Roman’s twist

Roman Polanski has won a libel case against the magazine Vanity Fair after it published an article claiming that he tried to seduce a woman on the way to his murdered wife’s funeral, in 1969. All in a normal day’s work, then, for the weirdest individual ever to have grown up in Krakow, southern Poland.

Now, just in case Mr. Polanski (or his lawyers) are reading this then I would like to make clear that the inclusion of the word ‘weird’ in that last sentence has no malice intended to it whatsoever. Honest.

Mr. Polanski, your reputation as a film director is without peer and I sincerely congratulate on your work to date – especially the Oscar you picked up in 2003 for that fantastic film, The Pianist, based on the autobiography by Wladyslaw Szpilman. And I just loved Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.

But I am sure that even Roman Polanski would not disagree that his personal life and biography can accurately and fairly – and without fear of litigation – be described as WEIRD.

Polanski, who is now a grand old man of 71, sued Conde Nast Publication Inc after it published an article in 2002 alleging that Polanski, after chatting up a girl in a restaurant in New York in 1969, said that he would, ‘make another Sharon Tate of her.’

The article in Vanity Fair suggested, wrongly, as it turns out, that this strange chat up line was made before Sharon Tate – who was murdered by Charles Manson’s psycho friends in Polanski’s Hollywood home in 1969 - was even buried. It turns out that, in fact, the remark, if true at all, was made sometime after the funeral.

A jury in London, where the case was heard, found that the article was defamatory and ordered the publishers to pay 50.000 pounds in damages and costs to the diminutive film director.

Polanski could not be in court to watch the proceeding, however, as Britain has an extradition arrangement with the United States; so if he had stepped foot on British soil then he could of found himself shipped off to the States to complete a prison sentence as part of his conviction for having sex with a 13 year old girl, in 1977.

Because he could not risk being there in person, Polanski gave evidence from Paris where he lives, via a video link. From his virtual witness box he recounted, not just those bloody, awful days in 1969, but also of the days growing up under Nazi occupation in Krakow during WWII.

But it was Polanski’s predilection and reputation for what could be described as his casual attitude to matters of the flesh that was central to the libel case.

Naughty old Roman admitted to having got between the sheets with loads of woman before, during and after his marriage to Sharon Tate. But Mia Farrow, no less, turned up in court to say that Polanski was far too distressed about the murder to have propositioned the girl in the New York restaurant so soon after the murder.

And the jury agreed with him. And I am sure they were right to do so.

But why, I hear you ask, did Polanski choose London as the venue for the court case – a country that he can’t even set foot in - if he lived in Paris, and the alleged incident occurred, and the libelous article was published, in the United States?

The answer is that Polanski picked a good place for a libel trial. Legal people, and especially libel lawyers, call London, ‘A town call sue’. England has some of the strangest libel laws in the world. In usual trials the defendant is deemed to be innocent until proven guilty. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. Not so in a libel trial in London, where the burden of proof was on Vanity Fair, who had to prove that Polanski’s reputation had not been damaged.

Vanity Fair's lawyers tried to argue that, due to Polanski’s well-known and often reported murky past, he had no reputation left to defame. But the jury disagreed.

But what next for the Polish-born director? Well, September this year sees the release of Polanski’s new movie, a remake of Charles Dickens’s, Oliver Twist. You know the story: how a young impressionable child is lured into criminal acts by an exploitative, older man.

Sounds like it’s going to be another Polanski classic.

This is a version of an article originally published on the Radio Polonia web site

Poland honours UK bomb victim

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski yesterday posthumously awarded an order of merit medal to Gil Hart, a British victim of the July 7 bombings in London who supported Poland's Solidarity movement in the 1980s.. Hart, 55, was one of 13 victims on the No. 30 bus blown up by a suicide bomber in Tavistock Square on 7/7. He founded the Polish Refugee Rights Group in London. Later renamed East European Advice Centre, it was the biggest such aid group for Polish refugees.

Poles take threats seriously

One of the groups that claimed the London bombings has made threats against Poland.

“Our attack in the heart of the British capital is nothing but a message to all European governments that we will not rest until all the infidel troops leave Iraq," said the Abu Hafs Al Masri Brigades, the same group that claimed the Madrid bombings last year. The ‘Brigades’ also claimed that it was able to stage a ‘bloody war’ on countries that have troops in Iraq. “Our next word will be in the heart of European capitals.”

“This is the last message we send to the European countries,” they say on one of the many anti-infidel web sites. “We are giving you one month for your soldiers to leave the Land Of The Two Rivers. Then there will be no other messages, but actions, and the words will be engraved in the heart of Europe. It is time for you to understand that the Mujahideen will not leave their nation suffering under the stigma of humiliation and the killings by American fire which you allied with".

Scary stuff. Poland currently has around 1000 troops in Iraq and is in control of a multinational force in the south-central zone of the horror strewn country. The government issued a statement of its own announcing that it, “takes all threats seriously.”

The Polish government also announced earlier this year that by the end of the year there will only be a few hundred troops left at their Babylon base.

But new plans to join the US in Afghanistan have been announced this week, where Poland will once again be in control of a multinational force, rooting out the Taliban, etc..

One Polish journalist said to me this week: ”Don’t they ever learn?” He for one was convinced that the bombings in London have a direct link to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Few Poles disagree.

Carbon copies or copy cats?

Who exactly are the Abu Hafs Al Masri Brigades, and should Poles be afraid of them?

Since Poland has been mentioned in a statement by a group claiming to be responsible for the 7/7 attacks in London, and the Madrid bombings last year, people have got a little more anxious here.

It is long been felt that getting involved in the war in Iraq – where Poles control the south-central area of Babylon – could bring terrorism to Poland. But should they take the word of what could be a lone nutter able to write a bit of HTML, seriously?

Abu Hafs Al Masri Brigades have made threats and claimed responsibility for many events before.

In July 2004 they issued a statement: “This message is directed to the European governments… Today we declare the start of a bloody war on you, and we will not stop the attacks on you until you return to the correct path…And we have started with the warning to the Italian government and its cruel leader Berlusconi… and his submission to the rule of America. Wait for us Berlusconi, and your other allies as well, wait for our promise which we have already revealed to you and are now revealing to Europe. O’ leaders and peoples of Europe, remove your murderous forces from Iraq… before you begin to taste the bitterness of your own blood.”

