I think the stupid jokes can stop now.

Poland just suffered a national tragedy. Last week, a plane carrying a delegation that included the Polish President, a former president and the chiefs of every branch of the Polish armed forces -96 people in all-crashed in Russia. The crash, a result of pilot error, instantly killed all aboard. The delegation was on its way to Smolensk to honor the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, in which more than 20,000 unarmed Polish soldiers and civilians were murdered by the Soviet military, then dumped in mass graves.

Let me spell this out for the vast majority of you who know little about Eastern European history. Many Poles hate Russia, with very good reason. From the partition of 1795 to the end of the Warsaw Pact, the vast majority of Russo-Polish relations have consisted of Russia placing its foot on Poland’s neck and stomping as hard as possible.

What difference does all this make? Glad you asked.

While I may well be wrong, I have not heard a single report of racially based violence against any Russian citizen on Polish soil. Polish leaders have gone out of their way to avoid blaming Russia for the tragedy, despite political incentives that may lie in whipping up nationalist fervor. The tone is that of mourning, not a cry for vengeance. Given that wars have started when heads of state have died under circumstances much less emotionally charged than this one, this is very good news indeed.

Contrast these sober decisions to our actions after 9/11. While we too avoided any race riots, there were scattered reports of Arab American owned businesses being vandalized and individuals beaten. We summarily rounded up and interned more than 1,200 individuals from Middle Eastern nations on immigration violations, a dragnet that failed to yield a single terrorism conviction. We unofficially withdrew from the Geneva conventions by openly condoning the torture of terrorist suspects. After what was agreed to be a just response in retaliating against the Taliban, we went on to attack Iraq, a nation that had produced precisely zero of the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center and played no role in harboring Al Qaeda. All because “everything changed” after the towers fell. That war has killed more than 100,000 Iraqis, along with nearly 5,000 coalition soldiers, so far.

It was an impulsive response from a young nation that has had little experience dealing with tragedy.

I don’t write this column to lay any claim to ethnic pride over the past week’s events. Even though my name ends in “ski” rather than “sky,” I have just as much, if not more, Russian blood in my veins as Polish blood, and identify as an American without hyphenation. I write this column because I want to say how proud I am as a human being that it seems nobody else is about to die on account of those already in the ground.

We are united in grief for your loss, Poland. We could learn something from you.

Weinberg senior Michael Gsovski can be reached at [email protected]