Helen Thomas, Famed UPI Reporter, Dead at 92, Said Jews “Should Go Back to Poland and Germany”
Helen Thomas, famous for being the bulldog of the White House press corps for UPI, has died at age 92. Thomas sadly destroyed her own long and stellar career in 2010 when she was videotaped by the 17 year old son of a rabbi on a visit to the White House. She told the boy that the Jews should get out of Israel and “go back to Poland and Germany.” It was Thomas’s Paula Deen moment. In an instant she had revealed something to the world that no one had known about it. The rabbi’s son posted the video, and Thomas was forced from her job, ruined.
http://www.showbiz411.com/2010/06/05/helen-thomas-self-destruction-rabbi-has-more-on-tape
And now it’s her epitaph: brave journalist was secret anti-Semite. But let’s rewind. Because before the incident with the rabbi’s son, Thomas was known as the one journalist sitting in White House press conferences who would ask the hard questions. If there was anti-Semitic subtext when it came to Israel, it went right over the heads of people watching TV at home. It didn’t seem to matter whether the president was Democrat or Republican. So for that, she should be remembered, and we are grateful.
This other stuff: it’s bad. And it’s interesting that, as with Paula Deen or Mel Gibson and some others, one day it just comes out. And then the game is over.
Read the NY Times full obit here: http://tinyurl.com/lxdt746
Anti-Semite? She WAS A Semite, knocking all those lost euro-Jews who gained English sponsorship of a home in Palestine. But it wasn’t democracy. The Balfour wasn’t even discussed in Brit Parliament. It was handed down by the %1.
RIP.
And, good riddance. AntiSemitic old crone.
“Back to Germany, Poland, and America”. That was not an anti-Semitic remark, it was just her view that Palestinians did not have to be pushed out of Palestine (which, I know, was not a state) to leave room for Jews of the diaspora. And it goes on, with new settlements in Palestinian areas. Now, most Jews especially in Europe would not agree with her after the Holocaust, believing that whether fair or not the creation of Israel had to be done, since there is no real safe place elsewhere. (And even in my country there is anti-Semitism on the rise in certain areas, which is very scary.) But I refuse to call her stance anti-semitic, and I refuse to think this viewpoint eclipses and destroys everything else she has done.
Rest in peace Helen, you broke the glass ceiling for the women in news. Your nephew on Ch 5 in Cheyenne wy is a newscater, he is somewhat in many ways like you.