Jews Go back to Germany?

White House Press Corps Icon Helen Thomas Tells Jews To ‘Go Back To Germany’
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by Colby Hall | 8:03 pm, June 4th, 2010
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Well this isn’t likely to turn out well for White House Press Corps legend Helen Thomas The senior correspondent to Hearst newspapers was interviewed on camera by Rabbi David Nessenoff of Rabbilive.com (during the Jewish Heritage reception at the White House) and let lose some commentary that is sure to make many wonder if seasoned Thomas might be losing it. Thomas has since issued an apology, which can be read below.

Thomas made news earlier this week with her aggressive stance on the White House response to the Israeli flotilla attack from earlier in the week. She posted the following apology on her website earlier today:


Why Shouldn’t Helen Thomas Be Expelled From the White House Press Corps?

Jennifer Rubin - 06.06.2010 - 11:08 AM

Politico reports that several individual members of the press say they don’t much like Helen Thomas’s anti-Semitic rant (they don’t use that term, of course), but, hey, she apologized — so let bygones be bygones:

“She doesn’t speak for the WHCA,” said White House Correspondents’ Association President Ed Chen. “Her views are hers alone. And now she’s apologized. Policing the views of opinion columnists can start us all all down a path that history suggests is best avoided.”

“Helen Thomas does not speak for me, and she does not represent the White House press corps,” said McClatchy’s Steve Thomma. “It was an offensive comment. She was right to apologize for it.”

“Helen has been a columnist for about a decade now and her strong beliefs on the Middle East are well known,” said ABC News’ Ann Compton. “I think I saw that she regretted these remarks and realized they were hurtful and inappropriate. Ari Fleischer is a private citizen and certainly free to express his opinion that this was a firing offense even for an opinion columnist. I would agree with you that Helen enjoys a rather special status as the White House. But I think her employer will have to decide whether the comments went over the line.”

Only Ari Fleischer has gone on record calling for her to be fired. One unidentified report agrees: “This is disgusting stuff. … If anyone else said it, they would probably be fired. Ari has every right to be mad.” Ori Nir, of the leftist, usually Israel-bashing (and deceptively named) Americans for Peace, pipes up: “Ms. Thomas’ comments were repugnant. She did the right thing by apologizing for making them. Whether she should end her relationship with Hearst over these comments is up to her and Hearst.” Well, far be it for him to call for someone spouting such repugnant comments to lose the privilege of sitting in the White House briefing room.

An official with a Jewish organization in Washington e-mails me:

It’s hard to believe that a company like Hearst would want to have it’s most visible public association be with a vile bigot, let alone a ‘reporter’ so ignorant of history and the fact of unbroken Jewish inhabitance in Israel going back to before the birth of Jesus. I wonder if she’ll continue to get called on at the White House, given her style of questioning and obvious mindset. How far does one have to go these days before it’s simply odious and beyond the bounds of civil discourse?

Apparently, there is no limit to how far one can go — provided Jews are the object of the venom.

Barack Obama “Really Excited” by Helen Thomas

Ira Stoll - 06.06.2010 - 9:13 AM

In respect of the comment of the Washington columnist for Hearst Newspapers, Helen Thomas, that the Jews of Israel should “go home” to Germany and Poland, there are two points to be made.

The first is that these comments should come as no surprise whatsoever to anyone who has followed Ms. Thomas’s career. The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America has a page full of the relevant details; back in 2008 even the Washington Post, not known for being a knee-jerk defender of Israel, was writing of Thomas’s “stridency in criticizing Israel and defending its enemies.” President George W. Bush’s press secretary Tony Snow once described her as offering “the Hezbollah view,” and back in 1991, George H.W. Bush, also not known for being a knee-jerk defender of Israel, had to explain publicly to Ms. Thomas why Iraq was not justified in lobbing scud missiles into Israel.

The second is that, even given Ms. Thomas’s well known status as a virulent critic of Israel and as more of a speechifier than questioner at White House press conferences, President Obama has chosen to call on her at two of his six full-scale press conferences. The only ones who have gotten called on more by Mr. Obama work for either the big five television networks (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News Channel, and CNN) or the Associated Press or Bloomberg wire services.

At his first presidential press conference, Mr. Obama called on her as follows: “All right, Helen. This is my inaugural moment here. I’m really excited.”

Her question: “Mr. President, do you think that Pakistan are maintaining the safe havens in Afghanistan for these so-called terrorists? And also, do you know of any country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons?”

At Mr. Obama’s most recent press conference, the president called on her again and she said, “Mr. President, when are you going to get out of Afghanistan? Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse? And don’t give us this Bushism, ‘if we don’t go there, they’ll all come here.’”

At a third press conference, Ms. Thomas had gotten in a question even without being formally called on. Mr. Obama responded, “Hold on a second, Helen.”

You can maybe excuse calling on her at the first press conference on the grounds that Mr. Obama or his press aides wanted to defer to her seniority, to sound a note of continuity with past presidencies, and to elevate the new president’s stature somehow by showing the public that the same woman who once hounded Reagan is now hounding him. But three questions in six press conferences for Helen Thomas? And the president pronouncing himself “really excited”?

It’s enough to make a person wonder whether either the president or some of his close advisers are sympathetic to Ms. Thomas’s views or, at least, think they deserve a more prominent place in the public eye.



(and don’t forget Huffington Post now is part of the press pool; and J Street gets invited to events and J Street gets high-level administration guests to appear, and…and….and…)
Why Is the Left Silent on Helen Thomas?

Jennifer Rubin - 06.06.2010 - 8:30 AM

It’s a troubling reflection of the times when Helen Thomas can tell Israeli Jews to go back to the countries ravaged by the Holocaust (Germany and Poland), and only conservative media outlets seem to care. Greg Sargent reports that her employer, Hearst Newspapers, isn’t saying whether she’ll be fired. And he acknowledges that liberals don’t seem to care:

Conservative Web sites have been banging away at Thomas ever since video surfaced of her urging Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland. Beyond these comments, Thomas has aggressively questioned the Obama administration’s support for Israel in the wake of the flotilla raid, angering the right, and some Republicans are now seizing on her latest comments to call for her firing.

So why don’t liberals care — has defense or at least toleration of anti-Semitism become a tenet of the Left? Really, had Thomas told blacks to go back to Africa or Palestinians to go back to Jordan, she’d already be gone. (A reader e-mails, “Imagine if this had been a Fox reporter!”) The bar is evidently so low these days that no one much cares. Oh, she’s a cranky has-been, you might say? Not important. Once the standard is set, the unacceptable gains respectability, and the sentiments are no longer out of bounds.

We’ll see which, if any, Jewish organizations speak up. And by the way, she’s credentialed through the White House press office. What does the Obama administration think of this, and why should they continue to permit her to masquerade as a legitimate media figure when she is no more than a propagandist for a Judenfrei Israel? The White House press operatives tried to throw Fox out of the press pool, so why don’t they throw Thomas out of the briefing room?