This statement - very similar to the one released recently claiming the London bombings - came towards the end of a three month ‘cease fire’, proclaimed, apparently, by none other than our favourite bearded cave dweller himself, Osama bin Laden, and giving time for the allied forces to get out of Iraq.

In mid July, 2004, the Abu Hafs Al Masri Brigades made another statement: “This is the last warning to the Italian nation. Either you get rid of the Berlusconi or else we will burn Italy down.”

In August 2004, they popped up again on the Internet claiming that they planted the bombs in Istanbul, near a British bank.

In 2003 they claimed that they were behind attacks on two Synagogues in Istanbul.

But they have also claimed connections to events they could not possibly have had anything to do with. Remember when New York and other areas of northeast United States had a black out when the electricity grid went down? Well, the ‘Brigades’ claimed that they had something to do with that, too.

In fact, the Abu Hafs Al Masri Brigades modus operandi seems to be to make threats and claim responsibility for events they could not have any connection with. More statements come form this group than any other.

The "Brigades" publishes their statements on the Internet or by way of notices sent to the press, especially to the London-based daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi.

Analysis by the Norwegian researchers at the Middle East (MEMRI) casts serious doubts regarding the very existence of a terrorist organization by the name of the Abu Hafs Al-Masri Brigades, its affiliation to Al-Qa'ida, and the scope of activities alleged in the statements.

MEMRI says that, “Those behind the publications are interested in undermining the coalition in Iraq. However they seem to be nationalistic in their orientation rather than Islamist, while pretending to be affiliated with Al-Qa'ida only to gain more credibility to their threats.”

Should Poles be worried?
According to another document obtained by Norwegian intelligence, al-Qaeda has instructed its militants not to attack the United States but its allies, and primarily Britain, Spain and Poland, in order to split the coalition.

The document – which was found on the Internet last year, and which pre-dates the 2004 Spanish elections – analyses what effect attacks on the population of allied countries – particularly Britain, Spain and Poland - would be. The document concludes that Spain was the weakest link in the coalition and that attacks on Spanish forces would weaken support for the war in Iraq.

Britain would be easy to force out of Iraq, because the popular opposition to the war and the occupation is so high. However, the author estimates that Britain will only withdraw from Iraq if Britain suffers significant human casualties in Iraq.

But Poland, apparently, is unlikely to withdraw from the coalition because there is political consensus on foreign policy, and the country has ‘a very high tolerance for human casualties.’

Oh really?
Whoever wrote that report – which CNN at the time attributed to al-Qaeda, but, as usual, it could have been written by anyone – is simply regurgitating long held prejudices about Slavs and nations in central and eastern Europe. Because, goes this gibberish, Poland suffered so much during WWII this has inoculated them do mass deaths. Unfortunately for this theory, there has been no outside attacks on Poland in over two generations. Poles have not suffered from any terrorism attacks in Poland – though three did die on 7/7.

In fact, the reverse is true. Poland would be absolutely devastated if terror came to Warsaw. They would not be showing the stiff upper lip of the British. There would be outrage and panic.

Whether they will be targets is impossible to say. But it will be much harder to launch an attack here than it would be in London. The Muslim population is small in Poland. Those that are here – basically, a few Syrians and Turks - are being watched closely, and probably harassed as well by the authorities.

A British born Pakistani was detained in the city of Lodz three days after the London bombings. Nothing came of this, but it does show the British police had connected Pakistanis, or Britons with Pakistani backgrounds, at the very start of their investigations.

Though Poland maybe is on the nihilists list, and there is a growing alarm at the possibility of an attack here, I would be much more fearful if I was living in Milan or Rome.

Read on:
See Assessing the Credibility of the 'Abu Hafs Al-Masri Brigades'Threats , by the Jihad Research Group

UK religious hate law: a lesson from Poland

In the aftermath of the London bombings and the subsequent attacks on mosques, the New Labour government will be speeding through the UK parliament new anti-terror and anti-religious ‘hate’ laws. Both will restrict free speech, and do nothing to make Britons feel safer.

On January 25, Jerzy Urban, the editor of the savagely satirical Polish weekly NIE (No), was convicted and fined 5.000 euros for insulting John Paul II.

Urban broke an obscure law in the Polish penal code (article 136.3), whereby it is a criminal offence to insult a foreign head of state (the Pope is the head of Vatican City, a small but nevertheless independent state).

The offending article was published in 2002, just before what turned out to be the Pope’s final visit to his homeland. Under the headline, ‘The Walking Sadomasochist’, Urban called John Paul II ‘the Brezhnev of the Vatican’ and an ‘impotent old man’. The controversial editor advised the Pope to stay in Rome and spare the people of Poland the distress of having to watch a man clearly past his sell-by date.

Maybe not a nice thing to say, but hardly a criminal act. Urban could have faced a ten month prison sentence for merely saying what he thought.

Reporters Without Borders called the verdict, ‘a dangerous precedent for an EU member state. We know perfectly well that it is still completely taboo to criticize the Pope in Poland, but that must not prevent the authorities from conforming to laws regulating press freedom in Europe, including article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights…’

The verdict came just after two Polish journalists, editor of Wiesci Polckie Andrzej Marek, and Beata Korzenewska, a journalist working for Gazeta Pamorska, were jailed for libeling a public official.

It seems that Poles fought for decades for freedom of speech, only to see that freedom become contingent on not upsetting anybody.

The left and the mullahs

'This was not a terrorist attack against the mighty and the powerful. It was not aimed at Presidents or Prime Ministers. It was aimed at ordinary, working-class Londoners, black and white, Muslim and Christian, Hindu and Jew, young and old. It was an indiscriminate attempt to slaughter, irrespective of any considerations for age, for class, for religion.'

Those are the words of Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, after hearing the news of the terrorism by Islamic nihilists in the capital. And his speech, from Singapore airport only hours after helping to secure the 2012 Olympics for London, hit the right spot with all us from that place.

People that put bombs at the feet of ordinary commuters and blow them to bits are not attacking any authority. They don’t challenge anything at all really, except, perhaps, what it means to be a human being.

Note Livingstone’s reference to ‘working class Londoners’. That’s not language that the squishy-squashy, softy lefties of New Labour would ever use. In fact, it’s been a long time since any mainstream Labour politician has used the word class. Old Labour types, like Neil Kinnock, for instance, would have referred to ‘working people’, but never the working class.

