White House says Obama 'misspoke' after Poles demand apology over ‘Polish death camp’ remark

[Geee]

Fox News:

The White House said President Barack Obama misspoke on Tuesday when he referred to a "Polish death camp" while honoring a Polish war hero.

The president's remark had drawn immediate complaints from Poles who said Obama should have called it a "German death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland," to distinguish the perpetrators from the location. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called it a matter of "ignorance and incompetence."

Obama made the comment while awarding the Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II. Karski died in 2000.

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."

Sikorski tweeted that the White House would apologize for "this outrageous error" and that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk would address the matter on Wednesday.

"It's a pity that such a dignified ceremony was overshadowed by ignorance and incompetence."

[Draggingtree]

This Ain’t No Polish Joke

 

May 30, 2012 - 8:30 am - by Stephen Green

 

 

Here’s an incomplete list of Poland’s suffering since 1939, cobbled together from memory and the interwebs.

• Invaded by Nazi Germany, in the first blitzkrieg.

• Warsaw was the first major city to endure terror bombing.

• Eastern Poland invaded by Soviet Union, and annexed.

• Katyn Forest Massacre, in which 20,000 officers — “the pride of Polish manhood” — were killed by Stalin’s order. The idea was to ensure Poland could never rise up again.

• 90% of Polish Jewry — more than three million — wiped out in Hitler’s Holocaust.

• Millions deported to Stalin’s GULAG.

• Millions of Poles removed from their lands in the West to make room for German immigrants.

• Germany’s “General Government” in rump Poland was perhaps the most brutal of all occupation governments in Europe.

• Forced labor in Nazi war plants.

• Warsaw Uprising brutally smashed by the Nazis, as the Red Army sat and watched.

• Suppression of Polish culture, including destruction of monuments and libraries.

• Warsaw suffered more damage than any other European city during six years of war.

• Poland served as the home to most of Germany’s most fearsome death camps, including Auschwitz.

• Six million Poles, Catholic and Jew, killed in the war.

• Poland did not regain its prewar population level until the 1970s.

• After the war, Stalin imposed a brutal Communist regime on the nation, which lasted for 45 years.

 

Despite all of this, it was two Poles — Lech Walesa and Pope John Paul II — who did more than Read More

http://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2012/05/30/this-aint-no-polish-joke/

[Geee]

@Draggingtree. In doing some family tree research recently I discovered that I had quite a few relatives in Poland, who were Catholics, killed either outright or in concentration camps by the Nazis. Two of my grandmothers brothers were shot because they were educated Poles and they wanted non of the Polish elite to remain. They were part of the cultural scrubbing of Poland.

[Argyle58]

Hard to believe that The "o" could "misspeak" while reading from a teleprompter. I guess TOTUS has joined the ranks of the disaffected.

[clearvision]

Hard to believe that The "o" could "misspeak" while reading from a teleprompter. I guess TOTUS has joined the ranks of the disaffected.

Excellent point.

[Evad]

Hard to believe that The "o" could "misspeak" while reading from a teleprompter. I guess TOTUS has joined the ranks of the disaffected.

Excellent point.

yup!

"Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called it a matter of "ignorance and incompetence."

No more Polish jokes for me..I think they have it figured out 100%.

[Pepper]

@Geee

 

"ignorance and incompetence"

 

Sikorski has captured Obama in two words.