“We have 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country that are part of the backbone of our economy and this is not only a reality but a necessity,” she said. “And that it would be harmful–the Republican solution that I’ve seen in the last three years is that we should just pack them all up and ship them back to their own countries and that in fact it should be a crime and we should arrested them all.”
12 million? The backbone of our economy? The Republican solution is arresting them all? Political views don’t get much more detached from reality than this. And this is not some random US congresswoman. Wasserman Schultz leads one of the two major political parties.
The second half of the video starts with a question about a disagreement at a meeting which took place a few days earlier. Note that this question triggers a far more impassioned response:
Question: The Republican Jewish Coalition head was reported in the New York Times – Matt Brooks is saying that you were proposing a gag order on this subject.
Wasserman Schultz: Ha ha, yeah, well, uh, you know I take… one of the most tremendous sources of pride for me is that I am the first jewish woman to represent the state of Florida in Congress. And, ah, another tremendous source of pride for me is that I am a pro-Israel jewish member of Congress and I proudly support a president that is pro-Israel. Um. What I think is unfortunate and what I suggested, along with others, including members of the Republican Jewish Coalition that are not the executive director of that organization, um, is that we need to make sure, like AIPAC pushes for, like Jewish Federation pushes for, like ADL and every major jewish organization pushes for in this country, we need to make sure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue. And that’s what we talked about in that meeting.
The meeting was a bipartisan jewish affair regarding jewish interests. Jewish GOP official blasts DWS, Politico, 24 May 2011:
The top official at a Republican Jewish group blasted Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for an “unprecedented and inappropriate” effort to quell partisan debate over Israel in a private meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday at which both were present.
Republican Jewish Coalition Executive Director Matt Brooks clashed with Wasserman Schultz, as I reported yesterday, after Wasserman Schultz called for partisan unity on matters of Israel policy and Brooks – whose group had criticized her for speaking before the liberal group J Street – responded that he reserved the right to attack Democrats who stray from a hawkish pro-Israel line.
The South Florida Democrat laughed at charges leveled by the head of a Republican Jewish group that she wanted to squelch partisan criticism over Israel. Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, accused Wasserman Schultz of proposing a “gag order” on criticism about Israeli policy when they and others met privately with Netanyahu this week.
“We need to make sure that Israel never becomes a partisan issue, and that’s what we talked about in that meeting,” Wasserman Schultz said. She quoted Netanyahu as saying, at the end of the meeting, that when it comes to Israel, “we need to erase the aisle” between Democrats and Republicans.
“Everyone that calls themselves legitimately pro-Israel believes that we should not make Israel a partisan issue. Unfortunately, I think there are organizations that claim to be pro-Israel that are partisan first and pro-Israel second. And I think unfortunately the way the Republican Jewish Coalition has conducted itself is they put their Republicanism in front of their pro-Israel stance. And I think that’s unfortunate. And I think it’s why the Israeli Embassy said that Israel should not be a partisan issue.”
Here are a couple of previous media reports concerning Wasserman Schultz’s background.
The congresswoman is beloved by the Democratic rank and file for her aggressive, outspoken advocacy for liberal points of view. She’s frequently deployed as a surrogate, particularly to groups of women and Jewish voters.
Ms. Wasserman Schultz is known inside the party for her strong fund-raising abilities, and she represents South Florida, which will be a critical battleground in the 2012 presidential race.
Matthew Brooks serves as Executive Director of both the Republican Jewish Coalition, an organization dedicated to enhancing ties between the Jewish community and the Republican Party, and the Jewish Policy Center, a think-tank that examines public policy from a Jewish perspective.
Matt began his political career as State Chairman of the Massachusetts College Republicans while still an undergraduate at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA. Matt managed the Jack Kemp for President campaign in Massachusetts, as well as directed projects in New Hampshire and New England. Matt became the Political Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition in 1988. Taking a leave of absence from the RJC, Matt served as the National Field Director for Victory ‘88 Jewish Campaign Committee, designing and implementing campaign strategy on behalf of the Bush-Quayle ‘88 campaign. Matt was appointed Executive Director of the RJC in 1990.
