Helen Thomas, in Memoriam

by Sami Jamil Jadallah

I wrote this essay back in 2011 immediately after Helen Thomas left the AP as senior White House correspondence and after the entire Washington jumped on the bandwagon to destroy an illustrious career of a very brave woman, who dared to ask difficult questions of presidents. Farewell Ms. Thomas, you are the bravest of them all… there are NO brave souls in corrupt, coward Washington. Rest in Peace, God Bless.

President Obama who participated in throwing Helen Thomas to AIPAC dogs and wolves has this to say:

“Michelle and I were saddened to learn of the passing of Helen Thomas. Helen was a true pioneer, opening doors and breaking down barriers for generations of women in journalism. She covered every White House since President Kennedy’s, and during that time she never failed to keep presidents – myself included – on their toes. What made Helen the “Dean of the White House Press Corps” was not just the length of her tenure, but her fierce belief that our democracy works best when we ask tough questions and hold our leaders to account. Our thoughts are with Helen’s family, her friends, and the colleagues who respected her so deeply.”

One has to compare the statements made by Helen Thomas and Henry Kissinger about Jews and Israel to see the hypocrisy and double standards that afflict official Washington, the media and public affairs in general in the US. Kissinger did not see any problem of Soviet Jews going to the gas chambers. Helen Thomas only asked why not the Jews of Israel go back to Poland and Germany where they came from. Kissinger was afforded the forum of the Washington Post to apologize for his statement while Helen Thomas was thrown to the wolves and under the train with every body from Obama on down doing their best to “delete” her outstanding contributions to professional journalism. Of course the answer to this hypocrisy is that one is an “Arab”, the other is a “Jew”, simple.

Shortly after meeting with Golda Meir at the White House in 73, Kissinger is quoted as saying to President Nixon “ The immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern, may be a humanitarian concern”. The statement of course came out to the public after Helen Thomas made her comments to a rabid Rabbi who was pestering her and asking her opinion of Israel.

This is exactly the conversation that took place between the Rabbi and Helen Thomas on June 7, 2010, (Wikipedia).

“Nesenoff: Any comments on Israel? We’re asking everybody today, any comments on Israel?
Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.
Nesenoff: Oooh. Any better comments on Israel?
Thomas: Remember, these people are occupied and it’s their land. It’s not German, it’s not Poland …
Nesenoff: So where should they go, what should they do?
Thomas: They go home.
Nesenoff: Where’s the home?
Thomas: Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else[55]
Nesenoff: So you’re saying the Jews go back to Poland and Germany?
Thomas: And America and everywhere else. Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries? See?
—May 27, 2010, RabbiLive.com [50]

Of course there was never a reference to the gas chamber, no indifference to sending the Soviet Jews the Gas Chambers, as suggested by Henry Kissinger, only calling for immigrating European Jews to go back to their countries of origin in Germany and Poland.

Kissinger offered his apologies in a Washington Post opinion page on December 26, 2010 widely republished around the world even in the Arab press and in the Israeli press. Kissinger argued his statement was taken out of context and offered this apology” Reference to gas chambers have no place in political discourse and I am sorry I made that remarks 37 years ago”. On the other hand Thomas made the following apology “ I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

Of course in a bloodthirsty media and politics, no one wanted to hear the apologies from Helen. Every one was out for her blood from President Obama to his Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, to Arie Fleischer, to Lanny Davis, to Mike Huchabee, to Victor Davis Hanson to Kevin Smith of the Society of Professional Journalists. All of them found Helen Thomas comments to the pestering Rabbi as “ offensive” and “inexcusable”. No one dared to say the same thing to Henry Kissinger statements, which it seems that every one from President Obama on down found his words not worthy of comments or they all agree to his statement. Henry Kissinger did not mind if the Jews go the gas chamber and no one raised hell about it. Every one find Helen Thomas calls for the return of the Jews to Europe offensive and worthy of every drop of her blood.

It seems every one is jumping on Helen Thomas from Kevin Smith of the Society of Professional Journalist who is seeking and calling for “reconsider” the name of Helen Thomas for Life Time Achievement at their January 8, 2010 meeting. Even a group of Holocaust survivors who are by the way silent about Henry Kissinger statements about sending the Jews to the gas chambers were critical of the Arab American National Museum of Dearborn, Michigan for its plans to put out a “statue” of Helen Thomas. Even Wayne State, no doubt under pressure from American Jewish organizations and threats of cutting off private and public funding discontinued the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity in Media Award.

