The controversy over President Obama describing
Nazi concentration camps in Poland “Polish death camps” while
awarding the Medal of Freedom posthumously to the Pole known
as Jan
Karski, who was instrumental in bringing news of the Nazis
murderous and genocidal ways to a skeptical West, may have blown
over quickly in the U.S. press, but it continues to be a hot topic
in Poland, where journalists in the country have helped lead a
decades-long fight to eradicate the wildly offensive misnomer.
David Frum does a really fantastic job
over at the Daily Beast explaining exactly why the
misnomer is so hurtful coming from the American President. Frum
offers up as an analogy the use of the term “Hawaiian sneak attacks
on Pearl Harbor,” which he calls a “pathetically inadequate
approximation.”

I don’t have much to add to David Frum’s very insightful
comments on the topic, except to offer my own perhaps less
inadequate analogy. Imagine in half a century, some country
somewhere in gratitude to all the sacrifices the United States had
made for it, honors the last surviving first responders to the 9/11
terrorist attacks, and while bestowing honors upon the
firefighters, EMS and police officers there, that country’s
president refers to bravery of the first responders in the
“American attacks on 9/11 that took down the World Trade Center and
damaged the Pentagon.” The planes all departed from American
airports, were part of American airliners, and executed their
attack in America. Yet they were no more American attacks than the
Nazi’s death camps were Polish, even though both tragedies left an
indelible mark on the countries they befell.