Jamie Stokes: feel Like At Home?

The impression given by the Panorama documentary was that the tournament's host nations are, at best, casually tolerant of far right extremism or, at worst, training camps for violent nationalists ready and willing to stab the first non-white person they see.

I cannot speak for Ukraine, but I have lived in Poland for five years and the image of this country portrayed in the documentary does not reflect the one I know.

Poland, like every nation, has its problems with extremists, but the idea that there are ranks of fanatical nationalists goose-stepping in and out of football stadiums is absurd and alarmist.

One major problem with Stadiums of Hate was that is conflated two very different situations in two very different countries. Poland and Ukraine may be neighbours, and intimately linked historically, but they are far from the same.

Poland has experienced what is beginning to be recognised an economic miracle over the past decade, while Ukraine, languishing on the wrong side of the EU's borders, has suffered through divisive revolution and stagnation.

It's not a simple equation, but the coincidence of nationalist violence with poverty is too frequent to dismiss. Poland is becoming more open and tolerant as it becomes richer, this isn’t the case in Ukraine.

The only evidence presented against Poland was that it tolerates anti-Semitism. This is both true and untrue, because it touches on a very tangled confusion between what the West means by 'anti- Semitic' and what Poland means.

When British journalists hear fans chanting 'death to the Jews,' their jaws drop. This kind of thing is at the furthest reached of taboo from the perspective of the West.

When Poles hear fans chanting ‘death to the Jews,’ they are disgusted, but they know these people are not actually referring to people who practice Judaism. The only thing on the mind of the red-faced fan screaming 'anti-Semitic' obscenities from the terraces is hatred of his Catholic compatriot waving a different coloured scarf on the other side of the ground.

It's a horrifying historical fact that Poland, a country that was once home to millions of Jewish people and witnessed the near-total extermination of this segment of its population, is today almost completely ignorant of Judaism. Very few Polish people alive today have ever knowingly met a Jewish person, and still fewer have any memory of what Jewish communities in Poland were like.

When visiting journalists report what looks to them like virulent anti-Semitism in Poland, Poles throw up their hands in horror and rattle of the ranks of Polish names listed as Righteous among the Nations, and there are a lot of them.

From a Polish point of view, calling Poland anti-Semitic makes about as much sense as calling a man with amputated legs 'anti-walking.' The Jews who were murdered in Poland were Poles. Their loss was a blow that, arguably, the nation is still recovering from, and Poles are well aware of this.

There are genuine, bone-headed anti-Semites in Poland, just as there are in England, and some of them are probably football supporters. The casual use of anti-Semitic terms I have described is not okay and needs to be tackled, but I do not believe they are evidence of a widespread neo-Nazi movement.

The international media will continue to take the line that an anti-Semitic slogan is an anti-Semitic slogan, regardless of the context. I have a lot of sympathy with this point of view, while recognising that it misses something important about Poland that results in an unfair and misinformed judgement.

Jamie Stokes