The ironic thing is that no one in Washington or any where in the country is calling for stripping Henry Kissinger of his Noble Peace Prize he received in 1973 for his part and contribution to the death and murder of over a million Vietnamese and Cambodians and no one is calling for striping him of the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed by the late Gerald Ford.

Henry Kissinger the “Jew” is offered every opportunity to explain his statement and offer an apology and that is the end of his indifference to sending the Soviet Jews to the gas chamber, while Helen Thomas the “Arab” is thrown to the wolfs with every one including President Obama is doing their best to “delete” her long contribution to professional journalism, her first as Dean of the White House Press Corps, the first woman officer the National Press Club, the first female member of the Gridiron Club.

With actions like these it makes one wonder if there is separate treatment of “Arabs” from that of “Jews”. Perhaps every one is telling us something we already know. When it comes to Israel, be careful, no one has the right to dare to speak. Welcome to America.

Source

 

In Defense of Helen Thomas: What’s Wrong With History?

Helen Thomas; Americas last great journalist

Helen Thomas’s recent request to purchase a table at the upcoming White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) annual dinner has been rejected.

by Tony Phillip

On Monday The Huffington Post ran a story by Michael Calderone covering the White House Correspondents Association’s decision to deny veteran journalist Helen Thomas a table at its upcoming dinner at the Washington Hilton. 

In a comment on that story I said, “It’s hard to imagine anything more wrong than this.”

I base my opinion on the fact that the 91-year-old Thomas, a former WHCA president, is unique among American journalists, having covered 10 different presidential administrations in a career stretching back to Dwight Eisenhower.

It is because of Thomas as much as anyone else that women were first included at the WHCA dinner since, as the WHCA’s website mentions:

“Until 1962, the dinner was open only to men even though the membership included women. That changed when, at the prodding of Helen Thomas of UPI, President John F. Kennedy said he would not attend the dinner unless the ban on women was dropped.”

Thomas’s letter to the WHCA requesting a table was written as a past president and specifically mentioned her desire to attend with family and friends to mark the 50^th anniversary of women’s inclusion at the event. A representative of the WHCA explained to The Huffington Post that no matter her past standing within the association, Thomas is only entitled to purchase two tickets to the event as a past president and another said it would be “logistically impossible” to allow every past president to get their own table. That, to me, misses the point. Not every past president covered the White House for half-a-century and not every past president is a living emblem of the advancement of women in journalism. For what it’s worth, I bet no other past president asked to buy a table in the first place.

Because of Helen Thomas’s unique place in American journalistic history, because of her many contributions to the WHCA and because she’s a woman in her 10^th decade of life who would like the chance to share something meaningful, something she helped to bring about, with her nearest friends and family, I stand by my assertion that it’s hard to imagine something more wrong than the WHCA denying her request. I was prepared for some people to disagree with me. What I was not prepared for was the rancor of that disagreement or its basis in events from 2010, events that as far as I’m concerned remain ill-told.

I’ll risk stirring up an old brouhaha for the sake of telling a side of that story that I think got short-shrift at the time.

You probably recall the incident. In May 2010 Thomas was questioned briefly by Rabbi David Nesenoff who was at the White House for American Jewish Heritage Celebration Day. A slightly condensed version of that questioning follows.

Nesenoff: “Any comments on Israel?”

Thomas: “Tell them to get the hell out of Israel.”

Nesenoff: “Where should they go?”

Thomas: “They can go home.”

Nesenoff: “So you’re saying the Jews should go back to Poland and Germany?”

Thomas: “And America and everywhere else? Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries?”

Click here to watch the full two-minute video from RabbiLIVE.com on Youtube. Whether or not her remarks were indelicate I leave to you to decide.

I received a reply to my comment on the Huffington Post article that read in part:
“Do you have any idea what got Helen Thomas in so much trouble it effectively ended her career?”

Yes I do.

I heard from another commenter who wrote:

“Arabs are . . . colonial invaders. Jews have always been a majority in Jerusalem, until the ethnic cleansing by the Hashemites of Trans Jordan.”

That’s not true. Not by a very long stretch.

The same commenter added this particularly vitriolic feedback:

“Helen Thomas is a racist Arab. No nice way of saying that!”

I suppose there is no nice way of calling someone a racist, whether that person is an Arab a Greek or a Finn. Nice or not nice, it’s not accurate.

