[THS] !!!!!! Paul Craig Roberts: Helen Thomas: In Appreciation

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25733.htm

Helen Thomas: In Appreciation

By Paul Craig Roberts

June 15, 2010 "Information Clearing House"- The propagandists for the Israel Lobby,
who occupy the Wall Street Journal editorial page while pretending to be journalists,
are determined to remove Helen Thomas from the annals of journalism. In case you
have already forgotten, a few days ago the distinguished career of Helen Thomas,
the 89-year-old doyen of the White House Press Corps, was ended by the Israel
Lobby, which made an issue about her opinion that immigrant Jews should leave
Palestine and go back to their home countries.

The White House Correspondents’ Association fell in line with the demands of the
Israel Lobby, and the cowardly president of the organization added the association’s
disapprobation to that of the neoconservative cabal.

Having removed Helen Thomas from the journalism scene, the Israel Lobby is now
working with its agents on the Wall Street Journal editorial page to eliminate the
Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Professional
Journalists.

A nonentity in the world of journalism, James Taranto, apparently is associated with
the Wall Street Journal editorial page, although Wikipedia reports that he was
incapable of graduating from journalism school at California State University,
Northridge. On a Wall Street Journal web site, Taranto writes: “We’ve been calling
Thomas ‘American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic’ for years,” and he asks
who would now accept the Helen Thomas award after Ms. Thomas revealed she
really was crazy by criticizing Israel.

I would for one. Of course the Society of Professional Journalists would never give the
award, assuming the distinguished award survives the assault of the Israel Lobby’s
assassins, to a critic of Israel. Helen excepted, American journalists are cowards. With
the concentrated ownership of the corporate media today, no independently-minded
journalist can have a career in print or TV media. You defend the Washington/Tel
Aviv line, or you are out of work.

The absence of independently-minded journalists on the Wall Street Journal editorial
page is an extraordinary change from my days as Associate Editor of that page. The
editorial page editor, Robert Bartley was ambitious and forced himself to tolerate
talented colleagues. Mere opinion was not our task. Often we scooped the reporters
on the news side of the paper. Our editorials reported new developments and
provided factual analysis.

I was hired as Jude Wanniski’s replacement. Jude, Associate Editor of the Wall Street
Journal, was fired, allegedly because the journal’s brass caught him handing out
election campaign literature on a train platform, but if you believe American
journalism was ever that pure, I have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

Jude was fired, because the neoconservatives got rid of him by telling Bartley that
Wanniski was over-shadowing him. That was too much for Bob’s ego. Jude, of
course, being a real journalist, was objective toward the Palestinians and thus had
earned the enmity of the Israel Lobby.

Once Bob was rapidly declining with prostate cancer, neoconservatives engineered
the takeover of the editorial page. Today the once proud Wall Street Journal editorial
page is a leading apologist for Israeli/American war crimes and police states.

To return to the nonentity, James Taranto, who wants to throw Helen Thomas down
the memory hole: Helen Thomas’ opinion that Israelis should stop stealing the
villages, homes, and lands of Palestinians, while confining Palestinians to the
equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto, is equated by Taranto to the advocacy of “ethnic
cleansing” by Helen.

Of course, it is the Israelis who are doing the ethnic cleansing. Many Jews have
documented Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, such as Uri Avnery, a former
member of the Israeli terrorist organization, Irgun, Ilan Pappe, Israel’s most
distinguished historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and the
Israeli peace group, ICHAD, who have been my house guests. The Israeli
newspaper, Haaratz, is far more critical of Israeli policy than Helen Thomas, and so is
MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the distinguished British journalist and film maker
John Pilger, and the distinguished scholar, Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust
survivors.

But Taranto prefers an 89-year old adversary.

Israel is an unnatural state. It was created by terror that was accommodated by
craven British and US “diplomacy.” Israel exists for one reason only: the US
government provides the money, weapons, and diplomatic protection. Any other
government that murdered thousands of civilians in other countries, as Israel does
routinely in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, would have its entire government
and military on trial before the War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague. Israelis have no
worst enemy than their own government.

Every time the rest of the world tries to hold the Israeli government accountable for
its crimes, the US vetoes the UN resolution. America has become the enabler of the
zionist-hijacked Israeli government. And the Israeli government knows it. Israeli
government leaders have publicly bragged for decades about their control over the
US government. US Admiral Tom Moorer, Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff after whom the F-14 “Tomcat” jet fighter was named,
declared publicly: “No American President can stand up to Israel.” Apparently no
American journalist can either.

I am a critic of Israel’s heartless policy toward the Palestinians, but I do not want
Israel destroyed. I want it moved or reformed. Bring the small number of Israelis to
America before there is a nuclear war over the fact that they are where they should
not be. To try to claim a land and dispossess its people on the basis of a spurious two
thousand year year old deed is an audacious act of conquest and dispossession.

My proposal to relocate Israelis in the US is rhetorical, but why not insist that the
Israelis, who are heavily dependent on US largess, reform? Why should Americans
support an apartheid racist state that denies citizenship to the rightful inhabitants?
What kind of morality, if any, does the Wall Street Journal editorial page represent
when it defends Israelis who force Palestinians into ever-shrinking ghettos, deprived
of water, food, medical care and schools? Why must Palestinians live in dread of
Israeli bulldozers arriving to flatten their homes in order to create space for zionist
“settlers.”

Allegedly, the US is a superpower, but in fact it is a puppet state of the Israeli
government. Witness, for example (the examples are numerous), the fate of the
Goldstone Report on Israeli war crimes committed in Israel’s assault on Gaza during
December 2008-January 2009. Goldstone is a zionist Jew and a distinguished judge.
He was given the task by the United Nations to investigate the Israeli attack on Gaza.
Being an honest person, he provided evidence of Israeli war crimes.

What was the result? The bought-and-paid-for US Congress voted, on the
instructions of their master, the Israel Lobby, to deep-six the Goldstone Report by a
vote of 344 to 36.

Amazing, isn’t it, there were only 36 US Representatives who were not owned by the
Israel Lobby.

Of course, James Taranto serves the Israel Lobby. The Wall Street Journal editorial
page, not even a shadow of its former self, when it speaks, speaks for Israel and for
the Bush/Cheney militarist police state.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page has fallen into the low ranks of Brownshirt
propaganda. The fact that management tolerates the continuation of totally
nonobjective journalism shows why print newspapers are failing everywhere.

The hubris of Taranto, a mere propagandist who will never come close to the league
in which Helen Thomas resides, causes him to think that he is fit to pass judgment on
a real journalist. Taranto epitomizes the hubris of the neoconservatives. Not a single
one of them has the smallest accomplishment. Yet, blinded with arrogance, they
remain in ignorant bliss of their status as prostitutes.