What Is the Reaction in Poland to the October 7, 2023 Pogrom in Israel? A Norwegian Medical Student Misrepresents Poland (Allegedly)

 

I've been wondering what the reaction is in Poland to the pogrom in Israel on October 7, 2023. Arab Muslims murdered and tortured more Jewish civilians in one day than anyone else since the Holocaust. 

How have Poles and Polish American responded? 

I don't know. I have not seen polls. 

The above photos appeared on the web. One site claims that the woman is a Norwegian medical student named Marie Andersen. 

The Polish Election: My Thoughts

 

source

My thoughts about the Polish election. 

I have no thoughts to share publicly. 

Of course I have thoughts, but this blog is not the place for those thoughts. 

This blog is dedicated to coverage of Bieganski, the Brute Polak stereotype. This blog, like my book of the same title, covers stereotypes of Poles and other Bohunks as they appear in Western culture. 

The election per se has little to do with that. How the election is covered in the press does have something to do with that. When I have time, I address how Poland is often depicted as a backward country of wicked Catholics who aren't ready for the 21st century. In contrast to Poland, there is the modern Western left, with its salvific Christophobia and contempt for anyone who isn't a Woke millennial.  

I haven't had time for that lately and so I haven't been posting that, but if you read the book and the blog and apply the templates therein to current events, you will get the idea. 

I'm an American. I live in America. I speak English. During our last presidential election, I found both candidates so inexcusable that I threw my vote away and voted for someone who could never win. It was a protest vote. If Trump and Biden are the candidates in 2024, and I hope that they are not, I do not know what I will do. I think they both are unworthy of the presidency. 

My thoughts about Trump and Biden extend to the wider right and left as they exist today. I think they both are so flawed as to be unworthy of a good person's vote. 

For myself, I believe that the best route is to support institutions that advance causes I care about I donate to those causes. 

Hoping for the best for Poland and the world, and whatever that best is, it's not going to come from the current political left or the political right. It's going to come from good people doing good things, which all of us can choose to do and be every day. 

May God Grant Israel a Rapid and Complete Victory, Security, and Peace

The Nazis carried out the Holocaust, largely, in Nazi-occupied Poland. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Chlemno, Sobibor, The Warsaw and Lodz Ghettos were all in Nazi-occupied Poland.

 "The German Nazis deported to Auschwitz at least 1.3 million people of more than 20 nationalities. Of that amount, 400 thousand were registered and incarcerated in the concentration camp as prisoners while 900 thousand were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival. Jews constituted 85% of all deportees and 90% of those who were murdered." source

 

Poland did not do this; Nazi Germany did this. But this happened on Polish soil.

 

We Poles and Polonians can respond to this heavy burden of history by doing whatever we can to resist genocidal murderers, especially genocidal murderers of Jews.

 

As an American, I support my country's significant support of Israel. I vote for candidates who support Israel. I reject isolationists.

 

As an individual, I have little power. I can use my pip-squeak voice to speak big truths.

 

There is a right side and a wrong side when it comes to conflict between Israel and Arab Muslims. Israel is the right side. Arab Muslims who attack Israel, and who commit the atrocities we see now, are on the wrong side.

 

Please note that your news sources may not be covering the atrocities Arab Muslims are committing. Please do some research and discover what's really going on. This is a war carried out through the torture, murder, and desecration of the elderly, women, and children.

 

Israel has a right to exist. See my piece "Coming Out as Pro-Israel on Faceook" here.

 

Israel's Arab Muslim opponents are not reasonable people seeking solutions to limited points of contention. They are genocidal and they are profoundly anti-Semitic. The Hamas Covenant calls for the "obliteration" of Israel and for Islam to dominate the world. See here.

 

It is not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim to state these basic facts. It is anti-Arab and anti-Muslim to avoid these basic facts. Israel is not a serious threat to Muslims or to Arabs. See for example this chart Muslims nations pose a far greater threat to their neighbors and to their own populations than Israel poses to them. Iran and Iraq, Civil War in Yemen and Syria, genocide in Darfur, have all taken far more Arab Muslim lives than Israel has in defending herself.

 

There are more Muslims and / or Arabs on the street today celebrating the attack on Israel than took to the streets to protest the allegedly genocidal actions of China against Uighurs.

 

Why? Because attacks on Israel are not about Arab rights or Muslim rights. They are about genocidal anti-Semitism.

 

For all these reasons this Polish American and all decent people worldwide hope and pray for a rapid and complete victory for Israel, and security and peace for Israel.

 

Am Yisrael Chai!

Lynching of Castenge Ficarrotta and Angelo Albano. Tampa, Florida, 1910.

I refer to this image in a piece of writing and I wanted the image to be accessible to readers so I am posting it, below. 

Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer. Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

 

Amazon Manipulates Reviews and Sends Malware Link to Reviewer
Because I Didn't Like Two Hot Books

Sometime during the summer of 2023, I posted a review of Elliot Page's memoir Pageboy on Amazon. I take words seriously, even the words that constitute Amazon reviews. Language can convey truth; language can empower lies. The difference between truth and lies is the difference between life and death. In my faith, Satan is the father of lies. God is the logos, the Word; God is truth and the truth sets us free. 

Elliot Page's Pageboy is a poorly written book. I said so in my review. I said this because bad writing matters. "Writing clearly is thinking clearly." Writing poorly underwrites destructive behavior. Identifying bad writing is a worthwhile use of time.