Helen Thomas is the daughter of Lebanese immigrants. She was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. On the subject of whether she’s an Arab, Hugh Downs quoted her in his 2002 book My America: What This Country Means to Me by 150 Americans from All Walks of Life:

“We were never hyphenated as Arab-Americans. We were American, and I have always rejected the hyphen and I believe all assimilated immigrants should not be designated ethnically. Or separated, of course, by race, or creed either. These are trends that ever try to divide us as a people.”

So as for whether she’s a racist, I think probably not.

"I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize

Israel in this country and survive," Thomas

 told Ohio station WMRN-AM

But the question, I suppose, is whether or not she’s an anti-Zionist, which is altogether different from her being an anti-Semite, or an anti-any ethnic or religious group. Her statement about Israeli Jews and their homelands of origin has, on its face, nothing to do with those Israelis being Jews and everything to do with the fact that their present home nation was taken by extraordinary means over the course of a few decades in the middle of the 20^th Century from an indigenous Arab majority whose land it had been for centuries prior.

That’s the part of the story that I think bears clarification and as if I’m not already chastened under the acerbity engendered by a mere comment, I’m probably about to get very unpopular very quickly with some people, but the thing about the truth is this; I think it bears telling though it anger the multitudes because a blissful ignorance is still ignorance.

Most Jews living in Israel today were born there but most of their grandparents were not. Jewish out-migration from the Middle East dates to the start of the Diaspora with the destruction of the First Temple in the 6^th Century B.C. The Jewish dispersion to regions outside the area of ancient Judeah and modern Israel accelerated in the 1^st and 2^nd Centuries of the modern era under Roman Occupation. Jews have represented a sizeable minority in Europe since Biblical times.

In 1948 there were approximately 1.35 million Arabs and only 650,000 Jews living between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. Today there are about 7.8 million Israelis, roughly 1.6 million of whom are Arabs and 5.9 million of whom are Jews. Only about 2 million of those Jews are of Palestinian ancestry. An equal 2 million are of European origin. Jews did not outbreed their Arab neighbors in the past 64 years – they immigrated. I doubt Helen Thomas, who is 27 years older than the nation of Israel, misremembers history. The one thing she remembers that most of us can’t is that Jews were effectively forced to seek a home far from Europe by the unthinkable atrocities of the Holocaust and the attitudes that outlasted it. Arabs were effectively pushed out of the modern boundaries of Israel by the arrival of those Jews and the one people who never really paid the price for the tragedy that befell Europe’s Jews were Europeans. To that extent if no further, Thomas’s comments reference historical facts that meant bad news for one people to redress the tragedy of another.

The history of Palestine is to say the least a contentious subject. But the events in that region over the past century are fairly well established. Those events have led to a current state of affairs in which there are roughly 10 million Palestinian Arabs in the world, more than half of whom live in exile outside of Palestine. Most Palestinians alive today have never seen the homes of their grandfathers.

Meanwhile, since 1948, Israel has had 12 prime ministers. David Ben Gurion and Shimon Peres were born in Poland. Moshe Sharett and Yitzhak Rabin were from Ukraine. Levi Eshkol, Golda Meir and Menachem Begin were Russian. Yitzhak Shamir was from Belarus. Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert were born in Palestine under British rule. Their parents were refugees from Russia, Lithuania and Ukraine, respectively. Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who speaks the English of a Boston Brahmin, is the country’s first head of state actually born an Israeli and he spent half his boyhood in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania. He subsequently spent several more years in America earning BS and MS degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean was definitely the birthplace of Judaism, but it is not the homeland of most modern Jews, not ethnically and not numerically. In fact, of the five cities in the world with the largest population of Jews, two are in the United States, New York with nearly two million, and Los Angeles with 655,000. Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and South Florida are home to another 1.5 million, meaning a population of US Jews in just seven metropolitan areas roughly equivalent to all Jews living in Israeli. Paris is home to another 310,000, Buenos Aires to 244,000.

The fact is that Jews, like Muslims and Christians, are a feature of the world’s population, spread across every continent, represented among many national cultures and histories. Israel is no more their home than Moscow or Skokie.

Nonetheless, the modern nation of Israel has entered into the community of nations as the world’s only Jewish-majority state. How it came to be such is a tale of woe for the Palestinian Arab majority that preceded the country’s birth.

