In Poland today, as in years past, there are some who insist on blaming the Jews for everything bad.
By ALAN MLEO GIOSUÈ DERSHOWITZalan dershowitz 88(photo credit: )Alan Dershowitz, leading American attorney and stalwart defender of Israel, continues his JPost.com blog.
Anyone familiar with the current situation in Poland would not be surprised to read that when Father Stanislaw Wieglus was forced to resign as archbishop of Warsaw because of disclosures that he had collaborated with Communist intelligence, "some of his supporters shouted that 'Jews' were trying to destroy the church" (New York Times 01/08/2007 PA6).
In Poland today, as in years past, there are some who insist on blaming the Jews for everything bad, although nearly all of Poland's Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
The prime villain perpetuating this myth is Cardinal Jozeph Glemp. Cardinal Glemp has made a career out of blaming the Jews for all of Poland's ills, including "spreading communism," "plying [Polish] peasants with alcohol" and even anti-Semitism.
In 1990 I was forced to file a lawsuit against Cardinal Glemp (for a full account of this lawsuit see my book Chutzpah) when he falsely accused an American rabbi, Avraham Weiss, who had come to Poland to protest a convent being constructed near Auschwitz, of trying to kill the nuns in the convent - a variation of the old blood libel.
As a result of the lawsuit, Glemp was forced to apologize, but his tirade against the Jews persisted. The best proof of the current problem of anti-Semitism in Poland is that fewer people seem to care that an anti-Semite serves as the archbishop of Warsaw than that a collaborator with communists serves in that distinguished position.
Alan Dershowitz is a professor of law at Harvard. His most recent book is Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways (Norton, 2006).
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