I was sitting with five Polish people recently in Ireland and a report came up on their Polish TV channel about all the Irish working in Poland. They got very animated and angry accusing the Irish of taking all of their jobs. All I could do was laugh, I guess ignorance is a universal trait not just confined to these shores. Not related to the story above I know but I don’t care :)

Never knew that was offensive. If the camps were in Poland you’d think it would be okay to call them that. Everyone knows who did what at that time. Is it not just a geographically description?

Know a few lads working can not go out at night they are told all the time there not wanted in Poland (( there working for a Irish company on new motorways )))))

Just spent the last 3 days in poland, couldnt believe how worked up they are over this, its amazing, its the main news story in poland for 3 days, every radio station every tv channel every newspaper, they really took offence too it.
I thought maybe what he said was lost in translation but it wasn’t.
I too would have described them this way,

Aushwitz is in Poland, Birkinau across the road. I suppose technically they were Jewish death camps in Poland, ran by the Nazis?!! Like some one said earlier, everyone feckin knows who did the evil.

Dont mention the war.

Its all because of interpretation. In Polish language there are quite lot of subtleties how you say things and sometimes tiny change could turn the meaning. English is more freeway language if that makes sense. What Obama said translates quite unfortunate, even though in English it’s just ok to say that perhaps. Either way I think my fellow country men took that bit too seriously no offence meant that’s clear. Polish tend to debate over little important things rather focus on real problems. Plane crash in Russia still does rounds in Polish Internet in press even though its been more said about it than whole Wikipedia lol. They seem go be slow getting over things for some reason, just get over it OK Obama is a cool guy :)

Of course it wasn’t a deliberate mistake but instead of calling the reactions of all of those people taking offence (quite a few by the sounds of it!) ridiculous or stupid, perhaps we can learn from the episode. It’s incredibly dismissive to call the offence taken stupid or wrong.

Those same people would probably take similar offence at a foreign news report implying that all of Ireland was in the UK by not specifying an independent Republic or that internment camps in NI throughout the troubles were ‘Irish’ when no offence was intended.

There’s always a different perspective on reactions depending in whether they are your own or somebody else’s and when it offends so many people, then maybe we should pay a little attention and learn and have everybody move on…

So would we find it acceptable to call the british internment camps in northern Ireland in the’70′s as Irish internment camps?

I think it would be more productive to put this kind of pressure on Obama about his military spending when poverty is so high in America

Give the guy a break. Everyday he has a microphone under his nose. He didn’t mean any harm.
There is always a bunch of people waiting to be offended. ‘You weren’t there, you have no idea of the atrocities that were commited’.
None of us were there so lets leave the hurt to those with a right to feel it.

Krakow has its own Jewish district, more like ghettos where basically Jews lived apart from the rest of the poles, this was going on long before WW11 started. They had their own issues with them before Hitler came to town

Raymond Power: not exactly. Of course, war is never that black and white and there isn’t all good guys and bad guys at each side. There were Polish people killing Jews, cannot deny that, but it’s extremely unfair to picture them as whole Poland. There wasn’t any mass act against Jewish steered by Poles in some sort of agreement, as Hitler did for example. There were always some individuals who acted like that, but in no way you can say about it as mass and acknowledged by all Poles process. Probably much smaller number of Poles acted against Jews than a number that died in attempts to save them and helping them.

What about Jews themselves? All that saint too? Many Jews born in Poland were Stalinist murderers and political conspirators. Names? Jakub Berman, Anatol Fejgin, Rozanski… and many more. Famous Defiance movie about Jewish partisans (starring Daniel Craig) – Bielski brothers? They allegedly murdered (well, were involved) 130 people near Naliboki village during war. And there are many, many more examples of Jews being super nasty…

Yes. The Polish were already wiping out Jews well before the German’s arrived.

Alot of the international news on this site is days old!!

Is funny..didnt the police stood in the crowd and watch 2 or 3 asians assaulted just because of their color..

He should be locked up in that Cuban prison camp where they hold people indefinitely without trial and torture them – you know – Guantanimo.

It’s not important what is SAID. It is important what is DONE.

In all fairness, I should point out that Mr. Obama has assumed the power in his executive branch, of killing anyone that they deem a “militant” or “terrorist” without any judicial review of such death sentences. So I’d be really careful about criticizing him or you might wake up to find a drone circling over your neighborhood and your Audi a smoking wreck with the tail of a Hellfire missile sticking out of it.
I am amazed that the US Department of State has criticized the Government of the Philippines over “extra-judicial executions” when in fact, dozens if not hundreds of people around the world have been summarily executed by drone strikes and other activities directed by Washington.

I think this is a one big joke! Is there no bigger problems in the world?? Come one Poland!! It’s like some Irish people making fuss about Northern Ireland and where it belongs; Ireland vs UK…

If he had said, ‘a Death Camp in Poland’ there would be no consternation. He omits a small word like ‘in’ and a country goes on the warpath. When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon he omitted the word ‘a’ from his speech, ‘A small step for (a) man, a giant leap for mankind’, but everyone knew what he meant. Just like now, everyone knows what Obama meant but they just want to stir it up!

@ fizi water
as i said it was incomparable to the final solution by any stretch of the imagination and while of course the history of jews in the soviet union was of course chequered it seems to me that you must as a pole have a preference for the more positive/honourable parts of your country’s history but were you even taught the much more unsavoury parts ie the well documented and serious anti semitisim that existed at the time?