Don’t think that her recent anti Semitic comments were something out of the ordinary for the old wind bag. She has been getting away with saying outrageous, hateful things for a long, long time (ever since her first appearance during Grant’s second term).
Update – The old biddy (crazy old aunt who lives in the attic), has officially retired! I guess those emails we sent to Hearst worked!!
by Rich Noyes
Longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas has issued a statement of “deep regret” after telling an interviewer that Israeli Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Germany and Poland.
Thomas has been widely admired by the liberal establishment in the media. NBC’s Ann Curry, for example, last year saluted Thomas as “a woman who inspired me….I’ve tried to emulate her.” CBS’s Harry Smith has described her as “legendary,” adding: “What she does day after day after day, I’m not sure we value enough.”
Thomas has not been shy about expressing her left-wing views and reliably anti-Israel opinions since she became a White House “columnist” in 2000, after a lengthy career as UPI’s straight news White House correspondent. But a review shows Thomas was expressing solidly liberal opinions even as a supposedly neutral reporter:
Nearly twenty years ago, she dismissed the idea of liberal bias as nothing but compassion: “I don’t know what a liberal bias is. Do you mean we care about the poor, the sick, and the maimed? Do we care whether people are being shot every day on the streets of America? If that’s liberal, so be it.”
In 1993, she slammed Ronald Reagan as soulless: “A President should care about all people, and he didn’t, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.” But a few months after Bill Clinton left office in 2001, Thomas fawned: “The human spirit — to me and millions of others, President Clinton has always personified that. He is the man from Hope, and that is what he has given us, hope. We miss him.” And, a few months after 9/11, she ridiculously insisted that the security measures were worse than FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans: “The chipping away of our civil liberties is unprecedented. Even in World War II, I never saw anything like that.”
In 2006, Thomas admitted the obvious: “I’m a liberal, I was born a liberal, and I will be a liberal ‘til the day I die.”
Here are some of her more legendary outbursts collected by the MRC over the years:
■ “I think he left an uncaring society….a government that was not as concerned.”
— UPI White House reporter Helen Thomas talking about Ronald Reagan on CBS News Nightwatch, December 30, 1988.■ “All of us who covered the Reagans agreed that President Reagan was personable and charming, but I’m not so certain he was nice. It’s hard for me to think of anyone as nice when I hear him say ‘The homeless are homeless because they want to be homeless.’ To my mind, a President should care about all people, and he didn’t, which is why I will always feel Reagan lacked soul.”
— UPI White House reporter Helen Thomas in the July 1993 Good Housekeeping.■ “A liberal bias? I don’t know what a liberal bias is. Do you mean we care about the poor, the sick, and the maimed? Do we care whether people are being shot every day on the streets of America? If that’s liberal, so be it. I think it’s everything that’s good in life — that we do care. And also for the solutions — we seek solutions and we do think that we are all responsible for what happens in this country.”
— UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas on C-SPAN’s Journalists Roundtable, December 31, 1993.
Read the rest here: Long list of liberal eruptions from media’s Mt. St. Helen
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal weighs in
by James Taranto
Helen Thomas is American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic. Peter Beinart is a starry-eyed nephew. She loathes the state of Israel; he claims to love it–though both sided with the so-called Free Gaza flotilla that tried to break Jerusalem’s naval blockade and allow the arming of the terror group Hamas, which has been firing rockets at Israeli civilians. Both Thomas and Beinart have caused a stir in recent weeks with their comments about the Israel–not about the flotilla episode in particular but about the Jewish state more generally.
Thomas, White House correspondent for Hearst Newspapers, showed up at the White House’s May 27 Jewish Heritage Celebration, where she gave an interview to Rabbi David Nesenoff of RabbiLive.com. Late last week Nesenoff posted a clip from the video on YouTube. Here’s the transcript:
[…]
Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic who now writes for TheDailyBeast.com, last month published a portentous essay of nearly 5,000 words in the New York Review of Books titled “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” To boil down his argument: Support for Israel has become unfashionable among young liberal American Jews, and it’s the fault of old Jews. Beinart cites the results of a focus group of such young liberal Jews:
[..]
As he lectures his elders, it does not seem to occur to Beinart that the young liberal American Jews may be the ones who have it wrong–which we suppose is not surprising, since he is one of them. Fortuitously enough, however, Beinart’s worldview vis-à-vis Israel faced a real-world test shortly after his essay was published. It was found wanting.
[…]
Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin pointed out in response that “the activists’ empathy”–or, rather, their lack thereof–is crystal clear:
Before the flotilla that Israel intercepted was launched in Turkey, the family of Gilad Shalit begged the organizers to take a package of letters and food to the Israeli being held in Gaza. In return, they promised to lend their voices to a call for lifting the blockade. Accepting this offer would have cost “Free Gaza” nothing and would only have given them good publicity and probably would have caused the Israeli government to seriously consider letting them through the blockade. But, in a decision that Beinart and other critics of Israel seemed to ignore, they refused the Shalit family.Why? It’s not that hard to figure out even if your grasp of the Middle East is as dim as that of Peter Beinart.First, they don’t care about Gilad Shalit. Like his Hamas kidnappers, the “Free Gaza” group is composed of anti-Zionists–people who don’t think there ought to be a Jewish state and that Jewish soldiers who defend it are, by definition, criminals who deserve what they get from Hamas. Most think the same about Israeli civilians who live under the threat of rocket fire and terrorist attack from Hamas.Second, they are not humanitarians. They are Israel-haters.
[..]“Go back to Auschwitz,” say the Turkish “humanitarians.” Go back to Poland, says Helen Thomas. Beinart claims to be pro-Israel, and we don’t doubt his sincerity. But his determined denial of the nature of Israel’s enemies leads us to doubt his grip on reality.
Read the rest Helen Thomas and Peter Beinart
Tags: Helen Thomas, Rich Noyes
