Rift Between Trump and Europe Is Now Open and Angry

T. Belman. This is a good thing. Europe rarely did anything for the US. Trump wants to confront Iran but the EU is resiting him. Trump wants to undermine the PA and UNRWA and Erope is trying to thwart his every move. Trump is very supportive of Israel and her rights to the Jordan R. and EU is doing their best to undermine Israel and Trump. France and Germany are embracing Muslim immigration and making it a crime to criticize islam. Trump is against this. The EU can support Trump or go it alone.

By Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold, NYT


Vice President Mike Pence and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in Munich on Saturday. She pushed back against his call for European allies to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.Matthias Schrader/Associated Press

MUNICH — European leaders have long been alarmed that President Trump’s words and Twitter messages could undo a trans-Atlantic alliance that had grown stronger over seven decades. They had clung to the hope that those ties would bear up under the strain.

But in the last few days of a prestigious annual security conference in Munich, the rift between Europe and the Trump administration became open, angry and concrete, diplomats and analysts say.

A senior German official, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on such matters, shrugged his shoulders and said: “No one any longer believes that Trump cares about the views or interests of the allies. It’s broken.”

The most immediate danger, diplomats and intelligence officials warned, is that the trans-Atlantic fissures now risk being exploited by Russia and China.

Even the saturnine Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, happily noted the strains, remarking that the Euro-Atlantic relationship had become increasingly “tense.”

“We see new cracks forming, and old cracks deepening,” Mr. Lavrov said.

The Europeans no longer believe that Washington will change, not when Mr. Trump sees traditional allies as economic rivals and leadership as diktat. His distaste for multilateralism and international cooperation is a challenge to the very heart of what Europe is and needs to be in order to have an impact in the world.

But beyond the Trump administration, an increasing number of Europeans say they believe that relations with the United States will never be the same again.

Karl Kaiser, a longtime analyst of German-American relations, said, “Two years of Mr. Trump, and a majority of French and Germans now trust Russia and China more than the United States.”

American troops near Manbij, Syria, last year. President Trump’s plan to withdraw United States forces from the country will help Russia and Iran, some European leaders say.Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

American troops near Manbij, Syria, last year. President Trump’s plan to withdraw United States forces from the country will help Russia and Iran, some European leaders say.Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, a former adviser to the German president and director of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund, said: “If an alliance becomes unilateral and transactional, then it’s no longer an alliance.”

There were signs that not all American and European leaders were willing to surrender the alliance so easily.

To show solidarity with Europe, more than 50 American lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats — a record number — attended the Munich Security Conference. They came, said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, “to show Europeans that there is another branch of government which strongly supports NATO and the trans-Atlantic alliance.”

The most visible pushback against Washington came from Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany — who delivered an unusually passionate speech — and from her defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen. They spoke about the dangers of unilateral actions by major partners without discussing the consequences with allies.

They cited Mr. Trump’s recent announcements that American troops would leave northern Syria and Afghanistan, as well as the administration’s decision to suspend one of the last remaining arms-control agreements: the ban on land-based intermediate range missiles.

That decision affects European security, and there has been no alternative strategy, Ms. Merkel said. Abandoning the treaty, despite Russia’s violations, helps decouple Germany from the American nuclear umbrella.

“We sit there in the middle with the result,” Ms. Merkel said.

The Syria pullout, she continued, could only help Russia and Iran. That view was echoed by the French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who called American policy in Syria “a mystery to me.”

When he was told by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, that the United States would preserve “some capacity” in Syria, the normally diplomatic Mr. Le Drian said, sarcastically: “Oh, that’s good news. I didn’t know.” And then he added acerbically: “That fills me with joy.”

Europeans are angry that renewed American sanctions on Iran hurt European companies far more than American ones.Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Europeans are angry that renewed American sanctions on Iran hurt European companies far more than American ones.Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Vice President Mike Pence, who spoke after Ms. Merkel in Munich, met stony silence when he tried to pressure allies to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, a sign of the continuing anger at Washington’s decision to scrap the deal unilaterally. European allies regard the pact as vital to European security and to the preservation of nuclear nonproliferation.

Even more, the Europeans are angry that renewed American sanctions hurt European companies far more than any American ones.

Ms. Merkel said the split over Iran “depresses me very much,” but she stressed that Europe and the United States were ultimately pursuing the same goal. She said the deal was one way to have influence over Iran — influence she clearly felt that Washington was throwing away.

Mr. Pence, in his speech, praised Mr. Trump and what he called the restoration of American leadership of the West. But Europeans were not convinced.

“It’s very odd to talk of American leadership of the alliance when it’s Trump who has caused the crisis,” said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament. “The Trump administration is seen by many Europeans as chiefly responsible for the tensions and the weakening of the West.”

Nathalie Tocci, a senior adviser to the European foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, said that for Europeans, the divide went “to the heart of how we view international relations and our national interest.”

“We’re small and understandably need partnership both inside Europe and outside, with NATO,” Ms. Tocci said.

But that is also a sign of European weakness and division. “We want to believe it will be fine again later because we have no alternative,” she said.

President Trump with NATO leaders in Brussels last year. The Europeans no longer believe that Washington will change, not when Mr. Trump sees traditional allies as economic rivals and leadership as diktat.Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump with NATO leaders in Brussels last year. The Europeans no longer believe that Washington will change, not when Mr. Trump sees traditional allies as economic rivals and leadership as diktat.Doug Mills/The New York Times

It means the dependency on the United States will continue, even as the Europeans look for ways not to depend on Washington as much, analysts say.

The Europeans “are beginning to do what we should,” Ms. Tocci said — spend more on the military, discuss some sort of European army in coordination with NATO, think more strategically as Europe in the face of Russia and China. “But no one believes it’s doable in the short run,” she added, and many believe it’s not easily doable at all.

Europeans are waiting for change in the White House, Ms. Tocci and others said.

“The Europeans are holding their breath and thinking that it’s maybe only two more years,” said Victoria Nuland, a former senior American official. “At the same time, they don’t want to do anything to wreck things further or to insult Trump personally and risk an angry response.”

A growing number of European voices warn that the current trans-Atlantic discord has more fundamental roots, and that there will be no returning to the past.

Mr. Trump is not the cause, said Norbert Röttgen, the chairman of the German Parliament’s foreign relations committee, but a symptom of the tectonic shifts in geopolitics that have led to the return of great power rivalry and centrifugal forces away from multilateralism.

“In the post-Trump era, there is no return to the pre-Trump era,” he said. “The status quo was Europe’s security is guaranteed by the United States. That won’t happen again.”

Jan Techau, director of the Europe Program at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin, worries that the intervening gap will mean strategic vulnerability to Russia and China. The United States faces “a superpower’s dilemma,” Mr. Techau said.

It has to “pressure allies to do more,” he said. “At the same time, the message has to be ‘We will always be there.’”

“Trump does not understand the price he pays in strategic terms when he bashes his allies so publicly and openly,” Mr. Techau added.

If there is any ambiguity, he said, Russia and China know that the security guarantee is no longer real. “When that protection goes,” he said, “then this strategic space is up for grabs.”