I'm thinking of a novelist who earned his PhD writing about theater. This short, physically handicapped novelist didn't deal in bullets or fisticuffs, but he was Hitler's right-hand. Without Joseph Goebbels' speeches, movies, school curricula, and book burnings, Nazism would have found it more difficult to achieve its diabolical ends. On the other end of the ethical spectrum, we have the words of the Ten Commandments; we have the Beatitudes; we have crusading novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe who helped end slavery. Yes, words and how we use them matter a great deal.

In my review of Pageboy, mindful of current speech codes, I did not refer to Elliot Page as "she." Rather, I focused on, as I said in the review, "sentence structure, punctuation, narrative flow, and coherence." I received a cheerfully-worded email telling me that my review was up, thanking me for the review, and providing a link that allowed me to visit the review. I did so. I saw the review on Amazon.

A few days later I thought of the review again, clicked on the link Amazon provided, and saw an error message. "That page does not exist," the message said, or words to that effect. I had received no notification from Amazon that the review would be removed. I received no explanation as to why it was removed. I received no warning telling me that if I posted another honest review of a poorly written book, I would be banished from Amazon forever. I received no instruction on how to write reviews that Amazon would not delete.

Perhaps a month after that, I again attempted to review a book on Amazon, Christian Cooper's Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World. Again, I received a cheery notification from Amazon telling me that my review was posted. I clicked on the link Amazon sent and I saw the review. Again, a few days later, I clicked on that same link and got the same message. "This page does not exist." Again,  I received no notification, and no explanation.

I shrugged. I was resigned. I moved on with my life.

On September 7, 2023, weeks after the above events, my inbox was flooded with approximately one hundred emails from Amazon. The emails that I read before deleting them all said the same thing. "Thank you for reporting a fake review," or words to that effect. This made no sense. I hadn't been reporting fake reviews at Amazon. At the end of this avalanche of spam from Amazon came the final email. That final email informed me that all of my reviews, reviews going back almost thirty years, had been removed. I would never again be allowed to post reviews on Amazon, not for books or for anything else. If I bought a spatula that was a really good spatula, I could never say that on Amazon.

I was offered a link to click. I clicked on the link and was sent to the main Amazon page. There was I invited to click on another link. Computer expert friends warned me not to click on the link Amazon sent me. It was a scam link to malware. Someone at Amazon had used my account to generate a series of false reports of fake reviews, and then to ensnare me into clicking on a malware link.

The Ulma Family Beatification / My Trip to Markowa

 The Ulma family of Markowa, Poland, was recently beatified. I spoke in Markowa years ago about my work on Bieganski, the Brute Polak stereotype. I had a lovely time. I wanted to make a documentary -- I wrote up a plan -- then I was told I had cancer and would probably not survive. I couldn't find funders or any Polish Americans who were even interested in the plan so I let it go. Oh, Polonia, if only you supported your scholars more than you do.

Bieganski Lives: Tomasz Kamusella: "Rapacious Anti-Semitism Is the Foundation of the Polish Nation"

 

Tomasz Kamusella's academic biography is here. From that biography, "I was born in Upper Silesia, at that time in communist Poland. I received education at universities in the Czech Republic, Poland and South Africa. I did postdoctoral research at universities and institutes in Austria, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the US. I worked in Poland and Trinity College Dublin, before moving to St Andrews in 2011 … I am an interdisciplinary historian of modern central and eastern Europe, with a focus on language politics and nationalism."
 
In July, 2023, Kamusella released a paper entitled "Anti-Semitism: The Foundation of the Polish Nation." Quotes, below, are from that publication. You can read the entire paper here.

 

The paper is undisciplined. It does not meet academic standards. It does not advance a single thesis statement and support that statement with facts. The author jumps from asserting that "rapacious anti-Semitism" is the foundation of the Polish nation to condemnation of the szlachta's exploitation of serfs, and condemnation of all of Christianity.

 

In short, the article is a Gish gallop. A Gish gallop is logical fallacy. Here's the Wikipedia definition of a Gish gallop: "The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm their opponent by providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper's arguments at the expense of their quality."

 

Kamusella's paper is a Gish gallop.

 

But here's the thing – he's denigrating Poland and Christianity. So his paper offers up the flavor of hate that academia wants. That is, of course, Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype.

 

Thank you to Paul Kujawsky for sending this in.

 

The first two paragraphs of Kamusella's paper:

 

At the turn of the 20th century, framers of the Polish national ideology and leaders of the Polish national movement adopted antisemitism for building a Polish nation from the two enemy ethnic groups, namely, the Polish-Lithuanian noble gentry and ‘their’ Catholic and Slavophone serfs, or forced laborers. The Polish national idea excluded Jews, but its supporters had no qualms at grabbing Jewish property and cultural achievements, whenever possible and useful for the nation-building project and for individual members of such a Polish nation under construction.

 

With time, this rapacious antisemitism was written out, and even whitewashed, from the Polish national master narrative taught at Polish schools. Also, thanks to the partial incorporation of the competing ethnoconfessional and socialist projects of a Polish nation, the former being vaguely civic in its character, while the latter allowing membership through conversion to Catholicism. This process of forgetting about antisemitic atrocities has been helped by the ‘vanishing’ of Poland’s Jews, first in the Holocaust and subsequently in the country’s communist-period ethnic cleansing of Holocaust survivors. Yet, with the authoritarian turn in Polish politics after 2015, antisemitism is back in political practice and programs. Notwithstanding the absence of Jews as a visible community, antisemitism – quite frighteningly – still attracts votes at the ballot box.