I was unaware of the story behind Helen Thomas’s outburst against Jews.
But I wonder what was wrong about what she said. My co-blogger JudeoPundit writes:
Israelis constitute a unique nationality and for the most part they are natives to their land. (A “native” is someone who was born in a certain place.) There is a country called Germany, but the “home” for Israel’s Jews called “Germany” is a chimera, a myth. Calling on someone to return to an imaginary home is akin to calling for him to breath imaginary air. It is a polite way of regarding him as having no legitimate interests, no humanity. Helen Thomas has not renounced her belief in such murderous fairy-tales. Why should she? She is at home in a vast and respectable mob.
I don’t disagree, but still what’s so offensive about her comments. True Hamas praised her. And the Hamas groupies who sailed in the flotilla expressed a somewhat more offensive version of her statement.
After years of pretending that Yasser Arafat was a moderate, the Clinton administration was surprised at the Camp David summit in July 2000:
The main sticking point remained the Temple Mount, known to Arabs as Haram al-Sharif.
Mr. Arafat has been saying since the Camp David talks, when the question of sovereignty over the site was raised, that the Temple does not exist, a senior administration official said. By insisting that what the Jews consider to be the most sacred of their holy sites was not even a Jewish place, Mr. Arafat was denying a basic respect to his main negotiating partner, the official said.
”This can’t be solved by denying the beliefs of one of the great religions,” the official said.
For Jews, the Temple Mount is the most sacred of all places, the site of the First and Second Temples destroyed by the Babylonians and the Romans. Among the Muslims, the site and its two Muslim shrines, the Dome of the Rock and Al Aksa Mosque, are among the holiest of all sites.
Even at that, this was not generally seen as proof that Yasser Arafat held extremist beliefs but rather a quaint quirk or perhaps a tragic flaw in an otherwise noble character.
Yesterday, Thomas Friedman told us that the really important stuff happening in the Middle East is the institution building done by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, for they were creating the necessary institutions for Palestinian statehood. Never mind that for the first 15 or so post-Oslo years, Friedman’s only necessary condition for a Palestinian state was Israeli concessions. Now the Palestinian national project is in the hands of “moderates.”
But last year we learned that “moderate” Abbas did not believe in the idea of a Jewish State:
The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Monday dismissed a demand by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, underscoring the considerable gaps between the sides.
“I do not accept it,” Mr. Abbas said in a speech in Ramallah, in the West Bank. “It is not my job to give a description of the state. Name yourself the Hebrew Socialist Republic — it is none of my business,” he added, according to Reuters.
And as I pointed out to Daniel Pipes, neither man has presided over a new Palestinian Charter that accepts the history of Israel as a Jewish state. Yet both are referred to as “moderates.”
Helen Thomas, then, didn’t say anything offensive. The belief she espoused isn’t the problem, it’s that she’s a Westerner who did. For some arbitrary reason, denying Jewish history is offensive for her to do; had she been a Palestinian politician there’d have been nothing wrong with her statement.
Joe Klein, (via memeorandum) who now tells Helen Thomas to go to the back of the room, regularly vilifies Israel and those defenders of Israel, who – for good reason – are skeptical about the intents of the Palestinians.
The question isn’t really what was offensive about Helen Thomas’s remarks, but what’s innocuous about similar remarks made by Palestinian leadership? If it’s wrong for an individual to say that Jews don’t belong in Israel, aren’t you courting disaster by creating a neighboring state founded on that very principle?
Finally, Helen Thomas is 89 years old. I can’t believe this is the first time she’s made her feelings about Israel clear. For years everyone in the media deferred to her for her wit and wisdom. And now all of a sudden she’s a pariah? Puh-lease! Our MSM has been covering for this woman for years, it’s only now that she’s been caught that they’re keeping their distance.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
I think the point is this: Caught on tape was a old hand, American Icon of the press asserting something showed quite clearly her animus towards Jews and putting herself and her profession on the line. She may also have been a trial balloon for BHO. Who knows. For an American to say such blatant anti_jewish rhetoric should be shocking to hear–even if you know they have these thoughts. In line with the idea that you never let a crisis go to waist, it is time to use this opportunity to challenge the MSM–where do they stand. Where does Obama stand ?
This is something that should be mentioned more prominently; it isn’t, I suspect, because doing so might be one of the factors that would necessarily lead to the conclusion that the reason there is no peace is something other than Israeli intransigence.
Fact is that no Palestinian leader, no one in authority, not Hamas, not Fatah, not anyone, has ever accepted the mere fact that Jews have a historic connection to the land. One could accept such a fact and still oppose the existence of Israel, but the Palestinian leadership continues to insist that there is no such connection, that there never was a Temple and certainly not on the Temple Mount, that there were historic Jewish kingdoms, and so on.
So any Jewish sovereignty is seen as illegitimate and not founded on any historical claim. The basis for Israel, then, is illegitimate and not founded in history.
One might think that a side that constantly and wholeheartedly endorses such a position might not be chomping at the bit for a peaceful settlement if only the stubborn Israelis would make more concessions. A certain amount of the western response to the situation, I think, is simply willful blindness. Accepting the nature of the Palestinians and accepting the idea that they pretty much mean what they say would start causing all sorts of dissonance and would require re-examining very deeply held principles. Far better and easier to decide that it’s Israel that is the obstacle.