February 17, 2019 | 50 Comments »

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  1. @ Michael S:

    Biblical words of the Psalms, that proclaim:

    “Pour forth Your wrath upon the nations that do not recognize You and upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name. For they have devoured Jacob and destroyed his habitation. Pour forth Your fury upon them and let Your burning wrath overtake them. Pursue them with anger and destroy them from beneath the heavens of the L-rd.”

    “The L-rd is a G-d of vengeance; O G-d of vengeance, arise!” (Psalms 94). And the rabbis say: “Yes, when vengeance is needed, it is a great thing” (Brachot, 3a). Or “let the high praises of G-d be in their throat and a two edged sword in their hand – to execute vengeance upon the nations…” (Psalms 58).

    ” Vengeance so that the world shall know the L-rd and cry, “Verily, there is a G-d that judgeth in the earth…” and: “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth vengeance, he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked” (Psalms 58

    “O daughter of Babylon that art to be destroyed; Happy shall he be that repayeth thee as thou hast done to us. Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the rock” (Psalm 137).

    And the Jews of Ashkenaz who created a prayer of vengeance in memory of the Jews massacred during the Crusades, a prayer that we read each Sabbath and that says: “May He avenge the blood of His servants which has been shed, as it is written in the Torah of Moses, the man of G-d: ‘O nations, make His people joyful! He avenges the blood of His servants, renders retribution to His foes and atones for His land and His people.’ And in the holy writings it says: ‘Why should the nations say, ‘where is their G-d?'”

    Our rabbis tell us (Midrash Avchir): “‘And Israel saw the great hand of G-d’ – When the Almighty wished to drown the Egyptians, the Archangel of Egypt (Uza) said: ‘Sovereign of the Universe! You are called just and righteous… why do you wish to drown the Egyptians?’ At that moment Gabriel rose and took a brick and said: ‘Sovereign of the Universe! These who enslaved Your children such a terrible slavery as this, shall you have mercy on them?’ Immediately, the Almighty drowned them.”

  2. @ yamit82:
    Hi, Yamit

    I understand your zeal for Deut. 25, as interpreted in Jewish tradition (transforming Amalek into Poland). I understand Deuteronomy and other scriptures (to the extent that I understand them at all) in a different way.

    Jews observe some commandments, and excuse themselves of others — even in their most religious communities. I won’t argue with them on these points; I have enough trouble with argumentative Christians. One thing I can assure you of, though, is that I don’t credit “zeal” as being God’s ultimate test of acceptance. He wants us to be like Himself. Indeed, He is zealous; but if that were His ultimate nature, we all would have been destroyed long ago.

    Hillel said the most important commandment was (I paraphrase): “Don’t do to others what you don’t want them to do to you”. Do you want the Poles to persist in all their past grievances against Jews? Do you want them to be Antisemitic? Then equate them with “Amalek” and burn against them forever. As you do, you will accomplish nothing against the Poles but destroy yourself.

    That’s how I see it.

  3. Please read Wikipedia’s “History of the Jews in Poland” for a fair and balanced account. I just sent you the introductory paragraph from it, but Ted sent it to trash.

  4. Uh-o, Ted just wrote that my latest comment is “awaiting moderation.” I guess he’s decided we have talked too long about this subject.

  5. MY WORD: THE ANTISEMITISM WAKE-UP CALL

    BY LIAT COLLINS FEBRUARY 22, 2019 04:49

    Liat Collins also has a fair and balanced account of the crisis. She points out that antisemitism is widespread in present-day Europe, not just in Poland. It seems to be just as bad, and in some ways worse, in Britain, France and Belgium. Singling Poland out for harsh criticism is a big mistake.

  9. @ Bear Klein: Bear, I believe that 90 per cent of CNN’s reporters and columnists are antisemitic, at least once the cameras and the microphones are turned off. CNN has over the past two years inflicted more harm on Israeli-Jewish interests than thirty million Poles, through their campaign to oust our first true friend in the White House. Also, remember that 90 per cent of what you read on CNN is fake news.

  11. Poles according to polls (CNN 2018) harbor anti Jewish views in about 40% of the people. Pretending that it is not so is just fooling oneself. Knowing reality is important so one can deal with it!

    Study: ‘Surge’ in Polish antisemitism since controversial Holocaust law
    “The surge of hostility to Jews and the Jewish State in Polish media and politics in early 2018 took many observers by surprise.”

    A new academic study by the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs has described “a surge” in hostility to Jews and Israel in Polish media and politics in 2018 following the efforts to pass a controversial law making it a crime to say that the Polish state or nation was complicit in the Holocaust.

    According to the study written by Dr. Rafa? Pankowski, a sociology professor at Warsaw’s Collegium Civitas, there has been a “disturbing revival of antisemitism” in Poland since the law was introduced and stirred controversy.

    “The surge of hostility to Jews and the Jewish State in the Polish media and politics in early 2018 took many observers by surprise,” wrote Pankowski for the IJFA, a publication of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations which operates under the auspices of the World Jewish Congress.

    “It was also a great shock because, for many years, bilateral relations between Poland and Israel had been especially cordial and fruitful.”

    Pankowski noted that Poland has made “significant progress in recognizing and researching the inconvenient truths about its own legacy of antisemitism” unlike other post-Communist countries in eastern Europe.

    “In the wake of the new legislation, however, that progress has been seriously hampered and the findings of these historians, and even their patriotism, has been called into question,” he wrote.

    He noted that while in recent years anti-Jewish discourse was mainly confined to extreme quarters, of late it has found a prominent place in the mainstream media, especially in state-controlled news outlets.

    “The surge in radical nationalist discourse,” warns Dr. Pankowski, “reflects a deeper crisis of liberal, democratic, and humanistic values – in Poland and elsewhere in post-Communist Europe, as well as in the wider world.”

    Last month, Poland amended the law and removed sections making it a crime to say the country was complicit in the Holocaust.

    The crisis boiled over again earlier this month however, when Yad Vashem issued a strong denunciation of a joint statement by the Israeli and Polish governments issued immediately after the law was amended, in which the Holocaust museum said that the “historical assertions, presented as unchallenged facts, in the joint statement contain grave errors and deceptions.”

    https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Study-Surge-in-Polish-antisemitism-since-controversial-Holocaust-law-562748

  12. Please read Eldad Beck’s article in Israel Hayom in full. But here is a key selection:

    “Israel is like Poland in the sense that there is a difference between what people in the street think and feel and the nonsense that politicians spout to scrape up one more vote here and there,” Walner says.

    “The only time I encountered anti-Semitism was in a club when a few scumbags who were drunk said to me, ‘What are you doing here? Go back to your country.’ But I’ve experienced things like that in the U.S., too. Aside from that, I manage a business that employs 40 workers and I’m the only Israeli and the only Jew. Everyone knows that the cafés are Israeli-owned. I sell Israeli products in them, the atmosphere is Israeli and I still haven’t encountered anti-Semitism,” he says.

    “The opposite. People come because they know it’s an Israeli business. The Israeli side doesn’t want to hear that the Poles were also hurt in the war. The Polish Jews who were murdered were still Poles. And Polish [gentiles] were murdered in the German camps, too, although in a different scope. Israelis don’t want to understand that and take in the fact that despite the terrible conditions of the [Nazi] occupation, the number of Righteous Among the Nations in Poland is much higher than the number in other countries whom Israelis have long since forgiven.”

