Helen Thomas Learns That Free Speech is a Myth
This is why a lot of people think Jews control the media.
Not me. I’ve worked in the media most of my life. So I know that the media is controlled by morons.
Still, what happened to Helen Thomas will feed the rants of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists.
On June 7th the professional life of Helen Thomas came to an end. The acid-tongued “dean” of the White House press corps since the Kennedy Administration got fired by her newspaper syndicate, dumped by her speakers’ bureau, and disinvited by a Bethesda high school that had asked her to address its commencement ceremonies. The White House Correspondents Association condemned her. President Obama took time out from not doing anything about unemployment or the Gulf oil spill to weigh in.
Chastened, reviled and subjected to the kind of national opprobrium normally reserved for international terrorists and blind baseball umpires, Thomas apologized and announced her retirement.
All in one day.
So what did Thomas do to merit such derision?
No, it wasn’t that journalistic career killer, plagiarism.
Actually, in America today, stealing people’s words and ideas and pretending they’re yours is A-OK. Mike Barnicle, fired by the Boston Globe for ripping off a column from a George Carlin book in 1998, landed on his feet at the New York Daily News and now works for the Boston Herald. And he’s on MSNBC. Monica Crowley, who plagiarized in the Wall Street Journal in 1999, is now at Fox News and The Washington Times. (Jayson Blair has yet to reappear in print, but that’s different. He’s black.)
No, Helen Thomas didn’t participate in the attempt to throw a presidential election.
Unlike George Will. The right-wing columnist may or may not have stolen President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 debate briefing book and handed it over to the Reagan camp, as Carter has claimed. But Will did admit in a 2005 column that he had seen the purloined document at Reagan economic advisor David Stockman’s house during the campaign. Will had a legal obligation to describe what he had seen to the police, and an ethical duty to his readers to report a blockbuster story to his readers. He did neither. Yet Will still works for Newsweek and the Washington Post, publications whose readers must not care about the truth.
No, Thomas didn’t say anything racist.
But racism doesn’t get you fired from journalism. Just ask Pat Buchanan, another MSNBC regular.
Here’s what killed Thomas’ illustrious career: “Tell them [Israelis] to get the hell out of Palestine,” she told a rabbi in a spontaneous video interview. “Remember, these people [Palestinians] are occupied, and it’s their land; it’s not German, it’s not Poland’s.” Asked where Jewish Israelis should go, she replied, “They should go home” to “Poland, Germany… America and everywhere else.”
No doubt, Thomas’ comments were simplistic. Three generations of Jews have made their homes in Israel. Asking them to back up and “return” to places where they’ve never visited, much less lived, would be inhumane, not to mention impractical. Of course, this is no different from current U.S. immigration policy, which calls for the arrest and deportation of undocumented people whose parents brought them here as small children.
Her words also demonstrate historical ignorance. Surely Thomas, who is 89, ought to know that most Israeli Jews were born there. As for the rest, many came from the former Soviet Union, not Poland or Germany (which murdered most of their Jews during, and even after, the Holocaust).
But are these remarks so beyond the pale that their utterance ought to mean the end of your professional life?
Ari Fleischer, who ought to be in prison for defending torture and concentration camps as press secretary for George W. Bush, called Thomas a fan of “religious cleansing.” Equating opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism, ex-Clinton spokesman Lanny Davis called Thomas “an anti-Semitic bigot.”
“If she had asked all blacks to go back to Africa, what would White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials —much less a privileged honorary seat?” Davis asked.
Davis is entitled to his opinion. But so is Helen Thomas—not that you’d be able to tell by reading the avalanche of self-righteous yowling by politicians and editorialists.
Thomas isn’t unusual. Like it or not, supporters of the State of Israel should understand that Israel’s creation was and remains highly controversial—and not just among anti-Semites.
The postwar decision to establish a Jewish homeland by seizing land from Arabs who had nothing to do with the Holocaust—instead of, say, Germany—continues to bewilder. The fact that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are living in refugee camps, where old men and women still wave the deeds and keys to their old homes when they see a reporter, attests to the freshness of the wound. Feeling sorry for them and taking the position that they have a right to be compensated doesn’t make you a Jew-hater.
Moreover, the might-makes-right tactics of Israeli political leaders doesn’t make them any friends in the world. Acting above the law, they ignore resolutions issued by the same U.N. that made their country possible in the first place. Dissembling about their own “secret” (and illegal) nuclear weapons, they bomb an Iraqi nuke plant and threaten to do the same to Iran. Mossad operatives traveling to Dubai to assassinate political opponents.
Israel’s policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians turn off a lot of people who don’t have a bigoted bone in their body.
Settlements in the occupied territories, apartheid-like economic planning, bulldozing the homes of the relatives of accused Palestinian terrorists, the Berlin Wall-esque “security fence,” and now the outrageous blockade of Gaza have angered millions of Americans. What makes these acts even more appalling is that Israel, as the number-one beneficiary of U.S. foreign aid, is America’s de facto representative in the Middle East.
Lanny Davis’ attempt to draw an analogy between Israelis and African-Americans is historical nonsense. Blacks were brought to the U.S. forcibly as slaves. Israel is occupying Palestine, and not just in Gaza and the West Bank. Eventually, the world—even Muslim countries—will come to accept the existence of the State of Israel as a fait accompli. But that will require the passage of time, as well as Israeli politicians who work harder to accommodate themselves to the Arabs inside and outside their borders.
So is Helen Thomas an anti-Semite? I don’t know. I do know that her comments were not inherently anti-Semitic.
The bigger question is: What if she were? Should she have been fired?
