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18 comments from readers

unseen
29 October 2009 at 14:22

James,

Looks to me like the Today Programme published the email at 9:13 this morning.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8331000/8331339....

Do you apply this level of research rigor to all your claims?

unseen
29 October 2009 at 14:25

In fact, that Today Programme webpage is linked to on the Daily Politics page you link to, right below the video!

Jared
29 October 2009 at 14:28

unseen,

Looks to me like your link is to the Today Programme and not to the original email that James references in his above article.

Do you fail to read all articles you comment on?

unseen
29 October 2009 at 14:32

No Jared, the email to James is in there and in fact makes up the focus of half the article.

Do you fail to read all comments you comment on?

Jared
29 October 2009 at 14:33

unseen,

The excerpt is there. Not the whole email. Do you understand the difference, and why it's important?

Jared
29 October 2009 at 14:38

unseen,

I'll help you with the last question. The excerpt is everywhere and has been extensively commented on. You attempted to refute the above article by claiming that the Today Programme did something which it had not done, and were sarcastic about it to boot. Read the above article again, so you understand what James is referring to, then look at your link. See the difference?

Jared
29 October 2009 at 14:43

unseen?

unseen
29 October 2009 at 15:43

Erm, they are the same. full text of the email in both.

Can you perhaps tell me what the BBC have missed out?

clare
29 October 2009 at 18:34

The detail of this exchange is much too complicated for the ordinary voter to care about. What matters is that the Tories are rattled because they made a bad decision to jump into bed with a load of racist homophobes. That point needs to be constantly rammed home...what they want is for everyone to get side-tracked down this dead end so that the real facts become obscured!

Jared
29 October 2009 at 18:44

While I agree with clare, and I think that the Kaminski affair will be seriously damaging to the Tories at the election, unseen is correct about the content of the emails on the links.

alan stoddart
29 October 2009 at 20:40

v

alan stoddart
29 October 2009 at 20:43

Jerzy Buzek said the same thing but I don't hear you squealing about that even though he is president of the European Parliament that Labour is so desperate to be a part of.

"There is no doubt that Poles participated in the crime," Buzek said. "But the murder was done neither in the name of the nation nor in the name of the Polish state."

"We object to the use of the Jedwabne case to spread false statements about the Polish co-responsibility for the Holocaust or on innate Polish anti-Semitism," Buzek said. Nor, he added, "should all inhabitants of Jedwabne of today be reproached for a murder committed 60 years ago."

The Pope was in the Hitler Youth, Jack Straw and Lord Mandy were communists. Do you have anything to say about the 22,000 Polish officers killed by the Reds? Or about the 20 million 'expendables' murdered to further the advance of Socialism?

It is a shame you slip from the moral high ground you so desperately scrabble up by using the deaths of 300 Polish Jews for electioneering for the Labour Party. To use the graves of these people as a stage for party political purposes is sickening for Jews or non-Jews.

Miliband's character and judgement is brought seriously into question as he belittles the esteem his high office should be regarded in with his squalid little attempt to smear a political rival. Such sordid assassinations should be left to his slinking little prompter and hatchet man, Macintyre, whose reputation can go no lower regardless of his puerile slandering of decent men.

Ross
30 October 2009 at 10:29

The Polish Chief Rabbi has just completely rebutted every accusation you have made.

You have been shown up as a liar and a smear artist.

frankyg
30 October 2009 at 12:59

I posted yesterday, quoting verbatim the direct criticism of the Chief Rabbi towards Mr. Macintyre.

However, my post was never published. I wonder why...

Luddite.
31 October 2009 at 08:51

Reading the comment's it looks like your intented smear's hasn't worked you do come across as a very insidious man. The left is failing because it nolonger knows what it stands for. So Cameron got himself a strange and eccentric bedfellow so what? just look at some of the so called left's friends like Islamic-fascists and religious bigots.

Remember James people in glass houses should never throw stones.

Luddite.
31 October 2009 at 08:56

I see that left-wing political censorship is running rifve today.

Luddite.
31 October 2009 at 08:58

So you printed that one why not the other one to near the truth,

Jedwabne and PiS
31 October 2009 at 11:52

Anyone who wishes to suggest I am an anti-Semite, should first look at www.pozsynpro.org/ What I am is anti-corruption, anti-venality, anti-opacity, and anti-lying. I am known Rabbi Schudrich since 2001 and consider him a threat to the health of the Polish Jewish Community, just as I consider people like Dick Cheney a threat to American Constitutional Democracy. You have to look beneath what such people say to what they do and how they do it.

Time wounds all heals. But it can take a long time about it.

Anyone who quotes Rabbi Schudrich soon learns that the rabbi has never said anything that he won't flatly deny if the wind changes or the wrong people take umbrage. Deniability is his rule of thumb. That he is now apparently coming out in support of Michał Kamiński is, sad to say, more predictable than shocking. What has he said exactly? That Kaminski is a friend of Israel. That may be so, for the Polish right wing does what it believes will please America (and irritate the EU). But that does not mean he likes, accepts or even tolerates the Jews in Poland. His Jebwabne comments, fully documented, come as close as possible to proving that he is rightly called an anti-Semite. The PiS party is avowedly anti-EU, which is why the Tories like them. Everything else is of little or no importance to them.

Though Rabbi Schudrich does not live in Poland (he lives in New York City, probably the only Chief Rabbi in the world to live 6000+ miles from his jurisdiction), he spends a lot of time there, and has become something of a media star there. A sort of Rabbi Lionel Blue, without the humour, tolerance or wisdom.

Keeping in mind that the President of Poland and his twin brother, the former Prime Minister are, as leaders of PiS, effectively the patrons of Mr Kamiński, and keeping in mind also that many Polish people have still not fully accepted the historical hypothesis argued by Professor Jan T. Gross of Princeton in his book Neighbours (now generally accepted, though with plenty of arguments about the details) that the Jews of Jedwabne were murdered not by Nazis but by their fellow Polish villagers, Rabbi Schudrich probably made the sudden (if tardy) calculation that, while truth and decency are fine things in fair weather, it was not in his interest to have both the President of Poland and a sizeable portion of the Polish people mad at him. Bad for business, so to speak. Et voila la volte face.

So when he says that James McIntyre misquoted him, I am inclined to believe that Mr McIntyre merely caused him problems by quoting him correctly. For Rabbi Schudrich, this is the same thing. He imagines himself to so embody Polish Jewishness that to attack him, or cause him problems, is the same as causing problems for all Polish Jews. In fact, there is reason to believe that a majority of Polish Jews do not consider Rabbi Schudrich to legitimately represent their interests at all. There is not space or time to explain why here, but if Mr McIntyre (or anyone else at the New Statesman) wishes to learn more, I am more than happy to explain. It is deeply sad for Polish Jews writ large to find themselves represented by a man whose mission in life is self-aggrandizement. And for no one of sufficient strength and character to stand up to him. As Father Rydzyk is to Polish Catholics, Rabbi Schudrich is to Polish Jews. A poor avatar, an unseemly human being, and a continual disgrace.