Matt was twice selected (in 2006 and 2008) by the Jewish Forward as one of the 50 most influential Jews in America.
In addition to his duties leading the RJC, Matt also serves as the organization’s principal spokesman. In this role Matt has been a frequent guest on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and has been quoted extensively in publications such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and other major newspapers.
One of the many consequences of jewish influence in media and academia is that the perfectly descriptive term Zionist Occupation Government is painted as “an antisemitic conspiracy theory”. Yet, the jewish conspiracy is right out in the open. Erase the aisle. Israel first, party second. This is the state of US politics today.
What we see here is a disagreement between hyper-ethnocentric jews who hold positions of great power and have strong influence over the US government. What they care about most is what’s best for the jewish ethnostate of Israel. They all agree that in US politics the interests of Israel should always come first, across the board, for everyone, not just jews. The big question for them is whether to continue imposing this the usual stealthy judeo-liberal way, or the usual in-your-face judeo-conservative way.
Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.
The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.
The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.
The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in “client states”; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.
This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.
What will emerge in the days and weeks ahead is an unprecedented picture of secret diplomacy as conducted by the planet’s sole superpower. There are 251,287 dispatches in all, from more than 250 US embassies and consulates. They reveal how the US deals with both its allies and its enemies – negotiating, pressuring and sometimes brusquely denigrating foreign leaders, all behind the firewalls of ciphers and secrecy classifications that diplomats assume to be secure. The leaked cables range up to the “SECRET NOFORN” level, which means they are meant never to be shown to non-US citizens.
Or for that matter to citizens.
Although their contents are often startling and troubling, the cables are unlikely to gratify conspiracy theorists. They do not contain evidence of assassination plots, CIA bribery or such criminal enterprises as the Iran-Contra scandal in the Reagan years, when anti-Nicaraguan guerrillas were covertly financed.
One reason may be that America’s most sensitive “top secret” and above foreign intelligence files cannot be accessed from Siprnet, the defence department network involved.
Nothing to see here “conspiracy theorists”, only “an unprecedented picture of secret diplomacy as conducted by the planet’s sole superpower”.
In Russian political culture, the secret services, Kremlin leaders, and business oligarchs have long practiced the dark arts of kompromat, spreading misinformation to blacken opponents’ reputations and influence public moods. So they suspect that there has to be something or someone with a hidden agenda standing behind WikiLeaks.
“I have no doubt that this was a prepared operation, probably by [the] US secret services,” says Alexei Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political Information in Moscow. “I find it improbable that US authorities couldn’t deal with one guy (Mr. Assange) if they really wanted to. No, this is clearly being done as an instrument of destabilization,” he says.
The most popular theory is that the massive outing of classified State Department communications is designed to make Obama look weak, inept, and unable to control his own government machinery.
“This will obviously damage Obama and his policies,” says Sergei Strokan, a foreign affairs columnist with the Moscow business daily Kommersant. “Obama made a strong emphasis on international affairs, outreach to the Muslim world, and resetting relations with Russia. These leaks show that many diplomats take a privately cynical view of those goals, or are actually working at cross purposes to them. All these disclosures will be a serious blow to America’s new image in the world, and will only undercut Obama.”
The guardian.co.uk article above notes that they have had the diplomatic cable data since “earlier this year”. I don’t have time or inclination to read all 250K cables nor more than a little of the smokescreen of spin and misdirection thrown up around them. Instead I’d like to focus on what the cables reveal about “GOI” (government of Israel), its obsession with Iran, and its relations with “USG” (United States government), especially concerning attempts to justify and precipitate a USG attack on Iran.
No US ally is keener on military action than Israel, and officials there have repeatedly warned that time is running out.
guardian.co.uk has so far placed 16 Israel-related cables online with their own title and highlighting. They do not link the corresponding Wikileaks pages.
