White House official says Obama ‘misspoke’ of Polish death camp

President Barack Obama "misspoke" when he called a Nazi facility used to process Jews for execution as a "Polish death camp," a White House official told the news agency AFP.

The verbal gaffe came as the president was honoring to a famous Pole, Jan Karski, posthumously awarding him a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian award.

Karski was a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to witness the atrocities being committed against Jews. Obama referred to him being smuggled "into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself," ABC OTUS News reported.

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, told AFP that the president "misspoke."

"He was referring to Nazi death camps in Poland," Vietor said in the article. "We regret this misstatement, which should not detract from the clear intention to honor Mr. Karski and those brave citizens who stood on the side of human dignity in the face of tyranny."

Yes, this is another Obama slap-in-the-face toward an ally: Poland.

But there's more to the Jan Karski story than what is mentioned in the posted article, and it brings up a historical subject that Obama and Democrats in general tend to avoid like the plague.

That would be the historical fact that Jan Karski came to Washington during WWII and had a face-to-face talk with President Franklin D. Roosevelt regarding his direct observations of the atrocities within those death camps in Poland. Karski is believed to be the first eyewitness to what later became known as the Nazi Holocaust to have met with Roosevelt, yet Roosevelt had undoubtly gotten information earlier through various other channels. Karski also met around this time with assorted other Washington power brokers.

The bottom line is that despite the efforts of Karski and others of good will, the Roosevelt Administration's record regarding the saving of lives of Holocaust targets was dismal, as it squandered opportunity after opportunity to use its power to help.

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As justiceseeker 93 correctly points out, Jan Karski met with Roosevelt, who buried the issue of the slaughter of Jews. Met with a number of other leaders as well, including Churchill I believe. I believe he was an official, low ranking, of Polands govenment in exile, and had access. Yes, FDR ignored the plight of European Jews, though he wasted no time turning Poland over to the Soviets.

There is as much evidence for obambi being a slaver, as any liberal has for claiming someone had white slave owners or traders ancestry in the South. You know, the “generic” Southerners were ALL slave owners. Course that’s true... yup.

Since we have no real paternity proof for obambi, at least none he will provide with the same level of provenance required for obtaining a US passport- none of this matters.

It is provable that he is one major moronic incompetent who cannot speak on his own two feet, a puppet tool with a stupidly fixed marxist tyrannical goal of redistributed wealth and a totalitarian state. Got lots of evidence for that.

The Poles have a good reason to be upset with this “slip”, inasmuch as two generations- the cream of their military and civilian leadership was murdered by Stalin, and their population slaughtered by the Nazis and the Soviets in tandem. The “slip” is one which the communists used against Poles— that they were accomplices to the Nazis. The extreme need of a teleprompter is one more poor attempt at consistency in the dialectic from obama’s marxist managers. It wasn’t a “slip” it was written that way.

More than a little tiring discussing how many angels can stand on the head of a pin... with the exact precision and certainty of academia which has gotten very little correct, including who this nightmare of a president is.

The “slip” is one which the communists used against Poles— that they were accomplices to the Nazis. The extreme need of a teleprompter is one more poor attempt at consistency in the dialectic from obama’s marxist managers. It wasn’t a “slip” it was written that way.

Correct. I'm a non-Pole staying in Poland and have an indulgence for history. The first "polish" pogrom against Jewry was in Tsarist controlled polish territories in the late 1800s. Remember that until 1793 the Poles were an independent nation (ok, from 1700 under the Saxon house they were puppets of the Tsars) and after that Poland was partitioned thrice and more or less didn't exist for the 1800s.

The Tsarist part gave Moscow it's huge rise in Jewry (in the late middle-ages the vast majority of Jews in the world lived and were equals in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth). The Tsars used pogroms as a political weapon.

Anyway, I digress -- to your point, anti-semitism is not in Polish history anywhere like other European nations -- I suspect it was due to three reasons: 1. the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was a mixture of 4 peoples: Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians (Ukrainians, Bialorussians) and Jews, with Armenians and Saxons and Tartars tossed into the mix, so a multi-cultural and multi-faith state where differences were expected
and 2. The population of Jews in Poland before WWII was about 20% -- some towns like Pinsk were 90% Jews, Warsaw and Krakow were 40% Jewish. Your neighbor was a Jew, your friend, your shopkeeper etc. -- and these were highly integrated into Polish society. Prejudice didn't gain ground
and 3. The man who recreated Poland -- Marshal Josef Piłsudski was of a Polonized Lithuanian family whose ancestry was in the East, Vilnius. For him Poland was not a mono-ethnic state but one like the P-L commonwealth: where different ethnicities were together, with one purpose (as an aside, during the P-L-C you had Germanics like Copernicus who considered himself a citizen of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and fought against the Teutonic knights' rule) -- Piłsudski won against the opposing camp (Dmowski) who wanted a mono-ethnic state.

Well done, and thank you. What many posters on this thread missed was that obambi's marxist writers are trained and on the same propaganda page as the soviets. You have outlined very informatively that Poles (the original countrymen not influenced/run by the tsarists and the later apparatchiks and bolshies of russians) were never anti-jewish. This assumption was repeated and formed a plot line in the novel/movie "Sophie's Choice" where the crazy jewish boyfriend of the Pole survivor of the camps.... assumed she was a collaborator (and indeed the plot line filled this in by making her father a professor who was pro nazi anti semite). It was not so, as you point out prior to the tsarist and communist partitions.
The biggest point in all this thread is that obama is exactly like Lenin-- willing to propagandize divide to destroy our wonderful republic for "democracy" dictatorship of the marxists. He surely lost most of the Polish American vote with this "gaffe" that wasn't. At least those who know the history.

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