During an East Room ceremony honoring 13 Medal of Freedom recipients, Obama said that Karski "served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action."
The correct statement should have been a Nazi death camp in occupied Poland or simply used the actual account of what Karski did. Maybe by using his secret trip to Izbica which was a transit ghetto that shunted Jews to the Nazi death camps of Sobibor and Belzec Obama could have had a bit of a teach-able moment.
Instead he just shows that he isn't sophisticated enough to know that calling something a "Polish death camp" sounds like the Poles set the place up or something. They have a right to be outraged at such a thing and its good that the White House quickly apologized. In any case either Obama or his handlers need to double check things like this because they might not mean much to people in the US but it is a big deal to Poland.
No comments:
Post a Comment