    Walner is the grandson of Holocaust survivors from Poland and Romania. He says his Polish grandparents, who survived the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz, did not hold a grudge against the Poles.

    “It was clear to them that there were good people and bad people. It was a war and everyone wanted to survive. Still, many Poles risked their lives and the lives of their families to save Jews. I met my wife, the mother of my two daughters, on a dating site. After we went out a few times, she told me that her mother’s sister was married to a man who had been named a Righteous Among the Nations. The family of my company’s manager saved Jews, too. A lot of Israelis refuse to acknowledge that for some reason and it’s very convenient for politicians to throw around accusations without knowing what they’re talking about. It’s very frustrating for me,” he says.

  13. To better understand my point of view about Israel-Polish relations at the present time, read

    This crisis is embarrassing us’
    Israelis in Poland describe their frustration at the latest friction between their home and adopted countries • Israelis, they say, won’t admit that the Poles suffered under the Nazis and believe that Poland was worse to the Jews than other countries.

    Eldad Beck // published on 22/02/2019

  15. @ Ted Belman:

    No Ted, I don’t know what happened. Computers, -and especially YOUR computer- are complete mysteries to me. Anyway I’m sorry I gave you the trouble of having to look for my posts, and thank you for restoring them.

  16. @ adamdalgliesh:

    ADAM… I was only kidding. You have been, I noticed, taking things far too seriously these past few days. I think you have “election fever”… which requires rest, two asperins,……. and stay away from controversial subjects for 3-4 days.

    BUT…..Pulleasse…call il .. “Torah”.. not “scriptures” …Michael calls it “scriptures”……

    Again I’m only kidding….well… half…

    Because of the time difference TED probably hasn’t seen my post yet but will likely looi into it…

  17. @ Edgar G.:
    I have absolutely no idea what is going on. One of your comments went into trash and the other in spam. I looked at your registration and there was no mention of “anonymous” there. Then I looked at “anonymous” and found that one of our users used that name but it had nothing to do with you.

    For some reason this appears above your email “Google%20Chrome” for both Edgar G. and Anonymous. Any reason why?

    It doesn’t appear with any other comments.

  18. I won’t comment on what Israel should do or say to Poland, and I don’t blame today’s Poles for what happened back in the day. However, this discussion is missing the flavor of how Poles discuss this issue on any mainstream website. Pure filth, really shocking. It’s like reading comments from Palestinians. That is all.

  19. @ Edgar G.: I will swear on the scriptures, Edgar, that I had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance of your posts. I have no special clout with Ted. I would never try to have your posts blocked.

    I have had many of my posts disappear as well. When I repeatedly complained to Ted about these disappearances, he eventually found some of them in the Trash file and then at my request moved them to this and the other comment sections to which I had posted them. Ted’s the guy you need to speak to about these disappearances. He told me that his computer was either misprogramed or suffering from an overload, or both.

    If you are ever able to retrieve your lost posts, I will read them with great interest and attention, as I do all your posts. I realize that sometimes you are right, and that I could be wrong, when we disagree.Best wishes, Adam.

    Best wishes, Adam.

  20. WHAT happened to my 2 posts. One ..answering Adam’s “alleged” exculpation of the Poles. and the other… objecting that it had been placed in MODERATION and classed as “Anonymous”.

    Now they’ve both disappeared…..

    Hey Adam what sort of “pull” do you have with the management….?? Use it better on the Trump Plan…

  22. I just posted the above comment responding to ADAM. I’ve been classed as “anonymous’ and placed In moderatIon”..whIch i hate lIKe poIson. it affronts me ImmenseLY.

    I distinctly made sure that my name ..”Edgar G.” was in the slot . It’s almost automatic. When I touch the slot my name appears in a small column. I press it and it appears in the slot. The same for the emial addess and Site. SOooo. …??

  23. @ adamdalgliesh:

    You should be ashamed after making such a SWEEPING statement of the “alleged” etc. and your own absolute knowledge that what you were saying was false.. to NOW try to wriggle out of that long drosha by the weak-kneed post about partially admitting the truth.. but exculpating it by saying that other countries were worse.

    They are not the focus of the article and comments. Bear
    Klein alone has produced OVERWHELMiNG documentation of what I originally wrote. and which you denied….”allegedly” …I believe.

    Get hold of yourself…. and stop allowing your undoubted combative and often brilliant constructions to get the better of you.

    TED this is Edgar G. Why are you referring to me as “Anonymous” and putting me in Moderation..?

  24. Prizes and punishment

    For the Germans, Jew-hunting depended on large-scale involvement by the local Polish population. Testimonies to this effect are found in German documents as well. One of them was a “working memorandum” issued by the Warsaw-area SS and police commandant in March 1943, titled “Concerns: Arrest and liquidation of Jews who remain in hiding.” The document, which is reproduced in Grabowski’s book, states, “In order to succeed, one has to involve the Sonderdienst [Special Services], the Polish Police and the informers. It is also necessary to involve the broad masses of Polish society.” The document added, “Persons who have helped to apprehend the Jews can receive up to one-third of the seized property.”

    To achieve their goal, Grabowski explains, the Germans developed a system of prizes and punishments, which they intertwined in their propaganda against “the Jewish threat.” Punishment for hiding Jews, for example, could be death, arrest or fines. “Peasants, firefighters, elders, and Polish rural youth were forcibly made parts of the German system and were subject to brutal German reprisals and equally brutal German discipline,” Grabowski writes. At the same time, he observes that the “deadly efficiency” of this system depended on “the zeal and willingness of its participants.”

    According to a study conducted by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance, an organization that operates under the auspices of the government and with its funding, about 700 Poles were executed by the Nazis for helping Jews hide. One of the best-known cases was that of the Ulma family, peasants from the village of Markowa, who hid a few Jews. The entire family – parents (the mother was pregnant at the time) and their six children – were murdered by the Germans together with the Jews in hiding.

    Last year, a museum commemorating the Ulmas’ heroism was established in their village, as well as a memorial site for other Poles who helped Jews during the Holocaust. Grabowski acknowledges the heroism of the Ulma family, but points out that the impact of their deed is heightened precisely because it was so exceptional in the local milieu.

    The Polish authorities are using the Ulma family cynically, Grabowski says, in an attempt to present a false picture to the effect that the rescue of Jews was widespread in occupied Poland – a narrative, he adds, that has the support of a large majority of the Polish population. Against this background, “The fact that the Poles who saved Jews were very few, and that they were a tiny, terrorized group who feared, most of all, their own neighbors, seems lost on the advocates of ‘innocent Poland,’” he asserts.

    What about the rewards? Testimonies collected by Grabowski show that in some cases the Polish peasants negotiated directly with the Germans in this regard. His book relates the case of Bronislaw Przedzial, from the small village of Bagienica, who demanded two kilograms of sugar from the Germans for the Jews he found while scouring nearby forests.

    In another place, the Germans offered 500 zloty for every Jew, according to the testimony of a Jewish survivor. One peasant, Grabowski writes, who was sentenced to prison after the war for complicity in the murder of two Jews, said that the notorious Gestapo commandant in the city of Nowy Sacz, Heinrich Hamann, “asked us what it is we wanted for having killed these Jews.” To which one of the Poles replied, “Whatever you see fit, although I, personally, would be happy with some clothes.”

