Poles are demanding an apology from Obama after he made a comment during the awards ceremony in what the Whitehouse said was meant to refer to “Nazi death camps in Poland.”
Obama used the phrase “Polish death camp” while honoring Polish war hero Jan Karski during the Presidential Medal of Freedom yesterday. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski is reported to have called Obama’s mistake a matter of “ignorance and incompetence,” saying that Obama made an “outrageous error.”
Obama said that Karski “served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action.”
Hundreds of news sites, blogs, radio programs and other media outlets throughout Poland and the United States have brought attention to Obama’s “slip of the tongue.”