When asked if the use of force on Iran might backfire with moderate Muslims in Pakistan, thereby exacerbating the situation, Barak acknowledged Iran and Pakistan are interconnected, but disagreed with a causal chain. To the contrary, he argued that if the United States had directly confronted North Korea in recent years, others would be less inclined to pursue nuclear weapons programs. By avoiding confrontation with Iran, Barak argued, the U.S. faces a perception of weakness in the region.
Acknowledging that there are at times differences in analysis of the facts, [Mossad Chief Meir] Dagan stressed that it is similarities rather than differences that are at the heart of the GOI-U.S. intelligence relationship, particularly on Iran.
A/S [US assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs Andrew] Shapiro stressed the importance of the U.S-Israeli political-military relationship, noting the significance of visiting Israel on his first overseas trip in his capacity as Assistant Secretary for the Political-Military Affairs Bureau.
GOI officials reiterated the importance of maintaining Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge (QME).
[MFA’s (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) Deputy Director General for Strategic Affairs Alon] Bar argued that a perceived closure in the capability gap between Israel and Arab states, coupled with a nuclear-armed Iran, could compel moderate Arab states to reassess the notion that Israel was a fixture in the region.
The King, Foreign Minister, Prince Muqrin, and Prince Nayif all agreed that the Kingdom needs to cooperate with the US on resisting and rolling back Iranian influence and subversion in Iraq. The King was particularly adamant on this point, and it was echoed by the senior princes as well. Al-Jubeir recalled the King’s frequent exhortations to the US to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program. “He told you to cut off the head of the snake,” he recalled to the Charge’, adding that working with the US to roll back Iranian influence in Iraq is a strategic priority for the King and his government.
GOI has responded to the leaked cables by spinning it as a good thing.
“I don’t see any damage. Quite the opposite,” said Israeli Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz, in an interview with Israel Radio. “Maybe there’s an indirect benefit that the truth is coming out, that the entire Middle East, including Arab states, are very fearful from the Iranian nuclear threat, and are calling on the West to be much more aggressive toward Iran.”
The revelation of regional support for Israel’s hard-line approach to Iran was seen as such a boon that Sever Plocker, a columnist for the daily Yediot Ahronot newspaper, quipped, “If the WikiLeaks site did not exist, Israel would have to invent it.”
“The massive leak of American diplomatic telegrams indicates a single picture, sharp and clear,” he added. “The entire world, not just Israel, is panicked over the Iranian nuclear program.”
Actually the sharp, clear picture is that GOI is more panicked than anyone else over Iran, and that they desperately want “the entire world”, but especially USG, to serve Israeli interests under the misguided belief that we are serving our own.
Part of GOI’s “Qualitative Military Edge” includes nuclear weapons. Part of what could be called GOI’s “Qualitative Political Edge” is that these weapons are rarely mentioned or questioned, though when they are the picture comes through sharp and clear:
In 2003, Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at Israel’s Hebrew University, thought that the Al-Aqsa Intifada then in progress threatened Israel’s existence.[19] Van Creveld was quoted in David Hirst’s “The Gun and the Olive Branch” (2003) as saying “I consider it all hopeless at this point. … We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.” He quoted General Moshe Dayan: “Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.”
UPDATE, 1 Dec 2010: Wikileaks has dubbed this Cablegate. At the moment the Wikileak web server hosting the cables (cablegate.wikileaks.org AKA ec2-184-72-37-90.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com) is offline.
The outcry in Israel over the operation against the Gaza flotilla has cut across political lines. Yet unlike the outrage being expressed abroad, the concern here is over tactics, not morality. “It’s not enough to be right,” wrote one liberal columnist in the daily Ma’ariv, “one also needs to be smart.” The assumption that Israel was right to stop the flotilla—and right to maintain its siege on Hamas-led Gaza—is largely a given here.
Israel and the rest of the world seem to be speaking dissonant moral languages. How, Israelis wonder, can pro-Hamas activists wielding knives be confused for peace …
The “dissonant moral languages” problem is that the “the world” is talking morals while the Israelis (and their cheerleaders abroad) are talking tactics.
