Stanislaw Tyminski, the Toronto businessman who finished second to Lech Walesa in last December’s Polish presidential elections, has claimed his efforts to field candidates in national elections were thwarted by a Jewish conspiracy financed from abroad.
Before boarding a Toronto-bound flight in Warsaw on Oct. 9, the 42-year-old emigre millionaire was quoted as telling the mass-circulation Gazeta Wyborcza, “I don’t want to be in Poland, which will be turned into a Jewish colony by rigged elections, and that is why I am leaving.”
The next day he told the Toronto Globe and Mail: “I’m not saying it’s all Jews who are rigging the election, because it’s a particular group centered around (former Prime Minister Tadeusz) Mazowiecki. But also you know they have wide connections, in the justice system, the legal system, the mass media and so on.”
“They are getting a lot of funding from abroad, from the U.S. — money, breaking the law and so on,” he said.
Tyminski’s Party X suffered a major setback this month when a court invalidated all but 44 of its candidates for the 460-seat lower house of parliament. The would-be lawmakers had forged the signatures of supporters, the court ruled.
The Polish expatriate was barred from running for a seat in the Sejm after the legislature passed an amendment mandating a five-year residency requirement for candidates. Tyminski left Poland in 1969 and returned only last year.
Jewish groups here have denounced Tyminski.
Canadian Jewish Congress spokesman David Satok called him a “charlatan” devoid of credibility, and said, “His remarks are ludicrous and outrageous.”
University of Toronto Sovietologist Aurel Braun, a spokesman for B’nai Brith Canada, said: “This type of intolerance is a manifestation of an inadequate understanding of democratic institutions and process. It diverts people’s attention from confronting monumental and urgent problems facing Poland and wastes their energy in a fruitless search for a scapegoat.”
Sol Littman, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Canadian office, called Tyminski’s accusations appalling. “There’s been a suspicion all along that Tyminski was coming from a radical right-wing, anti-Semitic venue, and this is the proof of it,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