    The Poles sometimes complained about the quality of the “prizes” they received. Grabowski tells about a peasant who buried the bodies of Jews who had been shot and afterward took away a dress, shoes and a kerchief. “But only afterward did I found out [sic] that there was a bullet hole in the back of the dress,” he complained.

    But it wasn’t only simple and ignorant peasants who took part in hunting down Jews. According to the postwar testimony of a firefighter named Franciszek Glab, from the town of Lipnica, his superior ordered him and his fellow firefighters to search for Jews in hiding.

    “Although we had information that they were hiding in Lipcina, we found no one,” he related. “Later on, [someone] told us that there were some Jews in [the village of] Falkowa. We went to Falkowa and there we found one Jewess in the house of Kurzawa and another Jew at Fryda’s place. We roughed up the Jews real good and the same day we brought them to the Polish police.” A few days later, he added, “all of us were called in to report to the Gestapo in Nowy Sacz, where we received two ex-Jewish coats each, as a reward for our diligent work.”

    Locating the Jews who were in hiding in Polish homes was not an easy task. The wife of Jan Kurzawa, in whose barn the firefighters found a Jewish woman, related that at first he refused to inform on her, and that it took “a tap of an axe on his head to make him talk.”

    Grabowski also emerged with a more general insight from his comprehensive research, which included a lengthy stay as a research fellow at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies. He is now convinced that the commonly used term “bystanders” – to describe the indifferent response of the majority of the local population, in Poland and elsewhere in Europe – should be removed from historical lexicon. His conclusion from the many testimonies he read is that it was impossible to remain neutral and indifferent, particularly in occupied Poland, where the Holocaust reached the very doorstep of so many homes.

    “The general lesson,” he says, “is that no one who went through World War II in Eastern Europe emerged without wounds and scars of one kind or another. There were no ‘bystanders’ to the Holocaust – everybody acted, one way or another, became involved.”

    Some took an active part in the hunt of their own free will. Others did so under coercion. And there were those who watched, from behind the curtain, as Jews were led by Polish peasants to the police station or were murdered by them.

    https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-orgy-of-murder-the-poles-who-hunted-jews-and-turned-them-in-1.5430977

  25. Other commentary from Grabowski,

    There is no doubt, he writes in his book, “that the great majority of Jews in hiding perished as a consequence of betrayal. They were denounced or simply seized, tied up and delivered by locals to the nearest station of the Polish police, or to the German gendarmerie.”

    A whole mechanism was set up to hunt Jews, he says. It operated under German supervision but all those on the ground were Poles: villagers who conducted “night watches,” local informers, policemen, firefighters and others. Together, Grabowski maintains, they created a dense web that made it almost impossible for those hiding to escape discovery.

    Grabowski emphasizes that the actual number of Jews murdered by Poles is even higher than his estimate. “[My] count is very, very conservative,” he notes, “because I have not included here the human toll of the Polish ‘Blue’ police, who were a deadly force not only after the liquidation of the ghettos but during these so-called liquidation actions.” To support his argument, he recruits Emmanuel Ringelblum, the historian of the Warsaw Ghetto, who said that the “Blue” police alone were responsible for “hundreds of thousands of Jewish deaths.”

    Harrowing documents

    Grabowski was born in Warsaw into a mixed family. His father was Jewish, from a Krakow family that assimilated well into Polish society, survived the Holocaust by hiding in Warsaw and took part in the 1944 uprising by the Polish underground there, which cost the lives of some 200,000 Poles and resulted in the city’s near-total destruction. His mother is Christian from a veteran, noble Polish family. He has relatives in Israel.

    In 1988, about a year before the fall of the communist regime that had ruled Poland since the end of World War II, he immigrated to Canada. “I was convinced that communism would never fall. I was wrong,” says Grabowski. A professor of history at the University of Ottawa, he is specializing in “the issues surrounding the extermination of the Polish Jews as well as the history of Jewish-Polish relations during the 1939-1945 period,” as his web page says.

    “Hunt for the Jews” joins two other books authored by Poles of Jewish origin that deal with the crimes perpetrated by their countrymen against their Jewish neighbors. The most famous of these is “Neighbors,” by Jan T. Gross. Published in 2000, that book shocked the whole of Poland and thrust the country into a prolonged bout of soul-searching. It tells the story of the pogrom in Jedwabne, in July 1941, in which the village’s Jews were burned alive by their Polish neighbors. In 2004, the Polish journalist Anna Bikont published “The Crime and the Silence” (English edition, 2015; Hebrew translation published 2016), which contains interviews with eyewitnesses, murderers and survivors connected to the pogrom described by Gross.

    But whereas Gross and Bikont produced micro-histories of one pogrom, Grabowski set out to address a comprehensive phenomenon. By doing so, he broadened the scope of current knowledge of the part played by Poles in persecuting Jews in the Holocaust.

    The background to his research consisted of the numerous and well-known stories of many Poles about the war period, which often included statements like, “The Germans arrived and took the Jews away.” One of the goals of his book, he writes, “is to answer the question about how exactly the Germans knew where to look for the Jews, and to uncover the circumstances surrounding the detection and death of unfortunate refugees hidden in the villages and forests of the Polish countryside.”

    He found the answer in archives, where he came across harrowing documents, such as the diary left behind by Stanislaw Zeminski, a teacher from the town of Lukow in eastern Poland. He documented the war’s atrocities until he himself died in the Majdanek death camp, probably in 1943.

    Zeminski’s diary, which was found after his death in a garbage heap in the camp, eventually reached the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

    “For me, the situation was even more tragic,” Zeminski wrote, “because the orgy of murders was not only the deed of the Germans, and their Ukrainian and Latvian helpers. It was clear that our [i.e., Polish] policemen would take part in the slaughter (one knows that they are like animals), but it turned out that normal Poles, accidental volunteers, took part as well.”

    What he wrote next makes for difficult reading. He provides testimony by Polish peasants who surrounded a nearby village and launched a hunt for Jews, as Zeminski puts it. They did it, he writes, to obtain prizes offered by the German occupiers: vodka, sugar, potatoes, oil – along with personal items taken from the victims.

    “Local inhabitants were actively involved in pulling out Jews from the bunkers in the ghetto,” Zeminski wrote in his diary, which Grabowski quotes in his book. “They pulled out the Jews from the houses; they caught them in the fields, in the meadows. The shots are still ringing, but our hyenas already set their sights on the Jewish riches. The [Jewish] bodies are still warm, but people already start to write letters, asking for Jewish houses, Jewish stores, workshops or parcels of land.” People, he noted. “volunteered for this hunt willingly, without any coercion.”

    The “heroes” of Grabowski’s book, those who took part in the “hunt for the Jews” and turned it into a national sport, were people like Jozef Kozaczka, from Dabrowa, who established a large hiding place for 18 of the city’s Jews – and then, at his own initiative, turned them all over to the Germans.