The treatment being meted out to Israel is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the treatment meted out to any other nation. Ever. It’s not just that the tyrannies of the present are not even reported on, let alone seen as a worthy and legitimate target of protest. Even the great progressive causes of the past, such as the campaign against apartheid South Africa, for example, never provoked such hysterical obsession, let alone such a sustained and frenzied onslaught of lie after distortion after fabrication after blood libel. Just like the Jew-hatred of the past, the characteristics of this victimisation are unique; just like the Jew-hatred of the past, it treats the Jewish people as some kind of cosmic evil; and just like the Jew-hatred of the past, ultimately it simply defies explanation. But it is happening, right now, before our disbelieving eyes; it is quite simply a derangement of the world.
According to Phillips, the international campaign against South Africa was “great”, but the toothless disapproval of Israel is “hysterical obsession”, “a sustained and frenzied onslaught of lie after distortion after fabrication after blood libel”, “just like the Jew-hatred of the past” (repeated three times).
Right after Phillips insists the contrast between South Africa and Israel “simply defies explanation” she claims the explanation is “simply a derangement of the world”. A more plausible explanation is that Phillips is deranged. She treats jews as some kind of cosmic victims of unique hatred. An even more plausible explanation is that Phillips is perfectly sane. She’s just hysterically guilt-tripping “the world” about “jew-hate” because she knows that this tactic has worked for jews many times in the past.
For some people it is indeed simple – crazy “jew-hate” explains everything. It’s a liberating idea. It justifies any jewish behavior whatsoever.
The beauty of the almost unanimous international condemnation of Israel for attempting to stop the terrorist flotilla like gentlemen — using paint guns? — instead of using serious military force, should send a message to Jews: You can’t win by being polite to terrorists who have a schoolyard bully mentality. Weakness brings out even more outrageous behavior in bullies.
Next flotilla that violently resists a search — just sink it. Torpedo it. See how many more flotillas follow. The condemnation won’t be any different. Better that than even one more Jew being injured while boarding these floating Jenins.
Few events in recent decades have illuminated the complete hypocrisy of the world. There is nothing that Israel can do or could have done that would stop the next diplomatic ambush. So start acting tough.
By Israel fighting as if their lives actually depended on it — which it does — Israel will, in fact, be taken more seriously by the international scholyard bullies. Bring back the “fear factor.” It is the reason why in 1980 Iran released the hostages when Reagan became president, and not during Carter’s presidency, because Carter was rightly seen by the Iranians as a wimp and Reagan was feared as a trigger-happy cowboy.
We are no longer in the general Euopean anti-Semitism mode but deeper into the new run-up (in the Arab mind) to the Final Solution — the extermination of Israel. In old Germany, a Jew sitting on an Aryan park bench was as much of a criminal as a Jew who robs a bank. So we might as well rob the bank. We might as well take out Iran as take out the flotilla.
The Other Side is fearless now. If someone is going to fear anyone, make the bad guys fear Israel. Right now, too many Jews fear the world. Turn the tables. Make the bad guys think that Israel is craziest S.O.B. in the room. Make everyone wonder what the Jews will do. The world will be furious? Imagine that. Imagine winning.
Here Mark is rationalizing bank robbery and torpedoing civilian ships, slinging “blood libels” at Europeans, and he thinks the problem is “the complete hypocrisy of the world”.
From this day forward, Ms. Thomas will no longer be a part of the White House Press Corps. While I expect nothing less than than a fawning send off from her adoring colleagues in the media, to much of America she will be long remembered, not for her reporting and breaking of the glass ceiling for women in journalism, but for her irrepressible anger and hatred for Israel and the Jews. It’s a pathetic way to end a career, but in Helen Thomas’s case, a fitting one.
For me, Helen’s words brought back memories from my tour of the National Holocaust Museum in DC. It’s important to note that the Nazis didn’t just suddenly round up and gas the Jews out of nowhere. It was part of a long and effective strategy of government sanctioned anti-Jewish text books, children’s storybooks, public posters, and print and radio propaganda designed to generate enough public distrust of and anger toward the Jews that it caused the German people, unaware of the Nazi government’s ultimate goal, to marginalize them.