The only voice of criticism has come from the predictable direction of Melanie Philips in the Daily Mail. She said it was 'nauseating to witness London's mayor ... deliver his ringing condemnation of terrorism yesterday', since he has been sharing platforms with mad mullahs for years. (quote from the Observer, 10 July)

And she does have a point. Making alliances with weirdo, conservative religious figures – who don’t believe in personal freedoms at all - is strange, and makes the beetroot, for one. feel very uncomfortable indeed.

The Left was a product of the Enlightenment, and it should not be making alliances with backward, anti-Enlightenment figures who think that women should live behind the veil, homosexuals should have their hands cut off, Spain should be bombed back to the 1400’s, and the ultimate authority for anything at all is not reason and humanity, but mullahs and their superstitions, over fifteen hundred years old.

And this is where MP George Galloway repulses, as much as his opposition to the war in Iraq inspires. George is a socialist, but has gone out of his way to make friends with people who despise universal human rights. (see Nick Cohen on the Respect coalition)

He has also linked the murder of over 70 people on Thursday with the war in Iraq. "If you go on bombing other people they will go on bombing us," he warned.

For sure, the people of Baghdad could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about in London. They have lived through their own 7/7 virtually everyday since we invaded them. But few, very few, of them would support terrorism. They, after all, are being bombed by the same types of people who splattered blood all over London.

The SWP, and much of the liberal-left – terrified not only of the mullahs, but also of the white working class, who they see as almost naturally predisposed to racist tendencies – have given up on social progress and equality.

This has driven some of the most eloquent spokespeople from the Left, such as Christopher Hitchens, into the hands of the neo-cons. (See We cannot surrender in the Daily Mirror)

Hitchens, who hates the unreason of Islam and all other religions with a passion, seems to think that a new form of fascism has emerged: the fascism of the mullahs. But doesn’t this confuse apolitical anti-modernity and primitive nihilism for the (abhorrent) political philosophy of the fascist?

And doesn’t Hitchens forget that people in Iraq have the right to self-determination – a previous bedrock of leftwing belief – and the right not to be invaded by an imperialistic West, even though, like New Labour, they might believe that they are ‘liberating’ a people (by bombing them).

The Left has either fallen into a conservative, relativist and timid support of any minority, no matter how reactionary, or has drifted rightwards and supports Bush and Blair’s bloody ‘crusade’

The Left, (and Right), should support the march of reason, equality and freedom. We have to throw out the wishy-washy tolerance of the intolerant. The only way to keep young Muslims in the West out of the hands of the mullahs is by giving them a clear set of beliefs, and not the ‘anything goes as long as you don’t believe it too strongly’, relativism of the lefty, quivering middle classes.

Read on:
Livingstone Rejects Human Rights Coalition by Peter Tatchell
The philosopher as dangerous liar by Patrick West, in the New Stateman shows where much of this lefty bullshit comes from
London Community Coalition web site for more on Livingstone and his sometimes strange choice of mates

Poland beefs up security following London blasts

Authorities in Poland beefed up security Thursday in the wake of the attacks in London and put soldiers serving abroad on increased alert.

"We have strengthened security measures at the Warsaw metro, at all train stations and airports throughout Poland,'' said Alicja Hytrek, a spokeswoman for Poland's national police.

Deputy Defense Minister Janusz Zemke said soldiers _ especially those in flashpoints such as Iraq and Afghanistan _ had been put on high alert, which included requirements for them to wear protective gear and helmets. Poland heads a multinational security and training force in Iraq.

Poland's Foreign Ministry also urged its citizens against traveling to London, citing transport chaos following the string of attacks on the city's bus and subway systems.

Polish witness of London attacks

Marcin Stefanski, a 24 year-old student who recently moved to the UK from Poland, was in a train carriage in the Underground next to one which exploded. He said he saw bodies piled in the blast-strewn wreckage.

He said: "I just experienced a huge explosion and the glass hitting me in my back. People started screaming around me, there was glass everywhere, we couldn't breathe, there was no way to get off the train."

Stefanski, , was among many passengers covered in soot and coughed repeatedly as he relived his experience.

"I was in the front of the first carriage and there was a huge, massive hole in the carriage.

"As I went past the second carriage I could just see the bodies lying all over the floor."

Source: CNN

‘Bono stole my logo’, says Pole

The backdrop to the stage show by stadium rockers U2 features the Coexist logo, designed by Polish artist, Piotr Mlodożeniec. Shame then that they forgot to ask for his permission to use it.

U2 played Chorzow, in the south of Poland yesterday. And everyone loved it, of course. But imagine the surprise Piotr got when he recognized the Coexist logo – which features the Islamic crescent, the Star of David and the Christian cross, and symbolizes all three religions living happily in harmony and all that lovey-dovey stuff.

Polish graphic artist, Piotr Młodożeniec, told Polish Radio that he feels honoured to see Bono using his sign, but that he is bitterly disappointed that none of the members of the group ever asked him for permission to use it.

Apparently, Bono saw the logo on a wall with other graffiti when he was on a trip to the American, Polish stronghold of Chicago, and thought it would look good as part of the U2 stage show, which emphasizes peace and love throughout the world, and poverty is a bad thing and shouldn’t be allowed.

So Bono nicked it.

Maybe if Bono is really sincere about Making Poverty History, then he should make a large donation to an impoverished, Polish artist before he accuses the G8 of failing to live up to their promises.


Read on:

U2 use Polish designed logo, but forget to ask for permission
Radio Polonia June 6

See Coexists logo

Poland should join G5

The G5 – not to be confused with the G8, an exclusive club of the richest nations in the world, plus Russia (snigger) – represents the most populous countries in Europe. Poland, with a population of nearly 40 million, should be allowed to join and make it the G6, says French minister.

Apparently, the main topic of concern for the members of the G5 is cracking down on illegal immigration and ‘bogus asylum seekers’.

Yesterday, France’s interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said that Poland should be invited to join the G5 and help keep out nasty foreigners trying to get into the EU via its eastern borders.

Ministers of the G5 have talked about the need to introduce EU biometric passports, and a databank containing DNA and other personalized information on dodgy individuals (I think they mean Muslims) who are considered to be a security threat.

They will also be coordinating the hire of chartered flights to ship illegals off to the country they came from.

This will be good news for ‘bogus’ individuals in Poland. With 20% unemployment, a clueless political class that couldn’t manage its way out of a paper bag, and an inability to even get in the top 10 of the Eurovision Song Contest, I expect that the queue for these charter flights to be long and keen.