    To read the whole article go to https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-orgy-of-murder-the-poles-who-hunted-jews-and-turned-them-in-1.5430977

  26. ‘Orgy of Murder’: The Poles Who ‘Hunted’ Jews and Turned Them Over to the Nazis

    More than 200,000 Jews were killed, directly or indirectly, by Poles in World War II, says historian Jan Grabowski, who studied the brutal persecution of the victims. His conclusion: There were no bystanders in the Holocaust.

    Last month, the Polish-born historian Jan Grabowski won a lawsuit he filed against a Polish website. About 18 months earlier, the site had launched a savage attack on him under the headline, “Sieg Heil, Mr. Grabowski,” accompanied by a photograph of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

    That followed the publication of a favorable report in a German newspaper about Grabowski’s book “Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland.” The book describes the Polish population’s involvement in turning in and murdering Jews who asked for their help during the Holocaust.

    The editors of the right-wing site Fronda.pl criticized Grabowski for washing Poland’s dirty World War II laundry in full international view. But what upset the editors most was that the book drew praise in, of all places, Germany, which was responsible for the war. “So, the argument went, if the Germans praise Grabowski, then Grabowski is a Nazi,” Grabowski, 55, explained in an email interview with Haaretz from Ottawa, where he teaches.

    Grabowski, whose father was a Holocaust survivor and whose research focuses on the crimes perpetrated by the Poles in the war, decided not to take it lying down. He won a lawsuit against the website’s owner, Tadeusz Grzesik, last September. At the end of January, the owner lost the appeal as well; he was sentenced to do community service work, pay a fine of 3,000 zloty ($750) to Children of the Holocaust – an organization of Polish survivors who were children during the war – and to publish an apology.

    “As you can see, writing history in Poland, about Poland, is not boring at all,” Grabowski said.

    On a more serious note, he added, “As a Polish historian, I think that trying to cover up the less glorious aspects of our own national past – something that’s being done today in Poland with a lot of enthusiasm – is a crime against our profession. It is also unethical and, in the long run, counterproductive and silly.”

    Grabowski’s book was first published in his native land in 2011, and two years later in English, by Indiana University Press. A revised and expanded edition, in Hebrew translation, has now been published by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial authority in Jerusalem.

    The research underlying the book is the fruit of a three-year archival journey embarked upon by Grabowski in pursuit of a phenomenon called “hunting for Jews.” The term, which originates in the German word Judenjagd, refers to the murderous search for Jews who succeeded in escaping from the ghettos and sought haven from their compatriots in occupied Poland.

    Grabowski’s book concentrates on a rural region of southeastern Poland called Dabrowa Tarnowska. Of its population of 60,000 on the eve of the war, 5,000 were Jews, almost all of whom were deported to the death camp Belzec. Of 500 who managed to escape and hide among the Poles, only 38 survived the war. All the others, as Grabowski discovered, were betrayed and murdered in direct or indirect ways by their Polish neighbors. The events described in “Hunt for the Jews,” notes the historian Timothy Snyder (author of “Bloodlands”), constitute “an inquiry into human behavior in dark times from which all can learn.”

    Drawing on Polish, Jewish and German records from the war and postwar periods, Grabowski was able to document the local population’s involvement in turning over and murdering the Jews who sought their help – but also the heroism of Poles who tried to rescue their Jewish neighbors and sometimes paid for it with their lives.

    Between these two extremes, Grabowski also found more complex cases: of Poles who helped Jews not for altruistic and moral reasons, but out of greed. In this connection, his study challenges the prevailing opinion, according to which most of those who proffered help were “righteous.” He describes no few instances in which Poles saved Jews and then extorted money from them, and in some cases murdered them if they didn’t get what they wanted. continue at https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-orgy-of-murder-the-poles-who-hunted-jews-and-turned-them-in-1.5430977

  27. @ adamdalgliesh:I must agree with Edgar that you sound like a lawyer but the Polish Government Lawyer good on spin but short on actual any real defense of Polish atrocities.

    The only factual thing you cited was that other horrible atrocities occurred during the holocaust in other parts of Europe. That is correct there were. This does not absolve or lessen crimes that the Poles who committed murders, fingered Jews to the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust.

    All this came up with the Poles again because they have trying to whitewash their crimes during the Holocaust by enacting a law that makes it illegal to talk or write about what the Poles did during the war. This is why Israelis on all sides of the political spectrum blasted Poland for this attempted cover up of history. It is a shame when Jews participate in this spin and cover up.

    It is perfectly acceptable and accurate to say their were good Poles who helped Jews. Such as their diplomats in Switzerland who saved several hundred Jews getting them fake passports to get to South America. Poland also correctly talks about that they were also victims of the Nazis as the Nazis tried to destroy their nation. However downplaying the many and horrible things Poles participated in is not acceptable and should never be forgotten. Whitewash of history or saying to forget, lends to allowing history to be repeated. We see antisemitism rearing its ugly head in Europe and North America now.

  28. @ yamit82:

    The prohibition against forgetting Amalek’s attack

    …do not forget! (Deuteronomy 25:19)

    There is a positive mitzvah to remember how Amalek cravenly ambushed the weakest members of the Jews who left Egypt (Mitzvah #603). Here, we have a negative mitzvah prohibiting us from forgetting that which Amalek did to our ancestors. Not only are we not to forget it, we also are not to forgive it; that would cause us to come to embrace the Amalekite nation and would effectively nullify the mitzvah.

    The reason for this mitzvah is to remember God’s providence over Israel and how those who attack Him meet their downfall.

    This mitzvah applies in all times and places.

  29. @ Michael S:

    Jews have long memories and 70 years of our history is like a min. of time on a clock.

    Jihad?: The obligation to eradicate Amalek

    …you shall wipe out the memory of Amalek from beneath Heaven… (Deuteronomy 25:19)

    We are commanded to eradicate the nation of Amalek, wiping any vestige of them from the face of the Earth. The reason is because of the cowardly attack that the Amalekites made against God when He took the Jews out of Egypt. Apparently, God knows that certain traits are ingrained within the descendants of Amalek. Nevertheless, many people find this to be a very troubling mitzvah. As historic victims of inquisitions and pogroms, they ask, don’t we find it inconsistent to justify genocide?

    We can understand this mitzvah better if we realize that the Amalekites had the opportunity to turn their backs on the ways of their nation and be spared their fate. (This is very different from the way in which Jews were treated in, say, the Holocaust.) As with other nations, Amalek had the opportunity to accept the seven universal (Noachide) laws and submit to Israel’s rule. Not only that, they could convert. The Talmud in Gittin (57b) famously tells us that Haman had descendants who taught Torah in B’nei Brak. (Many authorities believe this to include the renowned sage Rabbi Akiva, who was known to be from B’nei Brak and who was descended from converts.)

    This mitzvah applies in all times and places. It is discussed in the Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin (20b) and is codified in the Mishneh Torah in the fifth chapter of Hilchos Melachim. This mitzvah is #188 of the 248 positive mitzvos in the Rambam’s Sefer HaMitzvos and #77 of the 77 positive mitzvos that can be observed today as listed in the Chofetz Chaim’s Sefer HaMitzvos HaKatzar.