Priestap is so concerned for jews that she hasn’t noticed that today it is Whites who are targeted for marginalization by virtually all Western governments.
Helen Thomas’s comments that Jews should leave Israel and go back to Poland and Germany were especially weighty for me, as I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading and watching documentaries about WWII and the Holocaust. I guess she forgot that Jews fled Poland and Germany to escape Nazi death camps, and suggesting they “go back” invoked Holocaust images.
I was sad and enraged when I saw a photo of naked Jewish women walking to a mass grave to be shot, and one carried a newborn. I’ve seen lots of Holocaust photos, but that one in particular brought the tragedy into focus. According to a book on the subject, Nazi’s sometimes buried the babies alive with their dead mothers, instead of shooting them.
The moral of this token’s little testimonial: jewish propaganda even works on blacks.
Priestap also links Leftists Cheerfully Defend Helen Thomas’ Anti-Semitism, which embeds a longer version of the Thomas interview, Helen Thomas Complete (original). Thomas uses the same argument as the jews who have accused her of being ignorant of history: “Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries?” The leftist “defense” is that Thomas is offering friendly advice to young jewish journos – she probably thought it was safe to speak her mind because, “some of my best friends are jews” and “after all, some of them have said the same thing”.
In much the same way that some of us on the left are fond of calling out racism among conservatives, right-wing commentators love little more than lobbing the accusation of anti-Semitism back our way. Normally, they aim way too wide, and wing a bunch of people who are plainly just reasonable critics of Israel. (As someone who’s unmistakably Jewish in person, but lacks a particularly Jewish last name, I especially enjoy blogging about Israel and getting called a Jew-hater in the comments. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a Heeb.)
For once, though, conservatives are piling up on someone who really did cross some kind of line.
Oddly enough, when jews aren’t nervously trying to pass they’re shoving their jewishness in your face.
Helen Thomas: When An Icon Disappoints, by Irin Carmon at Jezebel, “an Israeli-born Jew, whose European grandparents and great-grandparents were among the few in their families to survive Nazi genocide because they were Zionists in what was then known as Palestine”:
There may be only one Helen Thomas — who refused to follow the script for a woman, who has pushed back at every single president since Eisenhower, and who has now disappointed a lot of us. But maybe we’ve moved to a point where she no longer has to stand in for all loudmouthed, fearless women. There have been plenty of firsts and seconds and thirds since then, so even though she is harder for me to admire now, I hope that we no longer need her as badly.
No longer need her as badly? I think we all know what that really means is Carmon wants to ship Thomas to a concentration camp.
I don’t condone in any way what she said about calling for the Jewish people to get out of Palestine or the way that she said it. It was a horrible and thoughtless comment and there should be consequences when someone who is supposed to be an objective journalist not only inserts themselves into a news story, but also does it in an offensive and inexcusable way.
But I have to ask — why does Helen have to “resign” but others who have done similar things get to keep their jobs?
If forced resignation is good enough for someone who’s actually contributed to real journalism, then it ought to be good enough for those who work for “news” organizations with an agenda when they cross that kind of not-so-fine line of offensiveness.
But I suppose in this day and age of opinion news, as long as the offenders are making money for their bosses, it will get excused. If Helen Thomas had been working for FOX News, she’d probably still have a job.
Sure, because in PunditMom’s fevered imagination Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, and FOX are clearly “anti-semitic”. Why might she imagine that? Well here’s PunditMom on Surviving My Mixed Marriage:
My husband and I are very different in many ways.
He’s a city boy and I’m a farm girl. I’m Protestant and he’s Jewish.
It’s a rare person that actually came out and criticized Thomas without pretending that she made her remarks because she’s old or angry. The remarks are sheer Jew-hatred, nothing less. Jews’ millennia-old ties to the land of Israel are utterly discounted by Thomas, who chooses to use the fiction that Israel was a country created specifically by and for Holocaust survivors.
a former New Jerseyan who now resides in Virginia. She is a former liberal who now considers herself center-left, and has been the SNN token woman and token feminist since almost the beginning of the podcast.
