A television ad campaign by the right-wing League of Polish Families party is aimed at convincing voters that the U.S. and Israel are endangering Polish troops in Iraq. The TV ad features an anti-Israel and anti-U.S. kicker line to a series of images featuring Polish President Lech Kaczynski meeting first with U.S. President George W. Bush and then showing him wearing a yarmulke at the Western Wall. The images are followed with the words, “Our allies. They put us in the line of fire.”
The line flashed on the screen ends with a voiceover warning “It is our nation that is going to fall victim. Let the nation decide.” Party leader Roman Giertych denied the ad was anti-Semitic. “This ad shows the cooperation between Poland and the U.S…..and Israel. We have a right to criticize it,” he maintained. “One can be against the war in Iraq without being an anti-Semite.”
The Stop War movement in the country, however, slammed the ad, insisting that it did indeed have strong anti-Semitic connotations. Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Schudrich, agreed saying the sequence of images was intended to encourage negative reactions to the Polish president’s presence at the Western Wall in Israel.