Of course not. Free speech must be defended no matter what—even that of cranky anti-Semitic columnists (if that’s what Thomas is/was). Unless we are truly free to say what we think—without fear of reprisal—free speech is not a right. It is merely a permission.
Besides, if every American columnist or politician lost his job over bigotry, what would that mean for all those “family values conservatives” who bash gays, not to mention the nativists who attack Latino immigrants and Muslims?
We owe Helen Thomas an apology.
(Ted Rall is the author of the upcoming “The Anti-American Manifesto,” to be published in September by Seven Stories Press. His website is tedrall.com.)
COPYRIGHT 2010 TED RALL
8 Comments.
They should have let Patton take Berlin and , to quote George Carlin, “They should have given the Jews Bavaria”. We’re still paying for these decisions, eh?
And then there’s this, from the Rabbi who “interviewed” her.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1pj5ZZwG7g
Jayson Blair was an affirmative action hire.
Frankly, other then her age, I don’t know why Helen Thomas is dean of anything. However, she has the right to speak her mind. I only wish other reporters had her balls. Everyone is so afraid to offend anyone else. It’s getting so you can’t even tell a good Polish joke anymore.
I say it’s time to tell Israel and the Jews that the “World War 2 guilt trip meal ticket” is all punched out. Start breaking up the big companies and putting “Stereotypes” of them back in the cartoons, not just Arabic ones.
And, frankly, Jews DO run the media, Rall, not that I expect you to confirm this and get yourself banned by those parasites. The “Say bad things about Jews/Israel” is the one media/politics instant career killer. They say one bad thing publicly, they then apologize to the media, then they get fired anyways, or like Helen Thomas retire if they really are lucky.
Way I see it, it’s like the old media cliche of the Bully, the Nerd and the Protector. The bullies like to pick on the Nerd, but then an older kid comes by and stands up for him. This makes the Nerd’s head spin since he’s been spat on and hit every day of his life. Next thing, the Nerd is the new bully, using the threat of the “Protector” to extort money from the bullies and other kids. The protector either hears and withdraws his protection in disgust, or he has to move away, etc. Now the Nerd is back to square one, but this time the bullies REALLY want to hurt him and the general crowd now has not even a sliver of sympathy for the nerd…
That, IMO, is Israel, Zionism, and the Jews in a nutshell. For about ONE lifetime in man’s history it hasn’t been “cool” to openly spit on them. For about ONE lifetime if you walk up to one with a brick and smash his face screaming “How did it feel to murder Christ today, Coevetous JEW!?” the Fuzz will actively try to get you. For about ONE lifetime, they have the same rights as every citizen and actually a LOT of power.
But, frankly, there’s something about “Them” that people resent. So feeling “Forced” to not behave like they always have, at least “Razz” them a little, they feel bad and the pressure is building up. The WW2 guilt trip propaganda worked for a while and they actually felt sorry for them. But now, with how Israel behaves and this clear “Control of the Media” (idiots and out of touch ultra rich elites also, Jewish or non, I agree there) adds to this.
And, no I’m not a “neo-you know what”. But I’ve known and talked to some. Know what they are doing? Sitting back and smiling. The recession, the politics, etc. Their dish of hate with true intent of malice is being served to them.
Frankly, unless we release some of the pressure by removing their power and putting them on the defensive again, they’ll go back to being the “Pariah” and “Scapegoat” in a decade or two. In a decade or two, America falling apart in a huge depression, the “neoCONS” will use that Israel got wiped off the map but NOBODY got “Raptured” and go right back to open, blatant “Anti-Semitism” again, yelling that people working 14 hour days in factories to make cheap goods for the Chinese Wal-Marts never, NEVER “Unionize” because as the “Protocols” state that is part of the agenda of the “Covetous JEW who ruined America and murdered CHRIST!!!”
Congratulations Green for having the guts to say what many Jew hating lefties think.
Thanks, US395, but make it clear I do NOT “Hate the Jews”…
I hate what they (as a group/their elites) are doing, yes…
But I do NOT “Hate” them, not in the way that they use as an “Ad Homenim” attack against any who criticize them. If I did, as some Neo Nazis I’ve known are doing, I’d just shut my mouth, smile, wait and work on “Vigilante” plans for when the Sh-t hits the fan. The Neo Nazis have been rather quiet in recent decades, even though there’s more than them, ever notice that? They are lying in wait for the economy to crumble just a bit more, people to get just a bit more scared, and all of these incidents are there to “Prove” it.
I think if we turn the media around, such as by “monopoly” law enforcement, boycott of “Jew Media” and supporting “Alternative” with anti-Semitic/at least high criticism of Zionism, we’ll actually save their sorry butts from another “age of real oppression” or even a “Cleansing”. The ones in America, the Israelis are toast once the USA is no longer able to defend them, but I’ll dare take an unpopular stance to try to save some of them. They’ll go back to being the sniveling “Oppressed Nerd” and whine “Oh vey! Am I not human!? whimper Please no gas or bricks!” which IMO is their place in the universe.
Right now there’s a LOT of hate building up against them. So de-flate their power trip, it’ll deflate some of the hate.
And, really, 20 years from now, on a day off of a week of 14 hour days sewing jeans for the Chinese market I don’t want to have to smash a Jew in the face with a brick to prove to the “neo Defender” I’m not a “Closet Subversive”…
I have to note that Thomas is not an anti-semite. What kind of American anti-semite would want more Jews to come to the United States? Israel is an active war zone, Jews would be a lot more safer anywhere else. What kind of anti-semite would want fewer Jews dead? If Thomas is an anti-semite, she is a sucky one.