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It’s impossible to defend Grande Dame of White House journalists Helen Thomas’
recent off the cuff statement that Israeli Jews should go back to Germany…..
or Poland. (She said Israel should get out of Palestine, but it wasn’t clear if she
meant the Occupied Territories, which Israelis should get out of, or Israel behind
the green line.) It was deeply offensive and wrong.
terribly wrong, was massively criticized, apologized for it, and was forced into
retirement. Exactly the way it should be, right? Wrong.
It’s hard to even chart out the hypocrisy of the whole affair. What happened in 2002
when House Republican Majority Leader Dick Armey
response? Nary a peep. That same year Senator James Inhofe also called for Israel
to permanently retain all of the Occupied Territories, “Because God said so. “
Did he quit? No. And what to make of the fact that Obama’s White House
not lethal remarks, than for the death of 9 people on the Mavi Marmara, including
a 19-year-old US citizen shot in the head. (One prompted “deep regret”, the other
was “reprehensible”. Guess which was which.)
There’s also the glass house in which Rabbi Nessenoff lives: he’s the one who recorded
the Thomas gotcha video and who, it seems, has offered the world his own
Taking a short trip over to Israel we discover that the Israeli military recently created
an order that, according to many human rights groups and Ha’aretz,
Maybe because it wasn’t an off the cuff remark to suggest ethnic cleansing, but an
actual military order to allow it, its authors escaped opprobrium. Wacky!
Just this week, Likud party MK, Miri Regev shouted at Hanin Zuabi, an Arab member
of the Knesset from Nazareth who went on the Gaza flotilla,
have said it. Outrage meter? Zero. Then again, Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai
wants Zuabi stripped of her Israeli citizenship, so telling her to go back to a place
she is not from actually seems pretty mild by those standards.
Moshe Yaroni, who abhors what Thomas said,
who is surely responsible for what will go down as one of the most morally heinous
pieces of agitprop in modern history:
In Israel, the premier woman journalist in the country went a hell of a lot
farther, in a premeditated, rather than an impetuous fashion. And there is
hardly a peep in response in her home country.
Caroline Glick is well-known to readers of right-wing e-mail lists, and of
course, of the Jerusalem Post, where she is the deputy managing editor and a
regular columnist. She is also a fellow at the extremist neoconservative Center
for Security Policy in Washington.
Glick herself is an extremist, and even those who agree with her (and who
would, of course, not refer to her as an extremist) would have to agree that
she situates herself well to the right of the current Israeli government. And
that’s all well and good; she’s an op-ed writer, and she is certainly entitled to
her opinions.
But at her web site, Latma, Glick has raised her vitriol to a whole new level.
In a video overflowing with racism, a group of Israelis satirize the Israeli
attack on the Gaza flotilla. You can see it for yourself at the link above, if you can
make it through the whole thing.
Caroline Glick with fellow travelers, Morton Klein and John Bolton
In a most contemptible fashion, almost every trope of bigotry is on display in
the video, which features the contention that the massive suffering in Gaza
is all an elaborate fabrication. For a quick rundown of this “fabricated”
This level of cruelty is truly astonishing. Even if one contends that the Gaza
blockade is a necessary security measure (see my earlier article for why it
has the opposite effect), it is appalling to see fellow Jews laughing about it.
And don’t we know all too well the offense in denying such things?
The punch line, of course, is that because of her truly abominable and utterly vile
video, Caroline Glick and is being hailed as a Hasbara hero in Israel- while one of
our few truly great journalists has ended an otherwise remarkable career. Yaroni
continues:
No, the real concern, the real question is where is the Israeli outrage? We
wouldn’t expect it from the government, of course. In fact, the Government
Press Office e-mailed the video to journalists and later apologized, saying it had
been done in error. That is unlikely to say the least. Mark Regev, the
thought it was funny. It is what Israelis feel. But the government has nothing to do
with it.” The courageous blog, Coteret, run by Didi Remez, blasts the video
and all it represents. But in the mainstream Israeli media and commentary,
there is nothing. This blatantly hateful and racist video is perfectly acceptable
in Israel.
Glick, on her blog, magnifies her hypocrisy by spending a great many words
blasting Thomas for her offensive remarks.
Grit Tv’s Laura Flanders may be onto something when she says:
Thomas’s crime wasn’t just Antisemitism — it was Antisemitism in defense of
Palestine. That’s the true source of the outrage. The outrage that Obama and
Biden and most other U.S. officials, to say nothing of the majority of the press
corps, can’t seem to find for others.
I’m not sure. Had Helen Thomas made a similar remark about African Americans,
for example, it’s possible the same fate would have befallen her. If only I could feel
confident that all those power-brokers cared as much about my Arab and Muslim
friends as they seem to care about me… as a Jew of course.
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