Polish Foreign Minister Calls Obama Mistake a Matter of “Ignorance and Incompetence”

The White House issued an apology to Poland and the Polish people for what The Obama Administration is a mistake and that the President misspoke when he used the term “Polish Death Camp” in a ceremony yesterday.

The Poles say that the President should have used the term “German death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland,” to distinguish the perpetrators from the location. Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski called it a matter of “ignorance and incompetence.”

Obama was posthumously giving the Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation of Poland during World War II.

Obama said that Karski,

“served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring to the world to take action.”

National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said:

“The president misspoke. He was referring to Nazi death camps in Poland. We regret this misstatement, which should not detract from the clear intention to honor Mr. Karski and those brave citizens who stood on the side of human dignity in the face of tyranny.”

The Associated Press Stylebook states,

“World War II camps in countries occupied by Nazi Germany, do not use phrases like Polish death camps that confuse the location and the perpetrators. Use instead, for example, death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.”