Polish Political Party Seeks Prosecution of Israeli President For Telling the Truth About the Holocaust

True to form. Poland just keeps stepping in it. Instead of simply owning up to the complicity of some Poles in the Holocaust, they keep shifting the blame to the Jews who tell the truth about what happened.

Fresh on the heels of Poland’s perverted version of Nazi-esque Nuremberg laws criminalizing mentioning the complicity of “the Polish nation” in the crimes of the Holocaust, comes this persecution of Reuven Rivlin for the crime of telling the truth.

Of the infamous Polish law, Polish scholar Jan T. Gross said, “It’s terrible.” “It criminalizes all survivors of the Holocaust. Every Jew who is still alive and comes from Poland could be prosecuted.”

“Polish Ultranationalists Seek Prosecution of Israeli President Rivlin Over Reported Holocaust Remarks,” by Ben Cohen, Algemeiner, April 17, 2018:

Poland’s leading far-right political party announced on Tuesday that it was launching criminal proceedings against the president of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, under new legislation that criminalizes public discussion of Polish collusion with the Nazi authorities during World War II.

In a letter to Polish state prosecutor Marcin Gołębiewicz, the head of the far-right National Movement (RN), Robert Winnicki, said he wished “to inform about the crime committed by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin consisting in attributing to the Polish State responsibility for Nazi crimes.”

“I am seeking the prosecution of the perpetrator,” Winnicki said.

Under a widely-condemned amendment passed in March to the country’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Act of 1997, a person found guilty of claiming “…publicly and contrary to the facts, that the Polish Nation or the Republic of Poland is responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich…” faces a maximum prison sentence of three years. The law is not limited to Poland in its scope and can be used to prosecute foreigners.

The RN is basing its case against Rivlin on comments the Israeli president was said to have made during a meeting with his Polish counterpart, Andzrej Duda, on Apr. 12. “There is no doubt that there were many Poles who fought the Nazi regime, but we cannot deny that Poland and Poles had a hand in the extermination,” Rivlin — who traveled to Poland for the annual “March of the Living” at the site of the Auschwitz death camp — was reported as saying by both Polish and Israeli media outlets.

However Rivlin’s speech at the official memorial ceremony at Auschwitz used notably different wording than that attributed to him earlier in the day.

Turning to President Duda, he solemnly acknowledged that under the Nazi occupation, “the Poles were an oppressed people, living in fear.”

“The people of Poland produced thousands of ‘Righteous among the Nations,’” Rivlin said.

He continued: “Nevertheless, It is impossible to deny the truth. The Nazi death machine would not have been able to achieve its terrible vision, if it had not received help; if it had not found a fertile ground of hatred for Jews, in which to take root.”

Rivlin commented that while Nazi Germany had “built the camps, our people were not murdered only in the camps.”

“The members of our nation were betrayed by the people amongst whom they lived, in France, in Holland, and in Belgium,” the Israeli president declared. “They were murdered by Ukrainians, Lithuanians and, yes — also by Poles.”

In the same speech, Rivlin also countered the widespread claim in Poland that the Holocaust was as much a Polish as a Jewish tragedy.

“Polish people were killed and murdered in the cruel war,” he said. “We, the Jews, were slaughtered in the Holocaust.”…