I wonder if they have got any spare tickets?

Live 8? What Live 8?

The rock band U2, with their lead-singing poverty activist, Bono, play in Poland this Tuesday, still glowing from the success of the Live8 concerts at the weekend. Organizers say that a worldwide TV audience of 2 billion people watched some, if not all, of the events on Saturday. But how many Poles tuned in to watch?

Before I answer that, let’s go back in time to the first Live Aid concert in the mid-eighties. I remember the BBC news reports of the horrid scenes of starvation coming from Ethiopia. We’d never seen anything like it. I’d bought two copies of the Bob Geldof inspired Band Aid single that kicked the whole thing off – Do they know it’s Christmas? How naive we were back then. Of course a mainly Muslim country, as Ethiopia was in those days, didn’t know, or didn’t care if it was Christmas, or not. And the ones that did probably had slightly more pressing problems on their hands.

But the idea was to raise as much money as we could, and a huge worldwide television audience did just that.

But the whole world wasn’t involved. Live Aid in 1985 just didn’t happen in Poland. State television didn’t take the pictures of the concerts from London and Philadelphia. Cut off as Poland was by the Iron Curtain, Poles were denied the pleasure of tuning in to one of those, infrequent, worldwide collective experiences – although one woman I was talking to this weekend does remember something being broadcast on state radio about it.

But today, 16 years after the Iron Curtain fell, Poles are now in a position to play their part in a worldwide event like Live8, right?

Still disconnected
Well, once more, Polish public television was not involved. The private station, TVN, however - which is available in 85% of households in Poland - covered the concert for two hours in the afternoon, and two more hours at the end of the events in the evening. In between, the cable only channel, TVN 7, broadcast the concerts in the UK, America, Berlin and Paris. And no adverts interrupted the coverage – which is a quite remarkable for a private TV channel in Poland, where advertising and product placement saturate most broadcasts.

It’s as easy to be cynical about Making Poverty History, as it is to be naive about it. Poverty in Africa is going to take a generation at least to go away. And the Making Poverty History campaign is actually a misnomer: its aims are to halve the amount of people in the world living on a dollar a day by 2030 – which, if achieved, would hardly make poverty history. And of course, if poverty is going to be made history in Africa, then it will be because of something that Africans have done for themselves, and not because of any philanthropy by rich, western nations.

But at least things like Live8 are a start, say the organizers. And, this time, maybe the West can start doing things that will help, instead of doing things that will hinder – which is the West’s usual way.

But even the most cynical would be hard pressed not to be have been moved by some of the broadcasts on Saturday – and I’m not talking about the miraculous reforming of Pink Floyd for one night only – a group that seem to like taking each other to court more than they do playing together.

But the bit people will remember was when one of the most well known photographs from the mid-eighties famine was shown on the screen behind the stage in London. It was a photo of a little Ethiopian girl, her face a mask of hunger. And then, Bob Geldorf comes on stage with the same girl – only now transformed into a beautiful, 23 year old, healthy Ethiopian woman. All four of us who were watching were squinting through the tears in our eyes.

Tuned out
But to get back to my original question at the start of this slot: how many Poles were sitting in their living rooms watching these amazing scenes and reaching for their handkerchiefs?

Well, for the two broadcasts shown on national television in the afternoon and late evening, only around 12% of the total TV audience tuned in. And if you compare viewing figure at the same time, on the same channel on the Friday and the Sunday, the television audience for Live8 didn’t go up – as it did in most countries – but actually went down by three percent. And on the cable only TVN 7, the total audience only amounted to one percent.

In Poland, Live8 was an audience loser. Live8 was a Polish TV turn off.

Live8 this time was not collecting money; it was collecting names as part of a petition that will be presented to the G8 leaders in Scotland this week. But if you go to the web site, at www.whiteband.org, which coordinates the whole thing, you will see that no Polish organization has affiliated with the Live8 campaign at all. In fact, out of the central and eastern European countries that joined the EU last year, only Estonia, Slovakia and the Czech republic have been involved in the name collecting process at all.

What’s more, Poland doesn’t have a Sunday press, but in the Monday newspapers you would expect to see blanket coverage of the concerts, wouldn’t you? Well, in the broadsheet, Rzeczpospolita there was a three paragraph article on the front page, and half a page review in the culture section on page 10. In the tabloid Super Ekspres they had an article about U2’s concert on Tuesday in Chorzow, in the south of Poland, which mentioned that between 50 and 70,000 people had bought tickets for the concert; and that U2 were the most popular band in Poland. But they failed to even mention the Live8 concert at all. Not a single word.

On the Friday night before Live8, the German film director Wim Wenders met Bono and gave him back a book the U2 singer had lent him. It was the superb book about Africa, The shadow of the sun by Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski. And that book – written in 1998 – basically amounts to the sole Polish contribution to Live8.

So when Bono bounds on stage Tuesday night here, and is greeted by a roar from the crowd, the singer may be forgiven for thinking they are cheering on his efforts to Make Poverty History. But they won’t be. The whole world wasn’t watching on Saturday. At least, not this part of the world, anyway.



Read on:Read on:
Live 8 concert attracts 9.6m audience to BBC Brand Republic 05.07.05
Live 8 draws large crowds, except in Japan, Wikinews, 03.07.05
See a review of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Shadow of the Sun

This is a version of an article that originally appeared on the Radio Polonia web site

Tony Blair: new EU superman!!!

The Polish foreign minister, Adam Rotfeld, said today: “If Churchill were alive, he would be proud of Mr. Blair’s speech to the EU parliament.” Er...shurley shome mishtake?

The Polish government is keen on getting a resolution to the EU budget crisis, and they think that TB – who will be president of the EU for the next six months, starting July 1 – could just be their man.

But only a few days ago, the Polish government – desperate to get the EU budget negotiations done and dusted, so they can continue to plan new investments – were grumbling about how unfair the UK budget rebate was. Why should Poles have to cough up 200 million euros year, just so a rich country like Britain can retain their damn rebate?

And then, suddenly, Tony Blair emerges from the smoke of battle with one of those grins on his faces, looking like the EU super hero.

The Polish foreign minister had talks this week with the French, German and British sides in an attempt to mend fences and get things moving again.

But the problem, from the Polish perspective, now appears to be coming from the the other side of the English channel.

