Reader Norman Fraser takes me to task for disagreeing with David Aaronovitch:

No Charles this will just not do. You are attempting an act of heroic sophistry here and you are clearly not up to it. Quibbling about the words in one article is just not enough. There is too much other evidence that Kaminsky is an unpleasant man with a history of extreme right-wing statements and actions which he now seeks to explain away – unsuccesfully.

The Jewish Chronicle term his current position on Jedwabne as "ingenious" and summarise the case aganst him well here https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/20816/exclusive… Looks like a clear case of back-pedelling anti-semite homophobe to me

Here is the reply I have sent him:

I have spent too long in that part of the world, perhaps. The experiences people have had and the prejudices for better and worse they have inherited are far beyond anything we can understand.

So it’s all about being patient and letting people ‘catch up’ with our own lofty liberal standards. It’s not so long ago that gayness was outlawed in the UK and public facilities in the USA were racially segregated, so we too need to be a bit more modest in sneering at others. Poles are moving along their own trajectory towards contemporary European tolerance from a very different place, just as the Irish have done. The Arabs are far ‘behind’ if one wants to look at it like that (they I suspect do not). 

The bottom line in all this is that Poland is a notably less extreme and more ‘European’ place than it was six years ago, thanks primarily to the Kaczynskis getting in to power and (yes, maybe reluctantly) finding themselves having to deal with a new European dimension to Polish politics. They brilliantly sucked the electoral juice out of the Red/Brown Polish populists (30+% of the vote in 2003, nowhere now) and threw the husks aside.

Excellent result for Poland and Europe. Who would you rather have in the EP? Michal Kaminski or Andrzej Lepper? Do you see no difference?

Kaminski played a good part in accomplishing that seismic shift. The hypocrisy of Miliband/Aaronovitch lies in not accepting and praising that as at least part of the story, and in not being sympathetic to the Polish process as a whole.  

It’s all a sordid British political game at the expense of another country’s tragedy, so shame on those who started it.

All this is a bit Polish-specific, I know, but those making these accusations are counting on general ignorance of Poland to get away with it.