NYT: Massive Increase in Antisemitism in France; Muslims Are Source; "Silent Ethnic Cleansing."

Etienne Laurent/European Pressphoto Agency Source

Shocking, depressing article from the NYT. Massive increase in antisemitic hate crimes in France. Criminals are Muslims, who often cite their religion as inspiration. In one case, an elderly Holocaust survivor was murdered by an assailant yelling "Allahu Akbar."

Crimes range from Muslims spitting on Jews in public to torture and murder. Neighborhoods are emptying out. Jews are planning to leave France or to live in ethnic ghettos where they can feel safe.

People are asking Muslims to address antisemitic passages in the Koran. Muslims decline to do so.

The government does not want to speak about this. Muslims resist accepting responsibility. Muslims quoted in the article insist that the problem is "Jewish Islamophobia." One claims that Jews control the world.

Read the full article, They Spit When I Walk in the Street: The New Antisemitism in France here

Piasnica Massacres: Another Nazi Atrocity Against Poles You've Never Heard Of

The above photo came through my Facebook feed recently. I did a Google image search. The photo is identified as a record of the Massacres in Piasnica, Poland, 1939-40. 

Wikipedia reports: 

"The massacres in Piaśnica were a set of mass executions carried out by Nazi Germany during World War II, between the fall of 1939 and spring of 1940 in Piaśnica Wielka (Groß Piasnitz) in the Darzlubska Wilderness near Wejherowo. The exact number of people murdered is unknown, but estimates range between 12,000 and 14,000 victims. Most of them were Polish intellectuals from Gdańsk Pomerania, but Poles, Jews, Czechs and German inmates from mental hospitals from General Government and the Third Reich were also murdered. After the Stutthof concentration camp, Piaśnica was the largest site of killings of Polish civilians in Pomerania by the Germans, and for this reason is sometimes referred to as the "second" or "Pomeranian" Katyn. It was the first large scale Nazi atrocity in occupied Poland."

Inside Poland calls this massacres "the other Katyn." 

Inside Poland writes, "...in the autumn of 1939 began the Piaśnica massacres. Nobody, except ethnic, party-card toting Germans living in this part of Poland, was safe, and by the time the manhunts, summary shootings and mass executions were being wound down a year later, at least 16,000 people had died.

From the beginning, there was no doubt that Poles were the target of Nazi German aggression. Elżbieta Grot noted in her Genocide in Piaśnica (Ludobójstwo w Piaśnicy) that Albert Forster, Nazi Germany’s administrator of the region, roused crowds in Wejherowo, stating 'We have to eliminate the lice-ridden Poles, starting with those in the cradle… into your hands I place the fate of these Poles – you may do with them as you please.' Grot also notes that many ethnic Germans – some with Polish citizenship – who took part in the subsequent massacres later went on to become highly proficient members of the Nazi German SS."

I have nothing to add to these accounts. I am posting here simply because this photo crossed my path, and I did not want to delete it from my computer before sharing a commemoration of these innocent Polish victims of Nazism.

Re: comments. For some reason, I have not been receiving alerts about comments on my blogs, and there is a big backlog of unpublished comments. Please do comment, and I will do my best to make sure that appropriate comments are published. I apologize for the previous comments that got lost in the computer glitch. 

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.