"From what I saw at the meeting in Warsaw, I would have to lie to say that these countries (France and Germany) want dialogue," Rotfeld told reporters.

"Britain showed readiness to talk, but for France and Germany it is too early after what happened at the Brussels summit," he said. "It makes a deal much more difficult to reach."

So Poland is now suddenly in love with the British PM.

How things have changed for our Tony. The day after he won the UK General Election, only a couple of months ago, he looked a broken man.

But Blair is a canny political operator, albeit a pretty vacuous one. Devoid of much respect at home, New Labour is now presenting itself as the champion of the poor and dispossessed in Africa, and a friend of the new member states in the EU, like Poland.

While at home he looks resolute in his stance on not giving back any money to those damn foreigners (shades here of Thatcher's 'No, no, no') while at the same time he looks good to poor old countries like Poland, that just want everybody to get so along they can get more subsidies.

Even Clark Kent couldn’t get out of his suit and glasses as quick as Tony Superman Blair

Read on:
Polish FM: chance of EU budget compromise looks bleak

The spy who loved it

A new biopic of a beautiful Polish spy working for British intelligence during WWII, and based on a biography written 30 years ago by an English grandmother, tells the story of a life full of courage, intrigue, love and murder.

Krystyna Skarbek was born 30 miles from Warsaw in 1915, the daughter of Count Jerzy Skarbek. She spied for the allies behind enemy lines, broke many hearts in the process - including author of the 007 novels, Ian Fleming - only to meet a grizzly end after the war at the hands of a jealous admirer.

The film – which will star Polish actress, Liliana Komorowska - is based on a relatively obscure biography written in 1975, by the English author, Madeline Masson. When I telephoned her at her home in a small village in West Sussex, England, I asked her how she felt last year when a Canadian film company rang up and told her that they were going to be paying well over 100,000 dollars for the film rights. The 92-year-old grandmother just laughed: “I was quite surprised, dear.”

“After that,” she went on, “a kind of bun fight ensued between publishers who wanted to reissue the biography.” She finally settled on the British publisher, Virago, who will be releasing a new, up-to-date version of the biography this October.

And it’s a life perfect for film. After finishing school in the 1930’s, Krystyna Skarbek decided to enter the Miss Poland beauty contest, which she won. She then met a Polish diplomat, fell in love and promptly married. When the Nazis invaded Poland the couple were living in Ethiopia. They fled to London, where Krystyna, forever looking for adventure, hooked up with the British Secret Services.

Originally posted in Budapest, she slipped into Poland to monitor Nazi troop movements. Caught by the Gestapo not once, but twice, she managed to get away both times. Her Jewish mother, though, still trapped in Poland, was caught by the Nazis and executed.

When not in Poland, Hungary, or in Egypt, Krystyna worked in France, where her fluent French enabled her to pass off as a local. Finally, in 1945, she was awarded the converted George Cross, nominated by an obviously smitten Winston Churchill.

But the pressures of being a spy during wartime affected her marriage, and, then known under the alias, Christine Grandville, she divorced in 1941. She went on to have many affairs, mostly with fellow agents.

Biographer, Madeline Masson – who has now written thirty books, and is currently writing her thirty-first - is angry at the way she thinks Krystyna has been treated by her homeland in print. “There is a scurrilous book about her in Polish, written in 1998, (Miloscnica) which dwells on her love life, but almost ignores her bravery.”

One of the lovers was always rumored to have been Ian Fleming, who at one time worked alongside her at British intelligence headquarters in England. Since the biography was written in the 1970’s, many secret wartime documents have been released, and they confirm the stories. “I am absolutely certain she had an affair with Ian, “says Madeline, who also worked for a short while in France for MI6 as a currier. “But Fleming had a wife who was pregnant, so he, quite understandably, didn’t want that talked about very much.”

In fact, he was so enraptured by Krystyna, that she became the inspiration for the double agent character in Casino Royale, Vesper Lynd.

But after the war, Krystyna found herself bored, out of a job, and her inheritance taken away by the Polish communists. Staying in England, she drifted into a number of dead-end jobs. One of these was on a cruise liner, where she met steward, George Muldowney. Krystyna liked George as a friend, but George, captivated by the vivaciousness of the Polish ex-spy, fell madly into an obsessive and jealous love.

One day, in 1952, he could stand it no longer and stabbed her to death.

I suggested to Madeline Masson that there were parallels between her and the subject of her biography. “Oh no, dear, I did get sucked into the secret service, but I always tried my best get out of it. I am not as brave as she was. And I have always been quite old fashioned, you know!”

The biography of Christine Granville will be published by Virago Press in October 2005

This article was originally published in the New Warsaw Express

1968 and all that

A new book by award winning American journalist, Mark Kurlansky, 1968: the year that rocked the world, unravels the connections between the revolutionary events of that year in Paris, Prague, America and Poland.

Like 1945 or 1989, 1968 is one of those years that are seen as pivotal to the history of the 20th century.

We were only one year away from the first human being walking on the moon. It was a time of civil rights and anti-war protests, of new and inventive music and sub-cultures, of scientific and social experiment. A very different time, then, from the one we live in today, characterized as it is by aversion to risk and a fear of the new.

The motor of this movement for social change were young, mostly middle class sons and daughters of the old ruling elites. It was a time when students were concentrating more of sit-ins and love-ins than they were on their studies. It was a time of hallucinogenic drugs, which my granny used to tell me made one want to jump from the top of multi-story car parks in the mistaken impression that one was an albatross.

Most people, except perhaps for the most historically challenged, will have heard of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Abie Hoffman in the US; or in France, Henri Comte and Jean Paul Satire; or in the Czechoslovak capital, the students and Alexander Dubcek. All over the world, ruling elites had lost their legitimacy and were under pressure.

But few in the West have heard of the names associated with events in Poland of that year: Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik…

Radical theatre
In Warsaw, it all started in March with an evening at the theatre. The Polish National Theatre decided to stage a new radical interpretation of Dziady. – which is sometimes translated in English as Forefathers’ Eve – by Poland’s most celebrated poet, Adam Mickiewicz. The play, written in the early nineteenth century, tells the story of Polish political prisoners under czarist Russia. As well as a being a political play it is also interpreted by theatre and literary critics as being a mystical, religious piece of work.

The communists had no problem with the political content, but they weren’t too keen on all the religious stuff. They saw this version of the play as being subtly subversive, and with a stupidity characteristic of the regime, decided that they were going to ban it.

