Helen Thomas, oldest WH reporter steps down

[Crossroads Inc.]

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White House correspondent Thomas retires amid controversial comments
By the CNN Wire Staff
June 7, 2010 9:13 p.m. EDT

STORY HIGHLIGHTS
NEW: Rabbi who recorded interview says Thomas was giving Jews "the finger"
Thomas has been covering the White House since 1960
Retirement comes amid furor over remarks about Jews
Thomas apologized for comments Friday
Washington (CNN) -- Longtime White House reporter Helen Thomas has retired effective immediately, Hearst Corporation said Monday.

The media conglomerate had employed Thomas as a syndicated columnist for its newspaper chain. Her retirement comes amid a furor created last week by her controversial comments regarding Jewish people.

Thomas, 89, was considered the dean of the White House press corps, as she was the longest-serving White House journalist. She has been reporting on administrations since 1960, when she began covering then-President-elect John F. Kennedy and his family.
Thomas, had come under fire late last week when a YouTube video surfaced showing her saying that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine," and that the Jewish people should go home to "Poland, Germany ... and America and everywhere else."
In a posting on her website Friday, Thomas apologized for her remarks. "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," she wrote.

But the apology was not enough to silence critics, who began a rising chorus of calls for Thomas either to be terminated or suspended by Hearst.

Just prior to Hearst's announcement, the board of the White House Correspondents Association released a statement condemning Thomas' remarks. The group of White House reporters, which includes CNN's Ed Henry, called Thomas' remarks "indefensible."
Video: Thomas retires over Israel remarks Video: Helen Thomas remarks 'reprehensible' Video: Ari Fleischer slams Helen Thomas
The reporters' statement said, "Many in our profession who have known Helen for years were saddened by the comments, which were especially unfortunate in light of her role as a trailblazer on the White House beat."

And during a Monday morning briefing, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs also criticized Thomas, saying, "Those remarks were offensive and reprehensible. I think she should and has apologized because obviously those remarks do not reflect the -- certainly the opinion of, I assume, most of the people in here and certainly not of the administration."

On Sunday, former White House Counsel Lanny Davis was among those calling for Hearst to take action against Thomas. She was also dropped by her agent, Nine Speakers Inc., on Sunday, and Craig Crawford, who co-authored "Listen Up, Mr. President" with Thomas, said in a blog post that he "will no longer be working with Helen on our book projects."

Thomas, who is of Lebanese descent, made the comments to Rabbi David Nesenoff of Rabbilive.com, who told CNN his hand-held camera was in plain sight on May 27 when he asked her for "Any comments on Israel?"
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she responded.
"Any better comments on Israel?" Nesenoff asked.
Thomas replied, "Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land, it's not German. It's not Poland."

Nesenoff asked where the Jews should go, and Thomas responded, "They should go home," which the White House reporter identified as "Poland, Germany ... and America and everywhere else."

"This is a story about the power of video," Nesenoff said Monday. "This issue was anti-Semitism, within 24 hours over a million views, we find out that someone who's been reporting for 60 years, this is what she's about."

The rabbi said Thomas' website statement wasn't enough and that she owes the Jewish community an apology.

"My initial reaction is she can retire from her job but she can't retire from her responsibility to apologize for her comments," Nesenoff said. "There's a difference between telling your opinion and giving someone the finger, which is what she did."
The Anti-Defamation League said in a written statement that Thomas' apology "does not go far enough."

"Her remarks were outrageous, offensive and inappropriate," ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman said in the statement. "Her suggestion that Israelis should go back to Poland and Germany is bigoted and shows a profound ignorance of history. We believe Thomas needs to make a more forceful and sincere apology for the pain her remarks have caused."

Her apology also was not enough for Davis, who served as special counsel to former President Bill Clinton.
"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," Davis said. "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 added, "If she had asked all blacks to go back to Africa, what would the White House Correspondents Association position be as to whether she deserved White House press room credentials -- much less a privileged honorary seat?"
Ari Fleischer, who served as press secretary for former President George W. Bush, also said Thomas should be fired because of her remarks. He reiterated that demand in a statement provided to CNN Sunday.

