„Poles have sucked anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk”. Not only is this an unjustified metaphor but also, and foremost, bad phrasing and deceitful and harmful language. Every politician, every public person should be condemned for speaking this way. The Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs, Israel Katz, should apologize in public. Unfortunately, the list of politicians who should apologize for their racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Ukrainian and anti-Roma statements is quite long. Anti-Semitism and other anti-isms are not a feature of a particular nation but they happen far too often.

The reason lies in poor education, ignorance  and the choice of some politicians to be active in politics by stirring fear and hate. Anti-Semitism is present everywhere but let’s focus on what concerns us, let’s talk about Poland where there are almost no Jews but anti-Semitism does exist. It is a fuel to horrid campaigns which are being undertaken with more and more boldness in the public space and on the Internet. Let’s not speak of “the mother’s milk” or of inheritance, even though it cannot be denied that “As the twig is bent, so the tree grows” and as the Polish proverb says “What little Johnny has not learned, big John will not know”.

Generations after generations are growing up in a country where the Holocaust, and the pogroms of Jedwabne and Kielce took place. People are infected with a poisoned atmosphere from their very childhood, and contrarily to what Marek Edelman would have wished, ”in our schools, at universities, in kindergartens” we are still not teaching that “evil is evil, hatred is evil and love is our duty.”