On the last night of the performance, about 300 students from Warsaw University picketed outside the theatre and then marched through the center of town in protest. They were met by police and so-called workers-militia (who were basically a bunch of thugs) who beat them up and the police arrested anyone trying to get away from them.

The next day thousands of students joined in the demonstrations on the university campus, refused to go to classes, called for more freedom of expression and held sit-ins outside the Dean’s office, just as they had seen American students do on television. Before long, students from other universities had joined the struggle. All were met by the workers militias, and were beaten and arrested.

These protests had a similar character to those in Paris, or New York; mostly middle class kids from good homes, connected to parents who were part of the establishment. Another thing that the leaders of these protests had in common was that many of them were Jewish.

But in Poland, as ever, there was an extra twist.

Scapegoats
The communist party in the late sixties was divided into two factions: those who had fled Poland as the Nazis invaded, or lived in areas in the east of the country grabbed by Stalin in 1939. Many of these people were taken to the gulags, only to team up with the Soviet army as a way of freeing themselves from Stalin’s grip. Many of these, not surprisingly, were Jews. The other group, more nationalist in their outlook – the self-styled Patriots – came from communist cells within the underground movement, who fought the Nazis from within Poland.

Many of the ‘Patriots’ were anti-Semites and wanted to get rid of Jews from the party, who they accused of being ‘Zionists’. Remember, 1968 came just a year after the Israeli-Arab conflict, in which Moscow sided with the Arab states.

Jews in Poland had become communism’s scapegoats. And with many sons and daughters of Jewish members of the party taking part in the student protests, the opportunity for an anti-Jewish purge was just too tempting to be turned down.

The ‘Patriots’ organized counter-demonstrations, leading chants such as: “Zionists go back to Zion.” Unfortunately, the mob that the party had assembled were simple folk who had never even heard of Zionism. In fact, they thought that the militias were shouting, “Siamists go back to Siam”, and chanted along with gusto.

Yul Brynner would have been proud of them.

Meanwhile, the communist regime had given most of Poland’s remaining Jews one-way tickets to the West, stripping them of their passports.

Jacek Kuron, Adam Michnik and many of the other protest leaders were arrested again and thrown in jail. The demonstrations gradually ran our of steam, and a potentially dangerous ‘counter-revolutionary’ movement was snuffed out.

One of the failures of the demos in Poland, as elsewhere, was that the intellectuals failed to make connections with the workers. It was only when, in the late 1970’s, intellectuals such as Kuron connected up with workers such as Lech Welasa that the opposition movement really gained steam. And that is why the name of Solidarity was chosen for the first independent trade union in the communist bloc: it was a solidarity between workers and intellectuals – two parts of Polish society that were finally, and mutually, dependant on each other.

In the book, 1968, the year that rocked the world, American journalist, Mark Kurlansky tells this story well, and captures the spirit of adventure that was so characteristic among university students all over the world back in 1968.

Fast forward to today and look at the university students. Do you see that same idealistic, adventurist spirit? If you do, then maybe you have been ingesting some of those chemicals that make you want to jump off the roof of multi-story car parks.

Read on:

See review of 1968: the year that rocked the world

This article originally was published on the Radio Polonia web site

Polish government gets cold feet on referendum

In the initial few days after the French Non and Dutch Nee, the Polish government insisted that it was the Poles right to vote on whether they wanted the Constitutional Treaty to go ahead, or not. But now, as opinion polls show support for a yes vote is hemorrhaging, the government’s democratic impulse is fading fast.

The left-wing SLD, in a minority position in parliament and deeply unpopular in the country after four years of corruption scandals and an inability to solve Poland’s 20% unemployment problem, faces a general election in three months time that it is sure to loose.

The SLD has indicated that it may choose to go for a quick vote in parliament to see if it can get a Yes for the Constitutional Treaty that way.

Recent opinion polls say that only around 40% support the treaty position at the moment. Just before the French and Dutch votes, around 60% said they would vote positively for the constitution.

Up until May’s constitution debacle, support for the EU was growing in Poland. This shift mainly came from the 25% of the population that relies on agriculture for its living. Poland has two million farms. Initially skeptic, this community has liked the subsidies coming its way, and has also noted that agricultural exports to the EU have risen by 40%.

But since they have seen the way that the French and Dutch reengaged with EU politics – by not answering the question that the increasingly out-of-touch Euro elites actually asked them – Poles have discovered that you can say No to these people and the world will not end.

But shouldn’t the people of the EU – all of them – have the right to vote on this and many other issues? That way, politics might re-emerge as the way to solve collective problems, and take power back from Eurocrats who have not been elected by anyone.

Read on:,
EU newcomers angry with Blair over budget Daily Telegraph, June 20

If white wrist bands make you want to puke...

…then the new gimmick by the EU elite is going to produce a fountain of projectile vomit.

For the next few months, EU Commission HQ is going to be wrapped in a giant white wristband. The project is part of the EU’s support for the Global Campaign Against Poverty.

The whole continent is going to be wearing its heart on its wrist.

The EU elite, seizing on a chance to appear relevant after constitutional treaty debacle and budget stalemate, is joining Bono, Live 8 and G8 in dropping the debt of countries so poor they can’t even afford to pay the bailiffs petrol allowance.

The Make Poverty History campaign should be prosecuted for contravening the Trade Descriptions Act. The campaign does not aim to ‘make poverty history’. It aims to half the amount living in the world on one dollar a day by 2030.

Per capita, this means about five dollars more a year.

The poverty of Africans is being matched by the poverty of ambition currently inflicting the western world. The Euro elite is wearing a white wrist band in vain attempt to seem relevant to the Euro masses. But that won’t do much for the poor of the world. And it defiantly won’t be making poverty history.

And that really does make you wanna puke.

EU budget: Why should Poles subsidize the Brits?

Another day in Brussels, another crisis. Britain wants to keep its budget rebate, and expects countries like Poland to pick up the tab. Since when was the EU meant to be an organization where poor countries have to foot the bill for the rich ones?

In the first few months after New Labour won the general election in 1997, one of Tony Blair’s favourite guests to have round for tea, cakes and pep talk was Margaret Thatcher. Tony valued her advice; the Lady liked the attention.

Thatcher gave the new boy many pieces of advice, including: keep taxes low and put up with the second class public services; do not on any account repeal Tory trade union legislation; and do not in any circumstances hand back the frogs and krauts in the EU her budget rebate, won for Britain in 1984.

