The sad farewell of Helen Thomas.
I am with Dana Milbank on this one, I think the demise of Helen Thomas, especially in the circumstances in which it has occurred, is very, very sad.
It goes without saying that she should not have said what she said, but I can't help feeling that there is something one sided about the criticism of her.It was a sad end to a storied career.
You'll find no defense here of her anti-Semitic suggestion that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to Poland and Germany -- where they were slaughtered by the millions. There's no excuse for that, and Thomas deserved what she got.
Yet the White House press corps will be diminished without Helen front and center, and not only because she was in that job before the current president was born. She brought a ferocity to her questioning that has eluded too many in subsequent generations. At a time when others were getting cozy with sources, her crabby, unrelenting hostility was refreshing.
"When are you going to get out of Afghanistan?" she challenged President Obama two weeks ago. "Why are we continuing to kill and die there? What is the real excuse? And don't give us this Bushism, 'If we don't go there, they'll all come here.' "
Think Progress:
Calling for ethnic cleansing is simply wrong. But why does Helen Thomas have to stand down whilst Huckabee continues to say these things without anyone demanding that he pay a similar price?But are conservatives applying the religious cleansing standard equally? Consider Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has on numerous occasions voiced his opposition to a Palestinian state in Palestine, saying that “the Palestinians can create their homeland in many other places in the Middle East, outside Israel.” Like the most radical right-wing elements in Israel, Huckabee’s conception of Israel includes Palestinian lands occupied by Israeli forces in 1967.
Huckabee has never apologized for any of this, for the simple reason that this is what he really thinks: The Palestinians should be transferred out of Palestine. As far as I know, no conservatives have ever criticized Huckabee for these comments, let alone called on Fox News to fire him. I look forward to Ari Fleischer doing that very soon.
Click here for Milbank's full article.
3 comments:
The complete nonsense is definitely all the Jewish/Zionist propaganda being spewed all over the world for decades....You keep repeating so many lies and utter nonsense for so many years, that you have ended up believing your own crappy bullshit....enjoy it while it lasts.
Thomas's comments should be put in the historical context where Arab countries and Palestine awakened from the old colonial rule to face another one with a huge refugee problem pouring from Palestine.
Jews who were living in Arab countries and well integrated did not leave these countries until around the 1967 war. Palestine was occupied by Jews coming from Europe and this is the meaning of Thomas's comments. However she shouldn't have said them to a Rabbi on a day the WH was celebrating Jew. So the actual context was offensive.
But they say that people when they age live more and more in their younger self and with the memories of their early years...
I agree that she should never have said what she said. My point is that people like Huckabee make comments like this all the time and are never rebuked.
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