Poland condemns racism after defending march

WARSAW, POLAND— The Polish president has sharply condemned expressions of xenophobia and racism at a weekend march by nationalists, saying there is no place in the country for anti-Semitism and “sick nationalism.”

It was the strongest and first unequivocal condemnation by a representative of the country’s conservative leadership of the white supremacist and racist views expressed by some of the 60,000 people who took part in a march on the Independence Day holiday Saturday in Warsaw.

Government members over the past two days had mostly described participants as patriots and played down the nature of the xenophobic messages. The event was organized by far-right groups and some carried banners with slogans like “White Europe of brotherly nations” or had flags with Celtic crosses, a white supremacist symbol.

There were also anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim slogans and chants. One large banner read “Deus Vult” in Gothic lettering. Latin for “God wills it,” it was a cry used during the First Crusade in the 11th century, when a Christian army from Europe slaughtered Jews and Muslims in the Holy Land. In recent years, it has been used by the radical right to show hostility to Islam.

President Andrzej Duda said that “there is no place in Poland” for xenophobia, pathological nationalism and anti-Semitism and that the country must remain a land open to all who want to come together and work for the good of the nation.

He said it makes no difference if a person’s father was “German, Jewish, Belarusian, Russian or whatever.”

Earlier, the Foreign Ministry had said it strongly condemned racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic ideas, but insisted the march was largely an expression of patriotic feeling, “a great celebration of Poles, differing in their views, but united around the common values of freedom and loyalty to an independent homeland.”