Contrary to his popular image, Tony really is a good listener.

Watching the New Labour crowd in Brussels this week reminds the beatroot of Thatcher in her heyday, stomping around smoke-filled negotiation rooms hand-bagging any dissenting Eurocrats who dared to try and slip their hands in her purse.

Those smoke-filled rooms are now as rare as a smoke filled pub in Ireland. Another difference today is that Madge was a conviction politician. She really was a Little Englander.
Blair’s opposition to handing back any of her hard won rebate is more out of the usual desperate attempt to connect with a British electorate that is semi-detached from the EU, and semi-detached from the political class in the UK.

Watch Blair and Straw looking butch before the cameras, explaining to the rest of us that the Common Agricultural Policy needs reforming if it is ‘to be relevant to the modern world’. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Blair claimed that he would only agree to freezing the rebate at 2005 prices if the CAP was reformed. The agricultural policy accounts for 40% of the EU budget. Blair thinks that the budget should be spent on education, training and the environment, and not lining the nests of those pesky French farmers.

The beatroot cannot find any evidence of this UK policy in any manifesto. In fact, it seems the policy has been plucked out the air just before New Labour turned up in Brussels this week. This new found interest in the CAP is just another piece of Blairite oppotunism.

In 1984, when Thatcher snatched the rebate, Britain was one of the poorer nations of the Union. These days, it’s the richest.

Poland, the second poorest member, is now paying 200 million euros every year just to pay for that rebate.

All of the new members from central Europe, most of them impoverished by decades of communism, were so desperate to secure a budget deal that they offered to sacrifice some funds from EU coffers in a dramatic last-ditch attempt to revive the stalled negotiations.

The delay means that Poland cannot go ahead with the much needed building of new motorways and other infrastructure projects.

So not only was Poland – a country that has around 20% of its population involved in some way with agriculture – willing to forgo some of its subsidies because poor old, cash-strapped Britain doesn’t want to give up some of the Thatcher rebate, but it is even willing to go on paying some of its bills.

Blair’s argument that the CAP needs reforming on moral grounds looks a little hollow.

From July 1, the UK is going to be EU president for six months. It is going to have to sort out the Constitutional Treaty crisis and do something about the budget. Poorer nations be warned: keep your hands on your wallets – New Labour is in town!

Baby Beats: bite size stories

And now for a ‘Normality Parade’
Following last Saturday’s ‘Equality Parade’ in Warsaw - banned by the homophobic mayor, Lech Kaczynski, but went ahead anyway much to the disgust of far-right fascist types in Poland - the far-right fascist types have now responded with a planned Normality Parade.

The fascist-come-catholic-nationalist rally will take place on Saturday, June 18.

The mayor, however, is not so sure that good catholic boys should be taking to the streets of the capital city in this way.

“This is like a vicious circle – first the Equality Parade, which though illegal, enjoyed police protection, then the Parade of The Normal. Maybe we’ll have another Quality Parade after that. This is a very bad phenomenon”, said a bemused Kaczynski.

Lech Kaczynski is also the favourite to win the presidential election in October.

Read on:
The twins who would lead Poland BBC June 16

The Battle of Britain

It’s one year since Poland entered the EU. But the only countries where Poles could look for work without any restrictions at all were the UK and Ireland. So how have Polish job seekers got on?

One of the most successful reality-type TV shows in Poland since last May has been the intriguingly titled: Battle of Britain. The programme followed the fortunes of several young Poles who had taken the opportunity after Poland joined the EU to leave home and see if they could make a living in the UK.

Most said that they had encountered little discrimination there, and had found work in bars, restaurants, clubs or as au pairs. Many of them then lost jobs in bars, restaurants, clubs and as au pairs, only to later find other jobs in similar places.

Many of my friends in London have noticed an increase in the number of Poles living there. In fact, Londoners seem to be of the impression that all the new young workers in the pubs of London are in fact Polish. And they are half right. Fifty percent of workers who have entered Britain since the EU’s expansion have come from Poland. This is not surprising as out of the 80 million people who entered the European Union last year, 40 million of them were Poles.

So, whereas many of the bars and pubs of London used to be staffed by people from Sidney, Melbourne or Brisbane, they are now coming from Warsaw, Krakow or Gdansk.

Poles in London are the new Australians.

But Poles have also been filing posts in the professions too – most notably in dentistry. Around 200 Polish dentists, for example, are now working in the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, drilling and filing in British teeth for 50,000 pounds a year (that’s around 100,00 dollars). Which a large jump in salary. In Poland they get about a fifth of that amount.

And if George Orwell’s famous observation about English teeth is still correct, then they’ve got their work cut out.

The title of the Polish reality TV show I mentioned earlier, Battle of Britain, seems a strange choice. But what it is referring to is the fact that the last time a small wave of Poles hit the British coast was during the Second World War, when many of the finest pilots flying the spitfires and hurricanes in the RAF were Polish.

As newspaper reports at the time show, these dashing young Polish pilots were treated by British women as rock stars would be today.

But this positive attitude changed in the latter half of the war. The newspapers started to print negative stories about the Poles. This was mainly due to the fact that the British government was spending a lot of its energy trying to placate Stalin, who didn’t like the Polish government-in-exile in London.

But will the same happen this time? Will Brits tire of their new Polish friends?

There have been a few disturbing reports coming from loyalist, protestant areas in Northern Ireland. For instance, a group of Poles who had arrived over the Christmas period to work in a livestock stock factory in the Bushmills area of County Antrim were forced out of the area after receiving threatening phone calls from males claiming to be from loyalist groups.

And there have been other reports of attacks on Poles in these sorts of areas.

Some commentators have been trying to link these incidents with religious antagonisms between Catholics and Protestants.

But I think there is just a general breakdown in law and order in places like North Antrim. This is where some of my family are from. During the nineteen seventies and eighties – and if you exclude sectarian violence - crime was very low in places like Bushmills and other parts of NI. Working class communities basically policed themselves. If you got out of line then you could expect a visit from ‘the boys.’

But, ironically, since the Good Friday peace agreement was signed in the 1990’s, crime has risen in all areas of Northern Ireland. The tiny Muslim and Chinese populations there – around 10,000 at most, and who have lived there in peace for many years, have begun to experience attacks.

