This is an on-going issue that would end if the Polish goverment or a Polish organization finally sued the Wall Street Jouirnal or the New York Times. I am glad that Jewish voices are present on this issue for a change. Here is the issue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Polish_death_camp%22_controversy and a recent article by Alex Storozynski in the Huffington Post:
The New York-born Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, says, "Accusing Poles of participation in the Holocaust is a sin." Yet on a regular basis, American journalists do just that by calling Auschwitz a "Polish concentration camp." This is Holocaust revisionism.
The Nazi concentration camps were built by Germans, run by Germans, and guarded by Germans. The victims of those camps were Polish. Newspaper editors justify use of the term "Polish concentration camp" as geographical shorthand for "a German concentration camp in occupied Poland." But this shorthand is Orwellian doublespeak that turns victim into perpetrator and distorts history. It perpetuates ignorance about the Holocaust and gives impressionable readers the idea that Poles built the camps. The Auschwitz killing factory was a product of German engineering, and both Polish Jews and Catholics were murdered there.
The New York-born Chief Rabbi of Poland, Michael Schudrich, says, "Accusing Poles of participation in the Holocaust is a sin." Yet on a regular basis, American journalists do just that by calling Auschwitz a "Polish concentration camp." This is Holocaust revisionism.
The Nazi concentration camps were built by Germans, run by Germans, and guarded by Germans. The victims of those camps were Polish. Newspaper editors justify use of the term "Polish concentration camp" as geographical shorthand for "a German concentration camp in occupied Poland." But this shorthand is Orwellian doublespeak that turns victim into perpetrator and distorts history. It perpetuates ignorance about the Holocaust and gives impressionable readers the idea that Poles built the camps. The Auschwitz killing factory was a product of German engineering, and both Polish Jews and Catholics were murdered there. [...] The Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita has published editorials calling for legal action against newspapers that use these defamatory phrases. But it doesn't have to end this way. Newspaper publishers and the Associated Press can easily rectify this situation by changing their stylebooks to banish the phrase "Polish concentration camps." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-storozynski/the-medias-slander-of-p ol_b_773173.html
A lawsuit would be enough for BBC, LA Times, NYT, WSJ and others to get it right. Will our MSZ finaly do something or is Stefan Komar going to be the only visible voice?
A New York policeman of Polish origin has launched a campaign against the Wall Street Journal for using the expression “Polish concentration camps” in two recent stories. http://www.thenews.pl/international/artykul133723_polish-concentration -camp-headlines-enrage-nypd-cop.html
An insightful article in his column:
The phrase "Polish Concentration Camps" is often used by the mass media to describe death camps run by the German Nazi party. This permits the dissemination of the belief that the Poles were in some way responsible for carrying out the Holocaust. Even if some portion of readers is aware that this is untrue, a large number of citizens of the Western world have little knowledge of historical fact, and may come to wrongful conclusions. A good example of the poor level of historical knowledge among American students was documented by Edmund Lewandowski in the San Francisco Bay Area Polish American Community Newsletter in Santa Clara County, California. Lewandowski interviewed a group of high school students in 1998, showing them a picture of a concentration camp guard and asking "Who were the Nazis?" The response was shocking. The students overwhelmingly claimed that the Nazis were Poles. http://www.nypdpulaskiassoc.org/history-concentration-camp.htm
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