety-two. I don’t plan on evaluating the artistic merits of his work, but I would like to write a little bit about his corrosive effect on Polish-Jewish relations.

Bieganski and Georgette Mosbacher, Nominated to be Ambassador to Poland

Georgette Mosbacher, nominated to be the next American ambassador to Poland, blames Poland's recent Holocaust speech bill for rising anti-Semitism in Europe. 

Read here and here

The Jack Phillips Masterpiece Cake Shop Decision and Bieganski

Priests in Bydgoszcz, Poland, about to be shot by Nazis. 

Some years back, Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins entered the Masterpiece Cake Shop in Colorado and asked Jack Phillips, the proprietor, to design a cake for their wedding. 

Phillips declined, saying that he does not design cakes for same-sex weddings. He also refuses to design cakes for bachelor parties and Halloween. 

Charlie Craig and Dave Mullins received many offers of free cakes. That did not satisfy them. They, and their allies, wanted Jack Phillips to suffer. 

Suffer Phillips did. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court. 

Today, the Supreme Court decided in favor of Phillips, but not, alas, on the grounds of his freedom as an artist to accept or decline artistic commissions at will. Rather, they decided on the grounds that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission was hostile to Phillips' Christianity. 

You can read their decision here. 

The Supreme Court cites the Colorado Civil Rights Commission's conflation of Jack Phillips' Christian beliefs with the Holocaust. 

That's right. Christophobes in power in the US conflated Jack Phillips' Christianity with Nazism. 

The Supreme Court said that that is wrong. 

Below please find  a quote from the Supreme Court decision: 

***

On July 25, 2014, the Commission met again. This meeting, too, was conducted in public and on the record. On this occasion another commissioner made specific reference to the previous meeting’s discussion but said far more to disparage Phillips’ beliefs. The commissioner stated:

“I would also like to reiterate what we said in the hearing or the last meeting. Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be—I mean, we—we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use their religion to hurt others.”

To describe a man’s faith as “one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use” is to disparage his religion in at least two distinct ways: by describing it as despicable, and also by characterizing it as merely rhetorical—something insubstantial and even insincere.

The commissioner even went so far as to compare Phillips’ invocation of his sincerely held religious beliefs to defenses of slavery and the Holocaust. This sentiment is inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s antidiscrimination law—a law that protects discrimination on the basis of religion as well as sexual orientation. 

***

That's right. An American CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION is staffed by Christophobes who insist that Christianity = Nazism. 

In "Bieganski the Brute Polak Stereotype" I argue that that stereotype exists at least partly to rewrite history, to shift blame for the Holocaust from Nazism, which was influenced by Social Darwinism, Romantic Nationalism, Neo-Paganism, and Scientific Racism, to Catholicism. 

You can read "Against Identifying Nazism with Christianity" here.