In his magnificent book To the Ends of the Earth (1993), David Yallop wrote:

“On April 10, 1948, the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem, was destroyed. Its inhabitants, 260 men, women and children, were slaughtered; some were shot, some hacked to death. The attack was a combined operation by two Jewish groups, the Irgun, whose commander in chief was Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang, one of whose leaders was Yitzhak Shamir. In 1980, Begin was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1983, when Begin resigned from office, he was succeeded as prime minister of Israel by Yitzhak Shamir. History is written by winners.”

Deir Yassin today, part of the Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center, an Israeli psychiatric hospital

I might amend Yallop’s maxim only slightly – history is written by survivors. It’s hard to say, given the ongoing conflict in Israel and its occupied territories, that either side has “won” very much. But as far as holding land is concerned, Israeli Jews have certainly outlasted their Arab adversaries. Some of their tactics have been unseemly from the start, dating back to before the Deir Yassin massacre.

One of the first dramatic statements in advocacy of an independent Israel was the blowing up of the British headquarters in Palestine at the King David Hotel in 1946. In 1947, 30 years after the Balfour Declaration had set British policy that Palestine was to be a homeland for the Jews subject to the rights of Arabs, Great Britain called on the United Nations to resolve the Palestinian issue. The original UN solution involved the partition of Palestine into a Jewish zone and an Arab zone. But with the departure of British forces, leaders at the head of groups like the Irgun and Stern Gang joined in declaring an independent Israel and launched an offensive aimed at extending the area under Jewish control. Between May 1948 and January 1949, 370 Palestinian villages in the coastal strip from Tel-Aviv to Haifa were obliterated. And thus was born the original modern-day Israel.

The tactics of Israeli militia in those early days were appalling. In 1948, reacting to the events at Deir Yassin, Albert Einstein wrote to Shepard Rifkin, executive director of American Friends for Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, a fundraising force for the Stern Gang. In response to Rifkin’s solicitation of funds, Einstein wrote:

“When a real and final catastrophe should befall us in Palestine the first responsible for it would be the British and the second responsible for it the Terrorist organizations built up from our own ranks. I am not willing to see anybody associated with those misled and criminal people.”

Aftermath of massacre of Palestinians by Christian Phalangists in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. (wiki)

The history of Israeli brutality does not end, not by a very long shot, with the country’s bloody birth. Between September 16 and 18, 1983, Israeli Defense Forces in Lebanon surrounded and controlled access to two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila in Beirut. Over the course of that time Lebanese Phalangist militia were allowed access to the otherwise sealed camps where, according to the Red Crescent, more than 3,000 men women and children were murdered. While the slaughter raged, IDF units fired illuminating flares by night over the camps to aid visibility for the militia.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharone is shown during a press conference at his office in Jerusalem, on November 21, 2005. (UPI Photo/Emilio Morenatti/POOL/Files)

In 1983, the Kahan Commission found the IDF to have indirect responsibility for the massacres at both camps and it found Ariel Sharon, then Israeli Defense Minister, personally responsible for having allowed entry by the Phalangists into the camps and ignoring the atrocities that occurred under his watch.

Eighteen years later, Sharon was elected Prime Minister. Perhaps surviving war criminals write history.

One of Israel’s subtler tactics to continue dispossessing Palestinian Arabs of their lands in any possible future state of Palestine is massive Jewish settlement in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, all taken during the 1967 Six-Day War.

More than 500,000 Israelis have settled in the West Bank and East Jerusalem alone.

Yigal Palmor, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman

Of that announcement Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, “It means that we’re not going to work with them. We’re not going to let them carry out any kind of mission for the Human Rights Council, including this probe.”

I have never met Helen Thomas, although it would be my very great honor to do so. I have never read any treatise by Helen Thomas regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In fact, I don’t know if she has ever written or spoken on the topic at length. All I know is what she told one Rabbi one day on the grounds of the White House and I know that from what she said a lot of people seem willing to infer a lot of ugly things. I’m not willing to do that. But I am willing to consider why she might have said what she said and so far, I can’t really find anything wrong with it.

Actually I know one other thing that Thomas had to say about the matter, to wit, what she posted on her website a few days after her interview with Nesenoff:

“I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

Indeed, Helen. Indeed.

Source: open.salon.com


It would be wonderful if you would all contact the WHCA about this matter — and please let us know if you have done so. We will be pleased to tell Helen how many people phoned and emailed on her behalf. Pro-Israel organizations have been known to organize 6,000+ emails in a single day — we should be able to do at least as well! — Alison Weir, Executive Director, If Americans Knew website. You can write WHCA online, phone them at 202-266-7453, and/or fax them at 202-266-7454.