French site Observatoire du journalisme detailed the ban on Rafal Ziemkiewicz, a well-known journalist in Poland.
Ziemkiewicz writes a weekly column in the prestigious conservative weekly Do Rzeczy, and has worked for several other respected press titles over his twenty-year career. He was invited to Britain to speak on television. In the past he had hosted a show on public television, and he has a show currently airing on private TV, called TV Republika.
He is also a prize-winning author in his country, with several bestsellers on his list. While Rafal Ziemkiewicz may well display opinions to the right of the ruling PiS party, closer to Christian nationalist circles than the Christian Democrats, he is clearly part of the Polish mainstream.
Ziemkiewicz was invited by an organization of Polish emigrants to Britain to host author meetings planned for February in the cities of Cambridge, Bristol and London.
This displeased Labour MP Rupa Huq, a former journalist for the leftist newspaper The Guardian. The MP, who was born into a Muslim family from Bangladesh, wrote to the Home Office asking for a ban on his stay for this Polish journalist.
Huq successfully bullied the Polish writer who was due to give a speech in Acton criticising Islamism, into cancelling his trip.
Rupa lied in her tweet stating “He refused to debate with me” when what actually happened was that Rupa wrote to the Home Office trying to bar his entry into the UK, and when that failed, she got her supporters in the Metropolitan police to threaten the premises that were due to host the debate with having their licence revoked if they went ahead.
Huq told The Guardian that the cancellation of Ziemkiewicz’s meeting in Acton was the second time in four months that the borough of Ealing had shown it “will not tolerate hatred and extremism from neo-Nazi speakers from Poland”. Rupa described Rafal’s intended UK tour as “hate speech”. The newspaper refused to publish the Polish author’s response.
She also claimed that Rafal was a “holocaust denier” because he had joined calls for an exhumation of the Jedwabne mass grave to determine whether the Germans were behind the Jedwabne massacre during WWII, which a Princeton professor had claimed was perpetrated by Poles. The scope of the exhumation was strictly limited by religious objections against disturbing the remains of the dead, according to Jewish religious doctrine. Therefore, the exact number of victims could not be determined. In a 2016 television interview, Polish education minister Anna Zalewska expressed doubt regarding whether Poles had participated in the incident.
Huq has also spoken in the House of Commons urging a ban on US President Donald Trump visiting the UK.
According to Ziemkiewicz, these actions by Huq is again proof of the alliance between Islam and the extreme left that is observed in the United Kingdom. Ziemkiewicz has expressed doubts about immigration and Islamization observed in Western Europe.
Ziemkiewicz said he would start legal proceedings in the British courts after Huq’s insults which closely resemble that of communist regimes in Eastern Europe before the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989.
In January 2018, Huq complained that the British A Level history syllabus was biased and “brainwashing our kids”.
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