A far-right newspaper with national distribution in Poland has made headlines after it ran an article on its front page instructing readers on “how to recognize a Jew,” JTA reported Wednesday.
The Tylko Polska weekly, or “Only Poland,” listed categories which it said could be used to identify Jewish people. The supposedly distinctive Jewish attributes include “names, anthropological features, expressions, appearances, character traits, methods of operation” and “disinformation activities.”
“How to defeat them? This cannot go on!” the front page also said.
It featured an image of Jan Gross, a Polish-Jewish academic at Princeton University, who has sparked controversy for suggesting Polish people were complicit in the murder of Jews during the Holocaust. Gross spoke last month at a Holocaust studies conference in Poland whose speakers the newspaper accused of being anti-Polish. One professor received death threats, while protesters branded another participant “a dirty Jew.”
The newspaper is published by Leszek Bubl, a fringe nationalist political candidate and sometime musician who has sung about “rabid” rabbis, and caused an outcry among Polish politicians when it was spotted in a kiosk at the premise of the lower house of the Polish parliament, the Sejm.
Conservative politician Michał Kamiński, with a copy of the paper in his hand, appealed at a press conference “to the Speaker of the Sejm, Marek Kuchciński, to explain how it is possible that this type of paper is propagated in the Polish parliament.”
“It cannot go on – I consider it an absolute scandal that in the Sejm… filthy publications with messages similar to Nazi newspapers are being sold,” added Kamiński. In response, the director of the Sejm Information Centre, Andrzej Grzegrzolka, announced his office would request the publication be removed from the parliament’s press kit.
The question of Poland’s complicity in the Holocaust has engendered much bitterness. In March, the Polish government watered down a controversial Holocaust law and removed parts that imposed jail terms on anyone who suggests the nation was complicit in Nazi crimes, only six months after its approval in parliament sparked an international outcry.
The legislation caused an intense diplomatic crisis between Israel and Poland and led to an outpouring of anti-Semitic rhetoric in the country as nationalist media sought to portray Poland as under attack from foreign powers and Jewish advocacy groups.
[Photo: Algemeiner / Twitter ]