Thursday, October 25, 2007
HALOCAUST DENIER GETS TOP POLISH POSITION
WARSAW (Reuters) - A Polish senator who questioned the Nazi Holocaust has been given a top ceremonial role in parliament, drawing anger from the party that won Sunday's parliamentary election.
Senator Ryszard Bender was named by President Lech Kaczynski as "speaker senior," a post that will give him ceremonial duties at the re-opening of parliament on November 5. The president's office said Bender was named because he was the oldest senator.
Bender has said in the past that the Nazi extermination camp of Auschwitz was "not a death camp, it was a labor camp." More than 1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed by German occupiers at the camp in southern Poland.
"Someone like this should not have any political functions," said Stefan Niesiolowski, a senior official of the centre-right Civic Platform, which defeated the ruling party of Kaczynski and his twin brother the prime minister in the election.
"We do not want to start with boycotts and fights, but this is a scandal," Niesiolowski told reporters.
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