And violent crime against the indigenous population, along with housebreak-ins, and other sorts of crime, has risen as well.

So I don’t think that these attacks against Poles in Northern Ireland has anything to do with them being Polish or even being catholic. I just think they are in the right place at the wrong time.

There has also been a few strange articles in the British press about Poles. Since newspapers have found it hard to compete with the immediacy of the internet, radio and 24-hour TV news, they have all but given up writing news stories and filled more and more of their pages with opinion pieces.

One very highly paid columnist in the Times (London), Julie Burchill, wrote an article last year called, ‘Poles and Proles’. In it she stated that bringing in tens of thousands of eastern European workers to Britain, “robs those countries they leave of the young and the strong, and it robs [the working class] in the countries they go to of any pride they once had…” What chance have the British working class got, she goes on, “if east Europeans are willing to work for peanuts?”

She concludes by wondering if the only winners in this are rightwing neo-fascists like the British National Party.

Now, for a long time I have wondered if highly paid columnists like Julie Burchill are either being deliberately provocative, or are simply barking mad. I think probably the latter.

Anyway, over half the Poles that went to Britain last year have already come back. They probably got fed up with Britain’s public transport system. And the ones who have remained like it there and like the people.

Except that is for a few wackos in Bushmills, Antrim and Julie Burchill in the Times.

Read on:
For more on Ms Burchill see Sarah Anne's blog

This article was originally published on the Radio Polonia web site

How to spoil a skinhead’s weekend

Last Saturday around two and a half thousand activists marched through the center of Warsaw in support of gay and lesbian rights. This did not please the Mayor of Warsaw, however, who had banned the parade. The march also spoiled the weekend for a few hundred skinheads who were determined to stop the demonstration.

The Equality Parade, as it was called, was meant to be the centerpiece of Equality Weekend – two days of debates and educational initiatives about homosexuality and universal human rights in Poland.

Though homosexuality has been legal for decades in Poland, during communist times it was a bit of a taboo subject and was swept firmly under a rather tatty red carpet. Now that communism has gone everyone is free to give their opinions about everything. Unfortunately, westerners and many Poles find some of these opinions slightly antiquated, to say the least.

Hence the Equality Weekend. But the organizers of the Equality Parade quickly run into a few problems when organizing the event. The Mayor of Warsaw, the conservative right-winger Lech Kaczynski, decided that he was not going to allow gays and lesbians and their supporters to march through the streets of the capital.

The whole affair began to resemble ‘groundhog day’ – you somehow got the impression that you had been here before. And you had. Exactly the same thing happened last year.

In 2004, Mayor Kaczynski had refused permission for a similar march to go ahead. He said that he thought that it might constitute a 'danger to law and order'. Kaczynski is the head of the populist Law and Justice Party, whose central platform rests on promises to stamp out crime and corruption in Poland and to usher in a moral regeneration of the country.

Though the mayor had banned the gay parade he had given his permission for a counter-demonstration by far-right groups to go ahead. In the event, nobody showed up from either group.

But this year, gay and lesbian groups decided that enough was enough: they had the right to free assembly and expression just as much as everyone else. So, though officially illegal, they went ahead with the march, regardless of the consequences.

And I went along to have a look.

Showdown at high noon
Though the march on Saturday was illegal, a meeting outside the parliament building at 12 noon had got permission from the mayor. The Deputy Prime Minister and other left wing politicians gave speeches, and then the illegal march began to weave its way through the main shopping streets of Warsaw, heading for the Palace of Culture and Science, smack bang in the center of town.

Accompanying the two and a half thousand gays, lesbians and human rights activists were members from the Green party in Germany, plus a few hundred police in riot gear. There were also about 300 skinheads and members of far-right political groups who had been given permission to demonstrate and march against the illegal Equality Parade.

But Polish skinheads aren’t what they used to be. For a start, because modern day fashion dictates that virtually all young men in Poland sport very short hair these days, the average Polish skinhead to has been forced to make a radical decision: he has decided to grow his hair. Not by much, just a few millimeters, but enough to distinguish him from the rest of Polish youth.

Soon, in the not so distant future, everyone will look a bit like Polish skinheads, apart, that is, from Polish skinheads, who will be wearing long curly hair, and love beads.

But longer haired skinheads are at a noticeable disadvantage, as it makes them look significantly less scary.

In fact, last weekend, your average Polish skinhead didn’t look very scary at all. Not only because of their radical sartorial re-think, but also because there just wasn’t enough of them to seem particularly threatening.

Occasionally they chanted a few obscene remarks and made threatening gestures. But the Warsaw police, who recognized many of these characters as local football hooligans, had obviously decided that if there was going to be a law and order disturbance then it was going to be coming from the direction of the skinheads, and not from the gays and lesbians.

At one point along the route the Polish skinheads decided to have a sit-in in the middle of the street – a tactic utilized to great effect, of course, by 1960’s hippies. It seems that having slightly longer hair really is going to Polish skinhead’s heads.

The police were not going to put up with this, however, and as soon as they had sat down they were hauled off to a secure location away from the demo.

Once gays and lesbians got to the Palace of Culture – their numbers now swollen to over three thousand due to numerous weekend shoppers you had stopped to have a look, they were confronted by what was left of the skinheads, their numbers now down to about one hundred.

This is when the skinheads started throwing eggs. I was standing right next to someone who was on the receiving end of one these homophobic omelets and I can report that the skinheads had not even the wit or forethought to have prepared rotten eggs – they were fresh as a daisy and recently bought from the supermarket near by.

Along with the eggs came a few bottles and rocks. But you could see that the heart had gone out of the far-right demonstrators, and when the police charged they ran off into the Palace of Culture, pursued by a few police with very long sticks.

Mayor Kaczynski, and members from the far-right League of Polish Families have complained of police brutality against the skinheads, who, they remind us, were taking part in a legal march; whereas the gay and lesbian demonstration was not.

The human rights supporters proclaimed the whole event as a success for democracy and the Polish constitution. The skinheads, though, after running away, simply disappeared. Perhaps they went off to have a hair cut to make them feel big and strong again – a kind of Samson experience in reverse.


Read on:

Gay Pride in Warsaw ‘a Great Success” say Activists Gay News UK, June 13
Gay activists lobby EU Catholic World News, June 10
Antigay protesters clash with police in Poland The Advocate, June 14
Twins lead polls Cnews June 13

This article was originally published on the Radio Polonia web site