It becomes a tradition that a Belgian daily newspaper Le Soir presents Poland and the Polish nation in a negative light concerning Polish-Jewish relations. Today s article (9 June 2001) written by a Jewish writer Pol Mathil is another example of that anti-polish campaign. The content of that article sheds doubt on the credibility of the author, as well as the daily Le Soir .

In an earlier published article in Le Soir of 23 March 2001, Mathil, writing about the Jedwabne massacre, supports the thesis of Jan Gross who stated that 1600 Jews were pushed into a barn and burnt alive by their Polish neighbors. In today s article Mathil recalls the statement of the Institute of National Memory in Poland (IPN) saying that some 250 Jews were pushed into a barn and burnt alive by the Poles. He does not mention other discoveries, essential to the Jedwabne affair such as: 89 Mauser bullets 7.5mm, and other objects found during the exhumation in Jedwabne site, which could only be possessed by German officers. These details considered unimportant by the author, change dramatically the whole incident, indicating an active role and engagement of German officers in the tragedy this fact is systematically ignored by Mathil.

If Mathil s statements from few months ago show up so obviously wrong today, after an only partially completed investigation, what will happen soon to his current revelations so boldly pronounced. His selectivity in view of the professional ethics becomes nothing more than mere manipulation, which arrogantly falsifies the historical truth.

It became a fashion today to accuse individual people as well as entire nations of anti-semitism. The Poles are not the only ones in the boat. This anti-semitic mania is being created by a group of people, trying to make a fortune on the The Holocaust industry , as rightly named by a Jewish author Norman Finkelstein in his book with the same title. This fortune-making on an alleged anti-semitism is carried out at the cost of accused nations as well as of the Jews themselves. Finkelstein reveals how the process of gaining money and power is done by those who had little or nothing at all to do with the Holocaust suffering.

In addition to the above, another fact is astounding: how easy it is for descendents of a nation that once was a victim of a nazi terror to take a role of an executioner. What is meant here is all the evil that Israel allows itself doing in relation to the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Another Jew, Josef Ben-Eliezer, talked about it in his interview on BBC. In his book Lost art of forgiveness he writes how serving as a soldier in Israel after the WWII he was a witness to a continuous terror on the Palestinians performed by the Israeli army. Not being able to live with it any more, he left the country and settled down in Germany. To this day, he cannot understand how a nation that once has suffered so much becomes itself an instrument of terror. It is a matter of time that the Jews be forced to bow their heads and face the truth about themselves, he says.

All this sheds a serious doubt on Jewish credibility on the international arena. Will the old saying: He who uses a sword, vanishes by a sword come true?

Christopher Skotnicki

Polish-Belgian Association