Since moving to Virginia she has voted twice for Republican presidential candidates, purchased a handgun and a rifle (and knows how to shoot them), and spends most Fourth of July holidays at Fort Lee in Petersburg. Zionism and finding media bias are Meryl’s two specialties, as well as delivering as much juvenile scorn as a subject will stand. Meryl blogs about Jewish and Israeli issues at yourish.com.
It’s not enough to have spent a lifetime being an awesome, trailblazing journalistic and feminist icon. Because longer still than the shadow cast by such a great career is the one cast by the Holocaust.
The verdict is in. People who love Israel and love jews hate Helen Thomas.
In an exchange with Joey Kurtzman at jewcy.com, Be Nice, or We’ll Crush You, subtitled “Criticizing Jews is professional suicide”, John Derbyshire writes:
Almost the first thing you hear from old hands when you go into opinion journalism in the U.S. is, to put it in the precise form I first heard it: “Don’t f*ck with the Jews.”
Joe Sobran expressed it with his usual hyperbole: “You must only ever write of us as a passive, powerless, historically oppressed minority, struggling to maintain our ancient identity in a world where all the odds are against us, poor helpless us, poor persecuted and beleaguered us! Otherwise we will smash you to pieces.”
Helen Thomas has been a fixture in the White House press corps since JFK was president. She must have understood Derbyshire’s little bit of journo wisdom. What little I know of her involves her supporting role in the left-right kabuki that passes for US politics. Based on opinion from the right, or “conservative” side of the theatre, all I could ever really be sure of was that Thomas was some kind of immortal wicked witch of the left. She was “a nasty piece of work” who could be impertinent and insolent, even to presidents, and yet she never had to fear for her job.
Now that portion of the kabuki lies in tatters.
The response from “the jews” of all stripes to Thomas’ heresy has been swift and merciless. For “liberal” jews, Thomas’ “anti-semitism” towers above personal friendships, her decades of reliable “liberal” service, and her being the first woman journalist to do this or that. For “conservative” jews, her “anti-semitism” totally eclipses her “liberalism”. Everyone could live with Thomas’ “liberalism”, but now she has vexed “the jews”, and this cannot be tolerated. With the flotilla flap making Israelis look like bullies there couldn’t be a better time to remind everyone that they had better not say as much out loud.
There are some people who believe that any criticism of Israel is Anti-Semitism. That belief is as ignorant as Anti-Semitism itself. There is however, a great deal of crossover between hatred of Israel and Hatred of the Jews. To find out what people really mean you need to examine the words they use.
Helen Thomas’ comparing of the IDF to Nazi Germany is nothing but an attempt to water-down the horror of the Holocaust, and to dehumanize Israel. And her advice to the Jews to get the hell out of Palestine, and go back to Poland and Germany is nothing short of anti-Semitism. If Thomas’ comments were directed toward any other group but the Jews, she would have been out of work a very long time ago. Maybe it’s time for Helen’s bosses to retire her to the “The Home For Old Crazy Anti-Semites.
Helen Thomas–who is a Christian Arab, not Muslim (plenty of Christian Arabs hate Israel and the Jews)–continues in her neo-Nazi ways. In this video, she preaches Judenrein, which is in line with her previous support for Hezbollah.
So, Helen, I’ll go “back” to Poland (even though I, myself, am not from there), if I can get back all of my family’s land, my maternal great-grandfather’s thriving hardware store, my great-grandfather’s spot as Mayor of his town, my great-grandmother’s diamonds, my paternal great-grandparents’ farm, etc., etc., etc. (But since I’m an American, just as many other Jews are Israeli, I love my country and will only stay a week.)
Look, this would never stand under any other administration. The fact that Palestinian Jews were in Israel (Transjordan, Palestine) thousands of years before and during and after the Palestinian Muslims began their Islamic anti-semitic genocidal massacres is ignored by the morally depraved Thomas and her ilk.
Has The White House thrown her out on her ugly Jew-hating keyster? Not a chance.
