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Book launches for works of history are typically sedate, often even boring affairs, but the shouts of "Lie!" and "Slander!" from the agitated crowd suggest that the latest offering from Jan Tomasz Gross is garnering attention in circles way beyond those of academic historians. Gross has come to Warsaw's Entrepreneurship and Management Academy to promote his new book, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, and the visible police presence and the plethora of TV cameras in the jam-packed hall make clear that the topic has aroused strong emotions...
...told him what the lettering really said, and he looked over at the crowd of now hostile Iraqis. He turned pale. "Oh s--t man, I didn't know" he said. "Can you explain that to them?" He thrust the flag into my hands and ran back indoors. So there I was, holding Saddam's flag and facing an angry Iraqi mob. I could sense that their resentment at the soldier was being transferred...
Relieved, I handed the flag to an old man in the crowd - he was dressed like a tribal sheikh and had a kindly, weathered face. Through my translator, I told him that the flag belonged to Iraq, not Saddam. The old man turned to his neighbors and had a quick, whispered conversation. Then he gave the flag back to me. "You saved the flag," he said, in Arabic. "So you should have...
Luckily, my translator had a booming voice, and he shouted at the crowd to calm down. He explained that it had all been a big mistake, the soldier had not intended to insult their national flag, he had merely been misinformed by his Kurdish translator. To my relief, the Iraqis were mollified. Some laughed, others made wisecracks about Kurds...
...crowd was aghast - none of them understood English, so all they could see was an American soldier about to set alight their national flag. Some of them shouted at the soldier, but he seemed to mistake their anger for enthusiasm. He held the flag up higher, and fired up the Zippo...