Wiadomości

Letter to the HR Foreign Affairs Committee Members

Honorable Rep. _______________________

U.S. House of Representatives

Foreign Affairs Committee

Dear Rep.­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­______________________,

Please reject Bill H.R. 1226! Please do not forward this anti-Polish legislation to the House of Representatives for further consideration! Poland, the strongest ally of the United States in Europe, is the primary target of this deceiving and legally erroneous bill. As the country with the largest pre-war population of Jews, Poland is targeted by Jewish restitution organizations for “heirless property” restitution worth tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars.

I urge you to reject Bill H.R.1226 on legal grounds for the following reasons:

1. During WWII, Poland suffered proportionally the greatest human and material losses but was never compensated for these losses.

2. Over the years, Poland has resorted to various means to resolve private and communal property claims, including the return of properties to their rightful owners and monetary compensation.

3. According to the 1960 treaty between the government of the U.S. and Poland regarding claims of nationals of the United States, Poland compensated American nationals whose assets had been nationalized or wrongfully seized, and the United States provided indemnity to Poland against any further property claims. Therefore, Bill H.R. 1226 violates the terms of the 1960 bilateral treaty.

4. Poland returned Jewish communal property pursuant to the 1997 law on the relationship between the Polish State and Jewish religious organizations. Over 2,500 communal properties, including synagogues, cemeteries and cultural centers, have been either compensated for or returned.

5. All Jewish Holocaust survivors of Polish origin are eligible to receive a monthly pension from the Polish Government according to the law on war veterans and victims of war and post-war oppression. Thus, Holocaust survivors who were Polish citizens during WWII have been receiving financial assistance from the Polish Government regardless of their current place of residence. So, the claim for heirless property compensation in order to assist Holocaust survivors is duplicative with respect to Poland.

6. Restitution for heirless property is against the law of the United States, Western legal tradition and Polish law. In all Western countries, the US included, heirless property escheats to the state.

7. According to the Congressional Authority Statement, Bill H.R. 1226 is authorized pursuant to the Commerce Clause of Article 1 Section 8 Clause 3 of the Constitution of the United States. The Commerce Clause has nothing to do with this bill, which is based on the legally non-binding Terezin Declaration concerned with the well-being of Holocaust survivors.

I urge you to reject Bill H.R. 1226 on moral grounds for the following reasons:

1. With respect to heirless property claims, Bill H.R. 1226 has no basis in law. Therefore it relies on highly logically-questionable moral justification exclusively.

2. Some Holocaust organizations and scholars have been engaged for years in discrimination of Polish victims and distortion of Holocaust history by diminishing the suffering of Polish victims in WWII, disregarding Polish witnesses to history, marginalizing and suppressing the voice of Polish victims, eliminating ethnic Poles from the definition of Holocaust victims, and sidelining German genocide of ethnic Poles in Holocaust education.

3. There is not a single museum anywhere in the United States commemorating the millions of Polish victims of the German WWII genocide while there were 75 Holocaust museums worldwide as of 2011.

4. Some Holocaust scholars and educators have been overemphasizing and widely promoting questionable research and biased education about Polish co-responsibility for the Holocaust of the Jews, while effectively suppressing research and education about Jewish collaboration in killing Jews and Jewish killings of ethnic Poles.

5. The majority of Holocaust scholars and educators have never publicly objected to or unequivocally condemned the spread of major Holocaust falsehoods such as “Polish concentration camps” or “Polish death camps.” Such inactions on their part constitute Holocaust distortion in its pure form and amount to Holocaust denial in accordance with paragraph 5 of the definition of Holocaust denial adopted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

6. The use of the term “Polish concentration camp” is deceptive and offends millions of Polish people, whose relatives were brutally murdered by the German occupying forces in the concentration and death camps set up and operated by the German Third Reich.

7. Some Holocaust researchers engage in brutal smear campaigns against Poland by accusing the Polish people, before the entire world, of Polish complicity and culpability for German crimes committed on the Jews.

8. In order to showcase a moral justification for “heirless” property claims against Poland, a worldwide smear and disinformation campaign has just been launched under the pretense of opposition to the amendment to an anti-defamation bill passed by the Polish Parliament.

9. On January 27, 2018, one leading Israeli politicians Yair Lapid announced: “these were Polish death camps and no law will change it.” This terrible Holocaust lie did not prompt condemnation by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

10. Instead, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum expressed “deep concern” over the adopted legislation, falsely interpreting the law in order to accuse Poland of making it illegal “to reference the complicity of some Poles in crimes against the Jews committed during the German occupation.” Those who resort to such dishonest methods have no right to refer to and call for moral justice.

11. According to the Israeli War Crimes Commission less than 0.1% of Poles (often Polish Germans) collaborated with Nazi Germany. 99.9% of the Polish people DID NOT!

12. Bill H.R. 1226 is morally offensive because it treats the Polish State and the Polish Nation as perpetrators of the German crimes committed against the Jews rather than the victim of German WWII atrocities. Poland suffered the most of all countries during WWII. Polish citizens, both Poles and ethnic Jews, experienced physical destruction like no one else. Through Bill H.R. 1226 one victim frames the other victim as the perpetrator in order to extort compensation in blatant disregard of the historical truth. That is not moral, and that is not just.

I strongly urge you to reject this legally flawed and immoral Bill. H.R. 1226 causes pain and suffering to Poles all over the world and exacerbates their WWII trauma.

Sincerely yours,




Za: https://stopacthr1226.org/updated-petition-to/