Ironies can be beautiful or ugly. I’ll go with ugly for this one. A few days ago Tory ministers were fuming about students at the LSE who had the temerity to protest at the presence of an out and out racist, a believer in ethnic cleansing, a defender of an illegal occupation that daily inflicts human rights abuses on Palestinians. The protesters against Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, who included Jewish students, were ludicrously condemned by these ministers for “antisemitism”.

Today those Tory ministers are defending a decision to send a team of UK troops to Poland to assist a government widely condemned for its antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, and misogyny in recent months and years, in its efforts to prevent asylum seekers crossing the border into Poland, into the EU from Belarus. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/12/british-troops-sent-to-poland-to-assist-with-belarus-border-situation?fbclid=IwAR01rA4SWUhcGJyiKdzsFvM9T8wBxxvkHrsuduo-U0y8Ly4MXHUscYYT61M

The point of attempted entry is in the forests on the Poland/Belarus border. In recent weeks the Polish border guard presence has multiplied. They have created a two-mile deep militarised zone where they have been building a razor-wire fence creating dozens of checkpoints, and keeping human rights observers away.

And here the ironies multiply too. In October 1943, 300 inmates of Sobibor, the Nazi death camp, who led an uprising and mass escape ran for safety into those same forests. Only a few dozen survived, Most were hunted down by groups of Polish partisans in the forests who were against German occupation, but were also deeply antisemitic.

Today, Poles in local villages there are urged to report on those “who look like they don’t belong” to border guards.

The British Government will claim that their military team are merely giving “engineering” support to the Polish government against a dastardly plan by Belarus, but in reality they are colluding with a far right government in actions against the human rights of asylum seekers.

If the Tories want to chat more with their Polish government counterparts, why don’t they ask them about what happened elsewhere in Poland two days ago (11 November), when that government overruled the decision by Warsaw’s (more liberal) mayor to ban a provocative ultra-nationalist independence Day march through Warsaw’s capital in which neo-Nazi organisations played a very prominent role.

Why don’t they ask them about events in Kalisz Western Poland that same day where a similar demonstration took place and witnessed virulent antisemitism? There were chants of “Death to Jews”, and cheering as a replica of the “Calisian statute” of 1264, which protected Jewish autonomy and safety there, was symbolically burned.

The Tory Party are adept at imagining antisemitism on an anti-racist protest at LSE, but have long closed their eyes to antisemitism stoked by their allies in Poland’s ultra-nationalist right wing government, and the forces further right that Poland’s “Law and Justice” government tolerates and fuels.