Helen Thomas is valuable because she provides a picture perfect example of the double standard most Left- leaning journos ( and believe me, the majority are Left- leaning) have when it comes to Jew hatred. While they might not personally endorse it, they’re prepared to accept it, just like Joe Lockhart, as a legitimate point of view that is subject to debate. That’s something virtually none of them would do if that hatred was directed anywhere else but at Jews.
So I think it’s better that Helen Thomas remains an honored part of the White House press corps, especially since few if any of them seem uncomfortable with her in their midst. It tells us a great deal about a large part of the membership of that august body. And who knows? It may actually serve as a wake up call about how commonplace and acceptable in public discourse this kind of obscene anti-Semitism has become.
“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.”
Lanny Davis, the former White House Counsel for President Bill Clinton, weighed in on the Helen Thomas controversy today, calling her an “an anti-Semitic bigot.”
“Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot. This is not about her disagreement about her criticisms of Israel. She has a right to criticize Israel and that is not the same as being an anti-Semite,” Davis said in a statement.
In a written statement issued Friday, Thomas apologized for the comment to Rabbi David Nessenoff, saying, she deeply regretted her comments and they “do not reflect” her “heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.”
But Thomas’ apology did not go far enough, Davis said.
“In my opinion, her apology was not direct and didn’t address the merits of her belief in the stereotype that Jews are aliens in Israel and don’t belong there. She should be at the least suspended from all privileges in the White House press room since bigots don’t merit such privileges. And I believe Hearst should consider a similar suspension of her position as a nationally-syndicated columnist until she owns up to her bigotry and aplogizes (sic) for it,” he said.
Helen Thomas, who I used to consider a close friend and who I used to respect, has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot. This not about her disagreement about her criticisms of Israel. She has a right to criticize Israel and that is not the same as being an anti-Semite.
However, her statement that Jews in Israel should leave Israel and go back to Poland or Germany is an ancient and well-known anti-Semitic stereotype of the Alien Jew not belonging in the “land of Israel” — one that began 2,600 years with the first tragic and violent diaspora of the Jews at the hands of the Romans.
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?
Rubin adds that she has already used her hotline to the White House:
See, that wasn’t so hard. Where is the rest of the media, the White House Correspondents Association, and the White House? As to the latter, no response to my inquiry has been forthcoming.
For starters, this is a classic gaffe because Helen Thomas accidentally told the truth. She’s wrong on the substance, obviously. But of course she believes the Israelis should go away. I sincerely doubt there is anyone familiar with Thomas who really doubts for a moment that she was being less than honest when she made her “back to Poland” comments or that she is lying now when she says she didn’t mean it.
But beyond that, can we do away with all of the shock and dismay at Thomas’ statement? Spare me Lanny Davis’s wounded outrage. Everyone knows she is a nasty piece of work and has been a nasty piece of work for decades.
And when I say a nasty piece of work, I don’t simply mean her opinions on Israel. She’s been full-spectrum awful. I’ve known a few people who knew her 40 years ago, and she was slimy then too.
Organized jewry had some monotonously repetitive and hate-filled things to say about ignorance.
Helen Thomas’s statement of regret does not go far enough. Her remarks were outrageous, offensive and inappropriate, especially since she uttered them on a day the White House had set aside to celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments of American Jews during Jewish American Heritage Month.
The B’nai B’rith International organization says that the YouTube video showing long-time White House correspondent Helen Thomas saying that “Jews should go back to Poland…back to Germany…and America, and everywhere else” demonstrates an outrageous and complete lack of understanding of history.
“Thomas’ comments are contemptible,” said B’nai B’rith International President Dennis W. Glick. “Her distortion of historical reality is astonishing. Her call for Jews to return to Poland and Germany—site of the Nazi genocide, the worst genocide in modern history—is beyond offensive.”
“These vile comments, unfortunately, are the culmination of Thomas’ ongoing anti-Israel sentiments that she kept thinly veiled over the years,” said B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin. “There should be no place for her in a news organization. Her comments go beyond commentary and land well in the camp that will stop at nothing to delegitimize Israel.”