"Helen's statement calling for the religious cleansing of Israel is reprehensible," Fleischer said. "If this isn't bigotry, what is? What she said is as bad as someone saying all blacks should leave America and go back to Africa."
"Hearst Newspapers should do the right thing and let Helen go," Fleischer added in the statement.

Surprised I have not seen this posted yet.
Helen Thomas has been reporting on Presidents since Kennedy. She was regarded as the most credible and though questioning reporting on Presidents ever. During the Bush Years she was one of the few people to have the balls to routinely challenge W's assertions about the build up to the Iraq war, and then later call him out when all of his reasons turned out wrong.
She has been a bedrock of reporting for decades, and now she is leaving for some rather stupid remarks.

I won't defend or condom her remarks. The lady is almost 90 years old and speaks her mind, she should have known better then to say something like "The jews should go back to where they came from, back to poland" especially in the current climate. Still, the way she is being basically burned alive in the media is somewhat disgraceful. Every political cartoon I see about her, even ones from normally Liberal people, depict her as a Nazi saluting old crone. In the past few days most columns I've read about her seem to write her off as an old lady going senile and "Showing her true colors at last" as though all along she was a rapid Anit-Semite.

Again I won't defend what she said, I just find it sad how she is ending her career with the media turning on her like Vultures.

[SirNitram]

Newsflash: Ninety year old Arab American woman says something stupid, proceeds to apologize. WASP encrusted media go apeshit on her.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Newsflash: Ninety year old Arab American woman says something stupid, proceeds to apologize. WASP encrusted media go apeshit on her.

And thats the big thing, she apologized within a few hours of saying this, and apologized again, and then stepped down. No one even asked her to, and she did. If we applied the same standards to Fox news, we should be able to fire most of the News network

[Illuminatus Primus]

I'm devoid of surprise. We live in an extraordinarily power-dominated society, and deprived of the baton with which to cow speech and political organization, instead it becomes necessary to summon organized character assassination, denunciations, and politically-motivated harassment of undesired speech, persons, and organizations. It is necessary to have an extremely limited range of popularly-discernible and knowable politics and opinion on the subject of Israel, because our policies with regard to it are so unprincipled, unethical, self-serving, and harmful, and knowledge of them is at the level of Soviet propaganda of the 1930s. If it became broadly known and discussed -- the real state of the matter, that is --, it would be likely the status quo could not be maintained. Therefore, one needs to have kept Stalinist organizations like ADL, et al. Someone let me know when Ruth Wisse is ran out of Harvard by the contrived "outrage" and systemic harassment organized by organizations whose sole purpose is to de facto limit speech with regard to Arabs. After all, as Cockburn put it in The Nation:

"The obvious key to the success of Arab strategy is the presence, in the disputed territories of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank of the Jordan River, of Palestinian Arabs, people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery." This compassionate reference to the Palestinian situation comes from Ruth R. Wisse, in Commentary for May. These are the folk who complain about Jesse Jackson's insensitivity toward Jews.

What bothers Wisse is the "failure of nerve" of American Jewish intellectuals; said failure being squeamishness about the shootings and beatings meted out to the breeders.

One can imagine the nuanced reaction if a professor at a major university in a prestigious journal were to claim that "The obvious key to the success of Jewish strategy is the presence, in the disputed territories of Israel, of Jews, people who breed and bleed and advertise their misery, in order to drive Arabs into the desert."

Ruth Wisse went on to become the Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

[Ziggy Stardust]

It's certainly a retarded comment to make, but I don't really see how it is anti-Semitic. She's not saying she hates Jews, just that she hates Israel.

[Flagg]

It's certainly a retarded comment to make, but I don't really see how it is anti-Semitic. She's not saying she hates Jews, just that she hates Israel.

In America there may as well be no difference. Half the time I say something about how I despise Israel as a state I'm directly accused of being anti-Semitic or even a holocaust denier.

