Lodz local councillor was “only joking” with antisemitic quip in support of farmers
A Polish politician has been criticised for repeating an antisemitic joke during a Lodz District council meeting on agriculture. The “joke” goes: “Why don’t Jews buy land? Because you can’t cheat the earth.”
Waldemar Wojciechowski, a member of the right-wing ruling Law and Justice Party on the council, claimed that he used the “joke” to make a point about the need for fairness for farmers.
But Marcin Bugajski, head of the opposition party on the Lodz District council, said that he believed that it “was an antisemitic statement” and that it was “a scandal” to perpetuate such stereotypes, adding that the words had been “utterly irrelevant to the discussion.”
Separately, police are investigating the desecration of a monument to Holocaust victims in the town of Częstochowa, near Krakow. The monument was desecrated with a swastika and neo-Nazi symbols.
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