  30. @ Bear Klein:
    Bear,

    I don’t doubt the scholarship of your rebuttals to Adam, nor do I doubt the legitimacy of Adam’s assertions. What matters to me, is that bitter memories of this act of violence, which happened some 75 years ago (nearly 3 generations), should be dredged up today in a way that harms Israel’s relationships and standing in the world.

    My wife read an article the other day, about bitterness. “Holding bitterness is like drinking poison, then expecting someone else to die.”

    The Jewish people would do well to learn that lesson, as well as others like the Koreans and the Irish.

  31. @ Bear Klein: Yes, there were Poles who participated in pogroms before, during, and after the Holocaust. But they were far less numerous than the Hungarians, Rumanians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and Latvians who did the same thing. And Israeli officials have been far less critical of those countries and their present governments. Certainly there were more people even in France, Belgium and Holland who helped the Nazis round up Jews than there were in Poland.

    Again, the books and articles that seek to document massive Polish participation in the Holocaust rely on very little evidence and a great deal of speculation and conjecture to support their claims. Their statistics have been pulled out of hats. Very, very few survivors have ever claimed to have personal, eye-witness knowledge of Poles who handed over Jews to the Nazis, or were able to name these individuals. By way of contrast, survivors of Ukrainian, Rumanians and Hungarians Nazi-sponsored “actions” were able to name a lot of names. So were non-Nazi Ukrainians, Rumanians, and Hungarians.

    All of the scholars who have pointed a finger at Poland as complicit in the Holocaust are ex-communist Polish-Jewish-Americans who have personal grudges against Poland’s postwar Communist regime. In 1968, the Polish Communist regime purged these individuals and/or their parents from their previously priviileged positions in the regime, which had once included many Jews (on-religious, of course) in high places, as part of the Communist bloc’s retaliation for Israel’s victory over the Soviet Union’s Midest satellites in the Six-Day War. Polish communist leader Wldisslav Gomulka and his Minister of the Interior, whose name I forget, were indeed vicious antisemites. But they were also obeying orders from the Kremlin.

    Poland’s scholarly accusers have extrapolated from their own negative experiences in postwar Communist Poland, to conclude that the Poles must have been to blame for the Holocaust carried out by the German occupiers of their former country–which is a bllod libel. Israeli and American Jews have bought the blood libel hook, line and sinker, with disasterous results for Israel’s foreign relations.

  32. “Current research shows they were lost not only because the Germans were hunting for the Jews, but because of a deep involvement of Poles from all parts of society. Sometimes the Jews were caught and handed to the Germans, or were caught and handed to the Blue Police [Polish police force in German occupied Poland]. And some were killed by Poles,” said Dreifuss.

    Of the tens of thousands who tried to flee — most were killed, and Poles were very involved

    “Of the tens of thousands who tried to flee — most were killed, and Poles were very involved,” emphasized Dreifuss.

    https://www.timesofisrael.com/complicity-of-poles-in-the-deaths-of-jews-is-highly-underestimated-scholars-say/

  33. Complicity of Poles in the deaths of Jews is highly underestimated, scholars say

    According to a 1970 article, 200,000 Jews died at the hands of their Polish neighbors. A new law in Poland could make it difficult to publish these findings today.

    In a 1970 article, pioneering Polish-Jewish historian Szymon Datner estimated that 200,000 Jews died at the hands of Poles during World War II. Attempting to flee the Germans’ cattle cars and camps, they found their deaths after being handed over to the authorities, informed upon while in hiding, or through murder by their Polish neighbors.

    From 1942 to 1945, according to Datner’s calculations, of the 250,000 Jews who attempted to escape the Germans in occupied Poland, only 10-16 percent survived.

    A Jewish Holocaust survivor himself, Datner eventually became the head of the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw and worked as a historian for the precursor to Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). But were he alive today, he would potentially be prosecuted for his scholarly findings.

    According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, both Poles in uniform and individual citizens were complicit in condemning their Jewish neighbors to death. “Poland was brutally occupied by the Germans… As German forces implemented the killing, they drew upon some Polish agencies, such as Polish police forces and railroad personnel, in the guarding of ghettos and the deportation of Jews to the killing centers. Individual Poles often helped in the identification, denunciation, and hunting down of Jews in hiding, often profiting from the associated blackmail, and actively participated in the plunder of Jewish property.”

    continue article at https://www.timesofisrael.com/complicity-of-poles-in-the-deaths-of-jews-is-highly-underestimated-scholars-say/

  34. There were good Poles who are honored at Yad Vashem for their righteous deeds in saving Jews during the war. However Poland government is trying to sweep under the rug the terrible crimes in the Holocaust many Poles participated in.

    Poles murdered Jews. They participated in pogroms in places like Jedwabne, where Polish locals helped the Nazis round up and burn alive hundreds of Jews in 1941. Individual Poles tortured or mistreated Jews during the war at death camps and as civilians, and others denounced their Jewish neighbors.

    Debates about Poland’s role in the Holocaust began raging as soon as the war ended. They continue today—in part at the behest of the right-wing, nationalist political party, known as Law and Justice, that has led Poland since 2015. Since Law and Justice’s victory, the Polish government has courted controversy by cracking down on the media about the language used when discussing the parts of the Holocaust that took place on Polish soil. It has also taken a heavy-handed approach to representations of Polish history, as when it forced a new museum about World War II to merge with one focused on Polish suffering under the Nazis. https://www.history.com/news/poland-holocaust-law-death-camps


    I had an Uncle Izzy who was a Polish Jew. He was one of 11 children including a twin brother. He and an uncle of his were the only ones to survive the Holocaust from a very large family. So living Jews in the memory of those who died should speak up and not allow falsehoods to be said about what occurred.

  35. Poles even after the war participated in full blown massacres (Pogroms) of Jews when they tried to return home to Poland. This has been documented in full blown books and academic articles. Poles collaborated in large scale with the Nazis to help mass murder three (3) million Jews during the Holocaust.

    Yes there were good Poles who helped some Jews escape. Some took in children and made their own raising them as Catholics.

    For those actually want to start getting educated on the subject.

    Kielce: The Post-Holocaust Pogrom That Poland Is Still Fighting Over
    After World War II, Jewish refugees found they could never return to their native land—a sentiment that some echo today

    The massacre started with a blood libel. That wouldn’t be unusual, except this wasn’t the Middle Ages or even Nazi Germany—it was 1946, a year after the end of World War II.

    A few days earlier, an 8-year-old Polish boy named Henryk B?aszczyk had gone missing from his home in Kielce, Poland, a city of 50,000 in southeastern Poland. When Henryk reappeared two days later, he told his family he had been held by a man in a basement. As his father walked him to the police station to recount his story, the boy pointed at a man who was walking near the large corner building at 7 Planty Street.

    He did it, Henryk said.

    The building, which was owned by the Jewish Committee and housed many Jewish institutions, was home to up to 180 Jews. It did not have a basement. Most of the residents were refugees, having survived the horrors of the death camps that decimated more than 90 percent of the Polish Jewish population. After the war, they had returned to their homeland with the hope that they could leave the past behind them. They had no idea they were about to become the target of anti-Semitic aggression once again—this time from the Polish neighbors they lived alongside.