[Illuminatus Primus]

Never fear, as our favorite professor Ruth Wisse can continue to educate us on the Recieved Doctrines:

In a 2006 faculty meeting, Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth R. Wisse vocalized the underlying rationale of such censorship as few other professors have dared. Denying that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are separate phenomena, she declared anti-Zionism—that is, the rejection of the racially-based claim that Jewish people have a collective right to Palestine—the worst kind of anti-Semitism. For such defenders of Israel, any acknowledgment that Zionism in principle and in practice violates Palestinian rights is tantamount to an endorsement of the Holocaust.

This is a consistent pattern of Holocaust-whoring which has been consistently used as the prime tool of these Stalinist to cow and censor speech they find unpalatable; it is even used as an ideological weapon by Israel and its elite establishment itself, to wit, in this case, the current Prime Minister himself:

And when it comes to the West Bank, Netanyahu’s own record is in its way even more extreme than his protégé’s. In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared, would be a “ghetto-state” with “Auschwitz borders.” And the effort “to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel” resembles Hitler’s bid to wrench the German-speaking “Sudeten district” from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists, to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast, gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.

[thejester]

I'm devoid of surprise. We live in an extraordinarily power-dominated society, and deprived of the baton with which to cow speech and political organization, instead it becomes necessary to summon organized character assassination, denunciations, and politically-motivated harassment of undesired speech, persons, and organizations.

While I agree with your general thrust that there's a massive double-standard at play here, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to suggest this is just the Israel lobby eliminating a critic. Thomas' comments weren't just insensitive or rude, or some breaking of 'don't criticise Israel' taboo - they suggested a pretty warped view of the situation, as if Israel was just some Holocaust refugee camp that had been kept going a little too long. There'd be, what, two(?) generations of people who could legitimately be called Israeli now? It is their home.

[Illuminatus Primus]

I agree with you. I think its stupid to expect young Israelis to abandon their home and culture, for whatever we think of the process by which it occurred (and indeed, one could say that this is probably the dominant, if barbaric method in the history of human ugliness, including the United States), one could say that a distinct nation has been birthed, distinct from Jewry writ large. Still, it is an instrument and product of essentially censor-institutions at work, given that widespread and virulent racism (such as against Palestinian Arabs) is a permissible part of mainstream political credibility. I may not think Ward Churchill was a good scholar, but I still think the means by which he was run out was manifestly a political witch hunt.

[Crossroads Inc.]

I Was going to post this in the "TERRIBLE" cartoon thread,
but I think it is best placed here as a reminder of how "The Media" is largely covering Thomas.

[MKSheppard]

I won't defend or condom her remarks. The lady is almost 90 years old and speaks her mind, she should have known better then to say something like "The jews should go back to where they came from, back to poland" especially in the current climate. Still, the way she is being basically burned alive in the media is somewhat disgraceful.

Current Climate? Disgraceful?

Come the fuck on. What she did was like me showing up to the annual NAACP convention wearing a KKK outfit. Telling the "jews in israel" to go back to where they came; and then naming GERMANY and POLAND of all places? Come the fuck on.

There's a reason they all moved from Germany and Poland post WWII -- because well over ninety percent of the Jews in both countries were air pollution. Plus more than one death camp survivor was murdered by Poles when they tried to reclaim their property -- e.g. they used to live at such and such address; and when they were sent to Auschwitz, the house was seized by the Nazis and then given away to some Polish family; which wanted to keep that house at all costs.

[Elfdart]

Isn't it interesting how the last part of Thomas' quote is left out? When the interviewer asks where "home" is after Thomas said they should go home, she responds (while being egged on by the interviewer):

Poland and Germany, and America and everywhere else.

But then, if you're trying to paint the woman as a bigot who wants to kill Jews, the last part is a real turd in the punchbowl. The complete sentence shows that she's talking about the Occupied Territories, as did her earlier line after saying Israel should get out of Palestine:

Remember, these people are occupied.

She's obviously referring to the squatters in the West Bank (occupied Palestinian land), many of whom are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe -though there are quite a few Americans, too.

It was bad enough that the Israeli government released doctored video of the attack on the aid ships, but now their cockgoblins in the American media are also selectively editing too -and for the same reasons.

