An Open Letter to the Fox Network

At first, FOX tried to justify this attack on Poles, saying that the bigoted character played by Fred Willard makes fun of all ethnic groups. When this “equal opportunity racist” explanation landed with a thud, FOX apologized with another half-hearted email to those people who complained, such as myself. The FOX e-mail claims: “In no way was this dialogue meant to insinuate any connection between the Polish people and the Nazi movement.” Wrong. That is exactly what the FOX-TV writers did.

This disgusting and historically inaccurate joke is particularly painful for Poles because Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia invaded Poland in 1939 and wiped Poland of the map for 5 years. During those years, Polish resistance fighters took to the woods and struggled to repel these invaders from their country. Poland was the only country occupied by Nazi Germany that did not establish a collaborative regime with the Nazis, even though Hitler’s troops murdered millions of Poles.

My father fought against the Nazis in the woods of Poland, and then wore French and British uniforms in defense of those countries. Collaboration? Hardly. The FOX producers that allowed this line to be broadcast have spit on my father’s grave, and the graves of hundreds of thousands of Polish soldiers that gave their lives to free their homeland. Many of these resistance fighters are still alive and are suffering because of FOX’s sick joke.

So far, FOX seems to believe that it was all right because it was couched in satire.

Millions of people watch FOX and the network must offer its apology before the very viewers who watched this slander of Poles in the same time slot that the program aired, not just to the thousands of Polish Americans who have complained.

The Don Imus affair and the “Back to You” scandal should be a lesson to American television networks that the people of this nation will no longer tolerate bigotry and hate speech disguised as humor.

Unless FOX apologizes in the same time slot that the offending line was aired, Polish Americans will continue their protest of the FOX
network and its advertisers.

Respectfully,

Alex Storozynski