“This incident represents a new low in attempts to stifle discussion about the complicity of Poles in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust,” said Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan.

Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan condemned the violent assault by a member of the Polish parliament against a Polish-Canadian historian who suggested that Poland was complicit in Nazi atrocities.

The historian, Jan Grabowski,  was speaking at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw when MP Grzegorz Braun reportedly took the microphone from his hand,   smashed it into the podium and sought to disable the sound system before police intervened.

“This incident represents a new low in attempts to stifle discussion about the complicity of Poles in the persecution and murder of their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust,” said Dani Dayan in a statement. “This act of vandalism is more than an ugly attack on an internationally renowned scholar. It is an attack on academic freedom, on the historical record, and on Holocaust remembrance,” he added.

According to a Google translation of a statement Grzegorz Braun made in Polish, the politician said he was protecting “the Polish nation against a provocative attack on our historical sensitivity.”

Braun has been described as far-right and a proponent of antisemitic conspiracy theories. “The American empire here is the political and military tool of Jewish blackmail against Poland,” he has said.

Co-founder in 2003 of the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, in Warsaw, Jan  Grabowski is best known for his book Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (2013), which won the Yad Vashem International Book Prize.