[RIPP_n_WIPE]

Current Climate? Disgraceful?

Come the fuck on. What she did was like me showing up to the annual NAACP convention wearing a KKK outfit. Telling the "jews in israel" to go back to where they came; and then naming GERMANY and POLAND of all places? Come the fuck on.

There's a reason they all moved from Germany and Poland post WWII -- because well over ninety percent of the Jews in both countries were air pollution. Plus more than one death camp survivor was murdered by Poles when they tried to reclaim their property -- e.g. they used to live at such and such address; and when they were sent to Auschwitz, the house was seized by the Nazis and then given away to some Polish family; which wanted to keep that house at all costs.

Right because Helen Thomas was wearing an SS uniform and a white house press conference is actually a convention for the support of jews.

Though with the way the US' politics are that analogy might not be that far off...

[Illuminatus Primus]

She committed a de facto thought crime in the halls of access to power: excessive sympathy for the bleeding breeders.

[Elfdart]

Someone let me know when Ruth Wisse is ran out of Harvard by the contrived "outrage" and systemic harassment organized by organizations whose sole purpose is to de facto limit speech with regard to Arabs. After all, as Cockburn put it in The Nation:

Actually, it was Alexander Cockburn who wrote that. Andrew is his brother who does TV documentaries. The point still stands, though Harvard has racist fucktards who are far worse than Ruth Wisse. For example there's Martin Kramer, who thinks the Gaza blockade is a good way to reduce the birth rate among Palestinians and pacify them. There's also Alan Dershowitz who, when he's not cyberstalking adolescent girls to dig up dirt on their sex lives in a failed effort to get his billionaire client and child-fucker off on a molestation rap,calls for Lidice-style destruction of Palestinian villages.

Helen Thomas real crime was asking tough questions in White House press conferences. This has caused much consternation among the other White House reporters, who are made to look like the sycophants they truly are. Asking about the people killed in the flotilla raid and bringing up the plight of the people of Gaza? Real reporters just don't do things like that. Real reporters ask the President about college basketball and let the Vice President squirt them in the face.

The fact that they resorted to a doctored quote shows just how desperate they were to get rid of her. As Laura Flanders (who coincidentally is the niece of Alexander and Andrew Cockburn) pointed out, you would have thought Helen Thomas had shot nine people in an aid convoy or destroyed the Gulf Coast with an oil spill or something.

Interestingly enough, Mike Huckabee still has his TV show even though he called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

[eyl]

Isn't it interesting how the last part of Thomas' quote is left out? When the interviewer asks where "home" is after Thomas said they should go home, she responds (while being egged on by the interviewer):

Poland and Germany, and America and everywhere else.

But then, if you're trying to paint the woman as a bigot who wants to kill Jews, the last part is a real turd in the punchbowl. The complete sentence shows that she's talking about the Occupied Territories, as did her earlier line after saying Israel should get out of Palestine:

Remember, these people are occupied.

She's obviously referring to the squatters in the West Bank (occupied Palestinian land), many of whom are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe -though there are quite a few Americans, too.

Why didn't she say "back to Israel", then? And I doubt there are many (if any) settlers originating from Poland or Germany (those coming from Eastern Europe that you mentioned would tend to be from further east, especially Russia).

Thus, her "occupied" comment could indicate she's in that crowd which considers all of Israel as occupied Palestinian territory.

[Elfdart]

Why didn't she say "back to Israel", then? And I doubt there are many (if any) settlers originating from Poland or Germany (those coming from Eastern Europe that you mentioned would tend to be from further east, especially Russia).

Because she's almost 90 and made an off-the-cuff remark without looking up where the squatters are from?

Thus, her "occupied" comment could indicate she's in that crowd which considers all of Israel as occupied Palestinian territory.

Or more likely, it shows she's in the crowd that is repulsed by Israel's Lebensraum community, a disproportionate number of whom are from Eastern Europe -like Avigdor Lieberman, a racist thug who came from Russia; and racist mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who came from New York. Israel's version of the Teabaggers are a festering sore and until they stop stealing Palestinian land, Israel will be treated as a pariah nation.