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Polish Senate Speaker calls remark by ex Hillary Clinton aide ‘brazen lie’

PR dla Zagranicy
Grzegorz Siwicki 14.11.2017 12:08
A high-ranking Polish senator has slammed a tweet by a former adviser to Hillary Clinton that denounced an Independence Day gathering in Warsaw as a "Nazi" march.
Senate Speaker Stanisław Karczewski. Photo: PAP/Radek PietruszkaSenate Speaker Stanisław Karczewski. Photo: PAP/Radek Pietruszka

Jesse Lehrich, a former foreign policy spokesman for Hillary Clinton, has written on Twitter that “60,000 Nazis marched on Warsaw” on November 11, Poland’s Independence Day.

"This is a brazen lie," Stanisław Karczewski, the Speaker of the upper house of Poland’s parliament, said on Tuesday morning.

“We have to counter" this kind of allegation, and "of course we will intervene in various ways,” Karczewski told public broadcaster Polish Radio 1.

"Wherever we are, wherever we will be, we will be saying that this is false information," he said.

Karczewski added that Poland’s ruling conservatives condemned and distanced themselves from any "extreme behaviour" that occurred during the march. He added that a "small group" of participants in Saturday’s gathering was responsible for such "excesses," which he said he hoped would not occur in the future.

Most of those taking part in the Independence March were peaceful, according to Karczewski. "The march was a sea of red-and-white flags; it was very peaceful, with families, young people, children," he said.

No room for xenophobia: president

Polish President Andrzej Duda said on Monday that “there is no room … in our country for xenophobia, for pathological nationalism, for anti-Semitism.”

“Such approaches mean exclusion from our society,” he added.

“One can’t equate patriotism with nationalism,” he also said while speaking to residents in the south-western town of Krapkowice on Monday evening. “These are two completely opposite notions and two totally opposite approaches.”

'Fringe of the fringe': Polish ruling party leader

When asked about the march in a media interview, the leader of Poland’s ruling conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, Jarosław Kaczyński, said that his group referred to traditions that “have nothing to do with anti-Semitism or racism.”

He said that "there were some extremely unfortunate" and "completely unacceptable" incidents during the march, but added that these occurrences were the "fringe of the fringe" and that they were “very likely a provocation.”

“Those who want to harm Poland know perfectly well how to do that," he told public broadcaster TVP on Monday evening. "These kinds of slogans, this kind of nonsense, shameful nonsense, is very damaging to us," he added.

The Independence Day march had an umbrella slogan of “We Want God,” a line from a religious song.

Some 60,000 people took part in the march, according to police figures. Participants waved Polish flags, some of them with various patriotic symbols on them, as well as other flags and banners, one including the slogan “Death to enemies of the fatherland.”

Other banners brandished slogans such as “Europe will be white or uninhabited” and “A white Europe of fraternal nations.”

(gs/pk)

Source: PAP, IAR, wpolityce.pl

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