    On the morning of July 4, a small group of state militia and local police approached the building to investigate the alleged kidnapping. As rumors of misdeeds spread, a version of the centuries-old “blood libel” that Jews were kidnapping Christian children for ritual sacrifice, a mob began to assemble. But it was the police and military who started the violence, recounts Polish historian Jan T. Gross in his 2006 book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz. Though they were ostensibly there to protect civilians and keep the peace, officers instead opened fire and began dragging Jews into the courtyard, where the townspeople savagely attacked the Jewish residents

    Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/kielce-post-holocaust-pogrom-poland-still-fighting-over-180967681/#IyP366gLcfKf0jYw.99

  36. @ adamdalgliesh:
    Adam, Thank you for checking the facts, and reporting them.

    Many people here are ready and willing to carry on grudges into eternity. In the place I expect to spend eternity, such things must be left at the door, in order to get in.

    Putting aside talk of heaven, the behavior of Klutz Katz and others against the Poles, who are TRYING to be friends with Israel, is simply laughable. No other country in the world — not Venezuela, not Zimbabwe, not North Korea — is as foolish as Israel in biting the hand that feeds it. South Korea comes close, insisting that the Japanese grovel on their knees for eternity over World War II. Even they, I imagine, will one day realize that enough is enough!

    Poland took steps months ago, to defuse this crisis; but Israelis like Katz and Netanyahu somehow feel they are helping themselves by wrecking things. I suspect that both of them are simply trying to gain points among voters.

    This is Israel’s business. I wish them the best.

  38. @ adamdalgliesh:
    “I have reservations about reprinting in Israpundit articles from an anti-American source like the New York Times. Isn’t it possible to find an analysis of the Poland conference from a pro-American source?”

    I agree. NYT accuses the US President of destroying NATO, long before it happens. The most important reason NATO is in danger of collapsing has nothing to do with Pres. Trump, and everything to do with the fact that Europe itself is collapsing because of moral, cultural and political ineptness.

  39. @ Edgar G.: Edgar, maybe I’m talking like a lawyer. My brother thought I should become one. But I was young and idealistic and I failed to take his advice. I have been poor ever since.

    As to the facts of the case. I believe that Jews have wildly exaggerated Polish anti-semitism. I have studied Polish history extensively, and cannot possibly convey all that I have learned about it in the comments sections, because Ted would kill me.

    However, my study of the facts convinces me that for most of the past 500 years of Polish history, Jews were actually treated better by the Poles than by the other Gentile nations of Europe. Jews have tended to blame the Jews for the pogroms carried out by the Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians and ethnic Germans, who formed up to 20 per cent of Poland’s population during most of the past 500 years. Few of these pogroms were the work of ethnic Poles. But the present population of Poland consists almost entirely of ethnic Poles.

    I will also stand by my assertion that there are very few first-hand accounts by people who actually witnessed a Pole betraying a Jew to the S.S. Nearly all of the Jews who made these claims were repeating what they were told a second, third or fourth hand by other survivors. And they were very rarely able to provide specifics or name names. Even then, only a few dozen Polish Jewish survivors told these stories to the handful of historians (three, I believe) who wrote books and articles claiming widespread Polish complicity in the Holocaust. These historians all had personal grudges against Poland, because they were former Polish-Jewish communists who had been forced to emigrate to America when the Polish communist government launched an “anti-Zionist” purge of Jews in the party in 1968. However, the Polish communist regime was a puppet of the Soviets, who at the time were launching a massive anti-Israel and antisemitic campaign.

    The Polish-Jewish-American historians, now working at American universities, wrongly blamed the Polish people as a whole for the persecutions they had endured from the Polish communist regime. And they extrapolated from their postwar experiences that the Polish people must have been to blame for the Holocaust as well, which was committed before they were born, or when they were very small children, unable to understand what was going on. But most Israeli officials read their books and believed every word that was in them.

    The Polish government in exile did try to rescue the Polish Jews, but its efforts were rebuffed by America, Britain, and Russia, who were all unwilling to accept Jewish refugees.

    Between 1933 and 1939, the Polish government worked with Vladimir Jabotinsky in an effort to persuade foreign governments to accept Jewish refugees, and to persuade the Brits to admit the Polish Jews to Palestine. In order to do this, they made antisemitic statements to foreign governments in an effort to persuade them that Polish Jews were in immanent danger and needed to be admitted to other countries, especially the United States, as refugees. But in private, they believed that the threat to the Jews came from the Germans, not themselves or their fellow Poles. The Polish government had been convinced from as soon as the Nazis took power, that the Nazis would occupy Poland eventually, and that the Polish army would not be strong enough to defeat them. In private, they wanted to help their Jewish population escape before it was too late. Of course, most Jews in Poland and elsewhere did not know about their private dealings with Jabotinsky, and took the Polish foreign ministry’s antisemitic statements at face value. They were not aware of what was gong on behind the scenes.

  40. @ adamdalgliesh:

    Adam..Oh Adam…are you beginning to talk like a lawyer now. “alleged involvement’…You now damned well they were deeply involved. Do you expect centuries of Jew-hate and persecution in Poland to suddenly evaporate when they are invaded and beaten. but encouraged by the Nazis to vent their hate on Jews now more defenceless than ever, because there was no Polish govt. to “try” to keep them within certain bounds.

    There are literally hundreds or even thousands of authenticated accounts of vicious Polish rounding up of Jews for the Nazis …also informing where they were hiding …. Also well documented cases of Jews returning back after the war to clam their homes and found whole villages and towns whose citizens had, in the meantime taken over the homes…waiting there to murder them. I’ve read about them and I’m damned sure you have too.

    You should be ashamed….suddenly turning into a see hear and say no evil.. …
    a blinking.”simon-pure”.

  41. In any case, Netanyahu’s, Katz,s and other prominent Israelis attacks on Poland’s alleged involvement iin the Holocaust are unfair and untrue. There were no Polish Waffen SS. units, serving the Nazis, although there were French, Belgian and Dutch units. The guards at the Nazi death and slave labor camps were German and Ukrainian. There were few if any ethnic Poles among them.The trains that transported Jews to the death camps were manned by Germans, not Poles. Documentary evidence that large numbers of Poles turned in Jews to the Nazis have never been found. Jewish survivors have identified by name very few Poles who had turned in Jews to the Nazis. And even these survivors nearly always reported hearsay, and could not vouch for these accusations from personal knowledge. Professional Nazi-hunters have identified very few ethnic Poles as participants in the Holocaust, and very few if any have been arrested and charged with the murder of Jews, either outside or inside Poland. On the other hand, thousands of Poles who rescued Jews at great risk to their own lives have been identified by name by survivors, and have been honored by Yad Yashem and the surviving Polish Jewish community.

  42. Europe is now having to confront demons it thought it had laid to rest. The old pathologies of anti-Semitism, populist nationalism, and territorial aggression are threatening to tear the European postwar consensus apart. A vast migrant wave is exacerbating tensions between Europeans and their Muslim minorities; rising anti-Semitism causes Jewish schools and synagogues in France and Germany to resemble armed bunkers; and Russian imperial ambitions are destabilizing nations from Estonia to Ukraine. With President Trump now threatening to abandon America’s traditional role as upholder of the liberal world order and guarantor of the continent’s security, Europe may be alone in dealing with these unprecedented challenges.

