Helen Thomas has been an iconic figure in the White House for over four decades. However, her status does not negate the fact that she, a journalist, made a cold and frankly, horrible comment against Israelis. The video of the comment is positioned below this HuffPo report.
Longtime White House scribe Helen Thomas caused more than a few eyebrows to perk up when video surfaced on Friday of her declaring that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland.
Captured by Rabbi David Nesenoff of RabbiLive.com, the footage made the rounds on mostly conservative and neoconservative sites, with some private complaints that her comments weren’t getting wider play.
Thomas on Friday apologized in a written statement, saying she deeply regretted the comments — which were offered, ironically, during the White House’s Jewish Heritage Celebration.
But even as she was trying to walk back the remarks, calls for her firing mounted. Among the more vocal was former Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who claimed to have a close relationship with Thomas when he was manning the daily briefings.
“She should lose her job over this,” Fleischer said in an email. “As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.”
“She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”
A longtime fixture of the White House press room, Thomas hasn’t exactly hid her politics on the Middle East conflict. The day after Israeli Defense Forces stormed the flotilla, she pressed spokesman Robert Gibbs as to how the administration could stand by the blockade of Gaza and the broader treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government. A good faction of political and foreign policy observers found the line of inquiry refreshing.
The comments that surfaced on Friday were far less filtered than the quite-pointed questions she’s offered in the briefing — enough so that they’ve spurred earnest conversation as to whether she should be given a pass because of the historic perch she’s held as the longest serving White House correspondent or whether it’s time for her to leave that perch.
Here is the clip of Thomas:
Good day, just wanted to send a message to this lady that she’s an idiot, guess what folks the Jews were there first and were forced out by the Palestinians, they didn’t come from Poland! Besides that tell me another Middle Eastern country that still allows Jews, Muslims and Christians to all live together in one place. I’m sure if they wanted to it would be easy for them to send them out!
Ken Davidson:
I believe the historical background is not quite that simple. Ms. Thomas made a mistake in speaking imprudently out of an accumulated outrage over the plight of suffering Palestinians while failing to heed how hurtful her words could be to so many others. But kudos to Ms. Thomas for having compassion for the residents of Gaza and the courage to attempt to express her compassion and outrage. While I do wish Ms. Thomas had not been so careless with her rhetoric, Ms. Thomas is not an “idiot” and she should not be fired.
I have learned over the years that my Jewish friends have “antisemidar” that causes them to size a person up very quickly in their minds with “is he/she with us or against us” as opposed to “is he/she pro or anti-zionist.” IMHO too many Jews equate being anti-Zionist with being antisemitic. Since I can easily understand how and why that happens, when the plight of the Palestinians arises in the course of my discussions of current events I try to be very careful with my language. I refrain from confrontation and encourage my Jewish friends to discuss the morality of Israel’s domination of the Palestinians among themselves. That helps to avoid visceral concerns over anti-semitism. Sometimes I just ask provocative questions about the facts (or what appear to be the facts).
Last, all of us should remember that Jews, themselves, have very mixed opinions on the matter of the treatment of Palestinians. We should also recognize that in stretching the notion of what is necessary for its own “self defense”, Israel is not very different from the U.S..