Anti-Semitic propaganda distributed at Polish parliament as government witch-hunts Holocaust historians
By
Clara Weiss
16 March 2019
On Wednesday, an edition of the right-wing newspaper Tylko Polska with a front page article on “How to spot a Jew” was distributed at the Polish Sejm (parliament). In the manner of Nazi-style anti-Semitic propaganda, the article listed “names, anthropological features, expressions, appearances, character traits, methods of operation” and “disinformation activities” which allegedly allowed for identification of Jewish people.
A parliamentary deputy from the center-right Poland Comes First party denounced the distribution of the newspaper as an “absolute scandal” and described it as “filthy texts, as if taken from Nazi newspapers.” Following a public outcry internationally, the Sejm Chancellery, which had initially refused to take action, declared that the newspaper would be removed from kiosks at the Polish parliament.
There was nothing accidental about the distribution of this far-right newspaper at the Sejm. Its very publication was part of what can only be described as a state-sponsored witch-hunt of Holocaust historians.
Next to the article “How to spot a Jew,” the Tylko Polska newspaper ran the headline, “Attack on Poland at a conference in Paris,” and a picture of the historian and sociologist Jan Gross, who has written extensively on pogroms against Jews by Poles.
What the newspaper described as an “attack on Poland” was, in fact, a far-right assault on a Holocaust studies conference in Paris on February 21–22. Hosted by the prestigious Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), the conference was entitled “The new Polish school of Holocaust history.” It was disrupted by a group of…