[THS] !!! IN DEFENSE OF HELEN THOMAS - on apologizing to apologists

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/reality/archive/2010/06/07/in-defense-of-helen-thomas.aspx

IN DEFENSE OF HELEN THOMAS - on apologizing to apologists
Paul Jay 
is the CEO and Senior Editor of The Real News Network. He is an award-winning filmmaker, founder of Hot Docs! International Film Festival and was for ten years the Executive Producer of the CBC Newsworld show counterSpin. 


Helen Thomas was the dean of the White House Press corp.  She has a fifty-year
history of tough-minded journalism and is one of the very, very few journalists in the
mainstream press who has had the guts to question US policy towards Israel. On
Monday she was pressured into resigning, "effective immediately".

On Friday she was asked by a guy who stuck a video camera in her face, for any
comments on Israel and she said, "Tell them to get the get the hell out of Palestine.
Remember, these people [the Palestinians] are occupied and it's their land. It's not
Germany, it's not Poland." She was asked where they should go and she answered,
"They should go home, to Poland, Germany and America". The video has been
making its way around the Internet.

This was said days after the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla that killed at least nine
activists as their boat sailed in international waters. [NOTE: When I originally wrote
this article, I was mistaken about the sequence of events. The video was shot on May
27th, a few days before the Israeli attack. It was released on the Internet on Friday.
Of course it was after the Israeli war on Gaza and the blockade].

She later apologized in a short statement on her website ""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."

Her apology was not enough to stop calls for her head from those who have wanted
to shut Thomas up for years.

Ari Fleischer, President George W. Bush's press secretary, led the call in an e-mail
Friday to the Huffington Post saying Thomas' comments amount to "religious
cleansing."

"She should lose her job over this," Fleischer wrote. "As someone who is Jewish, and
as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling."

Perhaps Fleishcher should also add that he is someone who knows something about
apologies . . . being the leading apologist for the Bush administration as their war led
to the deaths of at least one million Iraqis.

But Lanny Davis, former special counsel to and White House spokesman for President
Bill Clinton, went even further than Fleischer. He issued a statement on Sunday
saying Thomas, "has showed herself to be an anti-Semitic bigot."

Now, Davis should know something about apologies and apologists as well.
TheHill.com reported that Davis led a lobbying effort against deposed Honduran
President Manuel Zelaya on behalf of Honduran business leaders. This is in defense
of a regime that came to power in an illegal coup and is killing journalists and
activists.  Hmmm  . . . defending those that kill activists . . .

Davis went on, "Her [Thomas] 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,"
said Davis.

Thomas was not talking about Jews that lived in the region from Roman times. If she
had been given more of a chance to explain herself, rather than the 30-second
sound bite traveling around the web, she might have made it clear that she also
wasn't referring to the thousands of Jews who lived in Palestine prior to 1948.

What Thomas clearly did say she was talking about was Jews that had come from
Germany, Poland and America. Now it's likely that most of the Jewish refugees that
came to Palestine from Europe just after the War, did so not because they "belong to
the land of Israel", but due to fact that the American, Canadian and British
governments wouldn't drop their anti-Jewish quotas even after the horrors of the
genocide were fully exposed (let's talk about some real anti-Semites).

I don't know of any opinion polls taken at the time, but if those refugees had a real
choice to go to some impoverished potentially war-filled land in the Middle East or
join the Jewish community in New York, I know what I would have chosen.

The American Zionist organizations at the time did not fight for a more open
immigration policy to allow Jews into America; they lobbied furiously for the Jewish
refugees to go to Palestine as part of a move towards the founding of a Jewish state.

As is well known, this state was created in the process of expelling thousands of
Palestinians from their lands, people who had nothing to do with the European
genocide against the Jews. You cannot say the same about the Anglo-American
countries that for much of the '30s were quite happy to equip Hitler with cars and
machinery. Quite content to shut their mouths as Hitler began an ethnic cleansing
that would end in barbaric genocide.

As far as the American Jews that went to live in Israel after 1948, it's difficult to
believe they went to escape persecution, as many of the Jews from other places that
went to Israel, in fact did. So, one can understand a certain specific resentment
against American Jews who decided that it was ok, at someone else's expense, to
work out their identity crisis and pick up some free airline tickets to boot.

Lanny Davis statement continued, "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?"

Our defender of illegal coups knows very well this is not analogous.  The obvious
comparison is asking all European Americans to "get the hell out", and leave the land
to its rightful owners, Native Americans.  One could argue Mexican Americans might
have an argument to stay in certain parts of the country.

The European migration to America isn't such a stretch if one thinks about it.
Colonialism makes use of people fleeing religious persecution to populate their new
possession . . .

At any rate, we all know what's going on here. The hyper-pro-Israel lobby, in both
parties, hasn't much liked the fact that Helen Thomas dares to speak up and
question that most sacred of topics, and right from the front row of the White House
Press Gallery.  Heck, she had the gall to ask President Obama about Israel's "secret"
nuclear weapons. She even asked the current White House spokesman why the US
had not condemned the Israeli attacks on the aid flotilla. No wonder they want her
the hell out.

Do I think all Jews (that came after 1948) should get out of Palestine? Well, no more
or less than Europeans should get out of North America, or the Portuguese should
get out of Brazil, or the British should get the hell out of Australia. There does come a
point where such things are simply not possible.

There's really no need anyway, there's plenty of land and resources. The only issue
is, are the rights of the people who owned the land before colonization going to be
respected now; is there proper compensation; do they have the right to self-
determination and so on.

In the case of the Palestinians, what Israel needs to do has been made very clear in
UN resolutions and in the demands of the Palestinians. In spite of the illegal blockade
of Gaza, almost no one, including the Hamas representative I interviewed a few
weeks ago, says the Jews have to get out. Ok there are some that say it, people get
very angry after 62 years in a refugee camp, but what most Palestinians want is to
live as equals with Jews in a truly democratic state.

It's way past time that we can discuss Israel and Palestine without the McCarthyite
witch hunt atmosphere that has ruled for sixty years.

I said in my last blog, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism - but some is.

Helen Thomas' isn't.