    Trump’s address in Poland is very illuminating !!

    Here’s the Full Text of Donald Trump’s Speech in Poland

    And so I am here today not just to visit an old ally, but to hold it up as an example for others who seek freedom and who wish to summon the courage and the will to defend our civilization. The story of Poland is the story of a people who have never lost hope, who have never been broken, and who have never, ever forgotten who they are.

    Under a double occupation the Polish people endured evils beyond description: the Katyn forest massacre, the occupations, the Holocaust, the Warsaw Ghetto and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the destruction of this beautiful capital city, and the deaths of nearly one in five Polish people. A vibrant Jewish population — the largest in Europe — was reduced to almost nothing after the Nazis systematically murdered millions of Poland’s Jewish citizens, along with countless others, during that brutal occupation.

    As I stand here today before this incredible crowd, this faithful nation, we can still hear those voices that echo through history. Their message is as true today as ever. The people of Poland, the people of America, and the people of Europe still cry out “We want God.”

    Together, with Pope John Paul II, the Poles reasserted their identity as a nation devoted to God. And with that powerful declaration of who you are, you came to understand what to do and how to live.

    Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.

    Americans, Poles, and the nations of Europe value individual freedom and sovereignty. We must work together to confront forces, whether they come from inside or out, from the South or the East, that threaten over time to undermine these values and to erase the bonds of culture, faith and tradition that make us who we are. If left unchecked, these forces will undermine our courage, sap our spirit, and weaken our will to defend ourselves and our societies.

    We write symphonies. We pursue innovation. We celebrate our ancient heroes, embrace our timeless traditions and customs, and always seek to explore and discover brand-new frontiers.

    We reward brilliance. We strive for excellence, and cherish inspiring works of art that honor God. We treasure the rule of law and protect the right to free speech and free expression.

    We empower women as pillars of our society and of our success. We put faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, at the center of our lives. And we debate everything. We challenge everything. We seek to know everything so that we can better know ourselves.

    And above all, we value the dignity of every human life, protect the rights of every person, and share the hope of every soul to live in freedom. That is who we are. Those are the priceless ties that bind us together as nations, as allies, and as a civilization.

    What we have, what we inherited from our — and you know this better than anybody, and you see it today with this incredible group of people — what we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before. And if we fail to preserve it, it will never, ever exist again. So we cannot fail.

    We have to remember that our defense is not just a commitment of money, it is a commitment of will. Because as the Polish experience reminds us, the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?

    We can have the largest economies and the most lethal weapons anywhere on Earth, but if we do not have strong families and strong values, then we will be weak and we will not survive. (Applause.) If anyone forgets the critical importance of these things, let them come to one country that never has. Let them come to Poland. And let them come here, to Warsaw, and learn the story of the Warsaw Uprising.

    Our own fight for the West does not begin on the battlefield — it begins with our minds, our wills, and our souls. Today, the ties that unite our civilization are no less vital, and demand no less defense, than that bare shred of land on which the hope of Poland once totally rested. Our freedom, our civilization, and our survival depend on these bonds of history, culture, and memory.

    I declare today for the world to hear that the West will never, ever be broken. Our values will prevail. Our people will thrive. And our civilization will triumph.

    So, together, let us all fight like the Poles — for family, for freedom, for country, and for God.

    I don’t believe globalist, multilateral defeatist and nihilistic Western Europeans were sympathetic to Trump’s aspirational visions. He views the preservation of Western Civilization and Europe hang in the balance. Europe is not taking up his challenge. That is the crux of the problem between Europe and Trump IMO.

  43. Most of Europe, within a decade at best, will be a Muslim majority Nation of their own doing. Why should the US devote more funds and energy attempting to protect them from themselves? If their own populist uprisings, that are so widespread now, don’t succeed in curbing and ending this destruction of Western culture immediately, we will be supporting an Islamic Caliphate there instead of the modern culture that had been the EU nations. Honestly, I believe much of Europe has already passed the point of no return. Very soon we will be dealing with European refugees attempting to flee their home nations.

  45. Why is Israel denouncing Poland at this time? Article by Shmueli Boteach in Israel Hayom. http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/why-is-israels-foreign-minister-attacking-poland/

    I agree with Boteach. Poland has been one of the few friends has in Europe. What possible motive could Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Katz have had for making blistering attacks on the Poles, just when their Prime Minister was planning to attend a five-nation conference in Jerusalem to coordinate policies between them, and just afterNetanyahu attended a conference hosted by Poland and attended by 70 nations to discuss coordinating policies against Iran. Israelis seem to have no sense whatsoever of good sense, manners, or timing.

  46. I wish posters here (and everywhere else!) would refer to the President of the United States as “PRESIDENT Trump”. That is the proper way to address the leader of a country, especially the leader of the foremost economic and military power in the world.

    Concerning differences the US has with European countries, these are not problems caused by one man: They are differences between countries. President Trump represents American interests, Chancellor Merkel represents German interests, etc. All the parties, in these cases, are democracies, not dictatorships. As long as the German people continue to back Ms. Merkel’s party, and the American people continue to back Mr. Trump and the Republican party, these differences will continue to be between the German people and the American people, not merely between their leaders.

    Very soon, I expect Chancellor Merkel and President Macron to be booted out of office. This may resolve outstanding issues those countries have with the likes of the US and the UK.

  47. Bear Klein Said:

    @ adamdalgliesh:
    https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2019/02/14/watch-pompeo-urges-confronting-iran-key-to-peace-in-middle-east/

    Iran is the top threat in the Middle East and confronting it is key to reaching peace in the entire region, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday at a Warsaw security conference.

    Mr. Pompeo made his observation as he stood with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the opening session at the conference. He warned “pushing back” against Iran was central to dealing with all the region’s other problems.

    “You can’t achieve peace and stability in the Middle East without confronting Iran. It’s just not possible,” Mr. Pompeo said in response to opening remarks by the Israeli leader.

  48. I have reservations about reprinting in Israpundit articles from an anti-American source like the New York Times. Isn’t it possible to find an analysis of the Poland conference from a pro-American source?

  49. The EU is in the early stages or process of falling apart. The unfettered disastrous immigration of Muslims from the middle east and Africa is causing it to crack at the seams. The globalists led by Merkel and her friends in France tried dictating to the rest of the EU who they must take into their countries like it or not. Never mind the rapes of their daughters and lost neighborhoods were they could no longer safely walk.

    Since Trump replaced Obama as POTUS the EU lost their patron saint of Globalism across the Atlantic. Trump is making it painful for German companies to try and do business with Iran and go along with the pretense that they have shelved their nuclear plans. Duplicity about contributing to NATO has been replaced by public humiliation and being called out as not real equal partners in the mutual defense pact.

    Now Europeans who have had it with the Globalists such as Italy, Poland and others are saying we are not going along with your dictates.

    Israel is better off with friends like Trump and a weaker EU unable to dictate to Israel what it is permitted to do. In fact threats of economic boycott by Europe towards Israel have become significantly less in the age of Trump. Israel should hope Trump wins a second term in 2020.

  50. The Europeans are so wrong… The idea that the French and Germans would trust the Russians and Chinese because they have now been forced to pay their own bills is perfect.