B’nai B’rith called on the Hearst Corporation to dismiss Thomas, its current columnist, immediately.
“Her comment revealed unbridled hostility to Israel’s very existence, if not to the Jewish people,” said Harris. “It also showed profound ignorance, as half of Israel’s Jews come not from Germany or Poland but from the Arab world, itself a telling point.
Ms. Thomas’s statement is astonishing both in its ignorance and insensitivity. It ignores entirely the enduring historical link of more than 2,000 years between the Jewish people and the land. It ignores the painful history of the Jewish people in Germany and Poland. And, it ignores the fact that half of Israel’s Jewish population today has roots in Arab countries, from which they were expelled or driven out by persecution.
While Ms. Thomas has issued an apology, it is unconvincing. It seemed designed to do nothing more than attempt to put out a fire of her own making. She has demonstrated blatant antipathy for Israel, and for the Jewish people.
Despite the impotence and fears of partisanship feigned by “conservative” jews, Thomas has indeed lost her job, or as the Drudge headline put it: “Helen Sent to Poland”. In the fullness of time we’ll see if her career-ending statement has made her notorious enough to join the bipartisan pantheon of infamous “jew-haters”, like Harry Truman and Richard Nixon, or if she will simply be flushed down the memory hole.
The irony is that Helen Thomas could have said something quite the opposite and she would just as likely have ended up vilified and fired. She could have suggested that all the zionist diaspora jews advocating so diligently for Israeli interests from afar should get the hell out and move to Israel. With only slight modifications to the portions of rhetoric about “unbridled hostility to Israel’s very existence” the jewish denouncements would be much the same and from the same people. The crime is the “insensitivity” to jewish sensibilities.
The strange thing about jewish sensibilities is that so many of them have such a preference for insensitively bossing people around, telling us what is or isn’t moral, dictating what we can or can’t say, judging whether our grovelling is good enough or not. And yet, it doesn’t really matter what you command them to do, the reaction is best characterized as unbridled hostility to your very existence.
Jewish moralizing about expulsion is as ignorant of history as it is brazenly hypocritical. Current events, such as the flotilla flap, provide constant reminders that many zionists would like the Palestinians to get the hell out. The Israelis have actually killed people to encourage as much. The Israeli government has a long history of ethnically cleansing Palestinians:
Benny Morris is a leftist Israeli historian who attained notoriety some years ago by uncovering Israel Defense Forces documents showing Israel’s deliberate policy of expelling Arabs from Israel during the 1948-49 War of Independence. Morris then startled the world by turning around and declaring that such expulsions were essential for Israel’s survival against enemies seeking to destroy it, and were therefore moral. He then went further and said that Ben Gurion’s great error was that he got cold feet and did not expel all the Arabs from Israel in 1948. He then went further and said that Israel in the near future will face an existential crisis in which it will, as a matter of necessity, complete the job that Ben Gurion failed to complete.
[Effi] Eitam, a charismatic ex–cabinet minister and war hero, has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. “We’ll have to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove Israeli Arabs from [the] political system,” he declared in 2006. In 2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu’s Likud. And for the 2009–2010 academic year, he is Netanyahu’s special emissary for overseas “campus engagement.” In that capacity, he visited a dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli government’s behalf. The group that organized his tour was called “Caravan for Democracy.”
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared Eitam’s views. In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane’s now banned Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil. Now Lieberman’s position might be called “pre-expulsion.” He wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won’t swear a loyalty oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed Israel’s 2008–2009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset. He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries who marry Arab citizens of Israel.
In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students—and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students—would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.
Has anybody of any consequence tried to defend Thomas? Why would they? They’d lose their job too. Whatever their political differences, jews agree: one set of rules for “the jews”, another for everyone else. If you have a problem with this then they will work to make sure you will indeed have a problem.
Politics + Technology = Nonsense at the Speed of Light
Here are a couple of previous media reports concerning Wasserman Schultz’s background.
Some background on Matthew Brooks:
