Poland’s Senate has passed a bill that outlaws blaming Poles for practices committed in WWII death camps on Polish soil, or even using the phrase “Polish death camp.” The bill has triggered earlier diplomatic spat with the Zionist entity.
The upper house of the Polish parliament approved the bill with 57 votes for the motion and 23 against. There were two abstentions. To become law, it now needs only to be signed by the country’s president, Andrzej Duda.
Under the new legislation, using the phrase “Polish death camp” or otherwise implying that Poles were complicit in Nazi practices during WWII can result in up to three years in jail.
The measure, championed by the ruling and right-wing Law and Justice Party (Pis), drew strong denunciation from the Israeli government, Jewish rights groups and politicians. The bill’s critics argued that it’s designed at “whitewashing history”, in particular, some Poles’ complicity in the alleged Holocaust and restricting scholarly research on the topic.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the bill as a “distortion of the truth, the rewriting of history and the denial of the Holocaust.”
After the Israeli ambassador to Poland joined calls to repeal the yet-to-be-signed legislation during her speech in Auschwitz, Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), a state research entity, accused Israeli authorities of “inappropriate interference” in the country’s internal affairs.
Washington, which has so far remained silent on the issue, chimed in Wednesday, with State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert saying the US is “concerned” that “if enacted, this draft legislation could undermine free speech and academic discourse.”
With that, though, she noted it would be “inaccurate, misleading and hurtful” to refer to death camps operated by the Nazis in Poland as “Polish.”
Source: RT
