Far-Right Pole Burns Poster of Mayor Wearing Kippah
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
— A Polish ultra-nationalist burned a poster of the mayor of Wroclaw wearing a kippah during a protest march.
Roman Zielinski, a far-right agitator who authored a book titled “How I fell in love with Adolf Hitler,” set the poster of Mayor Rafał Dutkiewicz on fire in front of cameras on Sunday during a march against the European Union in Wroclaw, in western Poland, the PAP news agency reported Monday.
It was not reported whether the mayor was actually wearing the kippah or if it was superimposed on the poster.
The march was organized by the National Radical Camp, or ONR, a formation that was banned in the mid-1930s on account of its extremism but reactivated in 1993. Zielinski is a figurehead of a faction of fans of local football team Sląsk Wrocław.
In March, Polish prosecutors indicted for incitement a construction contractor from Wroclaw who burned an effigy of a Jew at a protest rally against Muslim immigration.
Piotr Rybak, an entrepreneur from Wroclaw, was filmed burning a haredi Jew’s effigy in November at a rally of 200 people who gathered to protest EU requirements that Poland accept refugees from Syria and Iraq. Rybak is accused of incitement to hatred against a faith or ethnic group.
Jonny Daniels, the London-born founder of From the Depths, an organization promoting Holocaust commemoration in Poland, called Zielinski “a disgusting deplorable act by utter scum” on Facebook.
But, noting the spiraling debate in his native country about the anti-Semitism problem of the British Labour party, Daniels warned against allowing such cases to “paint a whole country as anti-Semites.”
Poland, he wrote on Facebook Tuesday, “has its fair share of idiots, but it’s certainly not the ‘elites’ like it is in the UK” where some from Labor “are calling for more than burning of pictures.”
Daniels was referring to British Member of Parliament Naz Shah, who in 2014 called for transferring Jews from Israel to the United States. She was suspended by the party from her position last week as part of an internal purge against individuals tied to anti-Semitic speech in the party’s ranks.
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