1. When Helen Thomas suggested that Israel’s Jews “go back to Germany and Poland” “go home” to “Germany and Poland” - I suppose we should be grateful she didn’t quite say “go back to the gas ovens” - that wasn’t an “anti-Zionist” comment, that was a racist comment directed at Jews.
2. Helen Thomas is of Lebanese ancestry. That doesn’t excuse her racism, but it does give it a context, just like anti-German racism still common among Jews (and the anti-Arab racism becoming more common among Jews) and the anti-Turkish racism still common among Greeks and Armenians. The attempts to link it to her supposed liberalism are nonsensical.
3. On the other hand, her personal stake makes it more outrageous for her not to have known either that there has been a continuous Jewish presence in Israel since it was an Israelite presence, or that the majority of contemporary Jewish Israelis are not European but Middle Eastern, driven out of Egypt, Syria, Iraq (where the Jewish populations pre-dated the 7th-C Arabization of those countries), Yemen, and Iran. (Oh yes, and Lebanon.)
4. Having said what she said, she couldn’t function as a journalist, even as an opinion journalist.
5. I’m waiting for Glenn Beck and Pat Buchanan to get the same pariah treatment.
Age gives & it takes away. It can turn a mediocrity like Thomas into a beloved national treasure, but it also loosens the tongue. (On dementia wards, every other patient veers now & then into David Duke/Louis Farrakhan territory; Thomas just got a running start.) It’s a little precious for her colleagues, who must have noticed her one relentless “question” over the years, to affect surprise.
I’m glad she said it. Finally. Because she’s thought it and things like it, for a long, long while, and does anybody really believe it hasn’t colored her journalism, even if she was previously intact enough not to express it openly? The real problem are the journalistic bigots who still have the wits to hide it, a bit.
With her gone, I suppose it’s too much to ask that some other reporter fill her shoes as a cantankerous and confrontational griller of Presidential flacks (but doesn’t take up her apparent bigotry)?
That’s not the sort of job you can just decide to ‘take up’; If you’re not already too much of an institution to ignore, it just gets you frozen out. You have to take up that job during a period when tough questions are expected, not silenced.
[...] Mark Kleiman: [...]
Mark, John Cole has some comments: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2010/06/08/no-need-to-embellish/
Ditto on (5). It shows just how much of an inbred group of b*st*ards the elite press is; Pat Buchanan can be a flaming antisemite, but he’s in, and will be until the day that they all go to his funeral. I guess his right-wing nastiness gives him cover.
Wow, Brett - you’ve discovered real, live, currently existing racism!
Of course, only when it’s against Israel.
So, she could not even work as an opinion writer after that statement? Is Buchanan grandfathered or something?
With today’s media being as it is, I have no idea how you could make such an assertion. All she would have to do is make some statement renouncing any liberal and/or progressive ideals, express how Obama is to blame for asbestos and that the asbestos problem stands to be Obama’s version of some catastrophic Republican scandal/crime, and then she can make all the anti-semitic statements she’d like. Fox&Fiends would have her on three times a week. And by the time Stephanopoulos was done with her, we’d have to redefine “softball questions” downward.
@ Brett Bellmore - I’m glad she said it.
She didn’t actually say it. Check out Barry’s link; John Cole makes a good point. Fond though I am of Kleiman, he’s not exactly living up to the “reality-based” ideals here.
Folks,
Mark raises an interesting point that Ms. Thomas should have known more about the movment of Jews around Europe and the Levant, but one of the responders also hits it pretty well when he mentioned the in-bred nature of the WH press corps. I would really like to see the President do more news conferences in “fly over country.” I think he would benefit, the local press would have a chance to talk about local issues that meld with national trends, and the citizens might even find out the President doesn’t have horns or 666 on his forehead. I live in Savannah and President Obama was recently down here for some economic development and job training photo ops and the local paper actually tried to get its game up and report on what happened and why it was important for Savannah and Coastal Georgia rather than just be a reprint service for the right wing echo chamber. It’s easy to demonize a stranger; a living, breathing person in front of you is much harder. It’s one of our better and underreported traits.
Perspecticus says:
“So, she could not even work as an opinion writer after that statement? Is Buchanan grandfathered or something? ”
I think that it’s a good point - racist sh*ts, and antisemitic racist sh*ts, generally get a pass. It’s criticizing ****Israel**** that gets one in trouble.
@Barry,
The American Conservative criticizes Israel all the time. (Although founded by Buchanan, it is not particularly antisemitic; just anti-imperialist and anti-Israel. It’s got a few other anti-s, too.) It gets a pass. I think that almost anything that comes from the right gets a pass. The center and left are held to higher standards.
btw, I don’t intend this as a knock on The American Conservative. It has some decent stuff in it, and is mostly written in good faith. It has a curious quirk of seldom criticizing “Republicans,” but constantly criticizing “neocons,” who, in AmConMagLand, just happen to include most of the Republican Party.
I think Mark K. is the racist here. Is he going to clamor for my firing for speaking the truth? Mark overstates and exaggerates for a reason. Is it to bring peace to the Occupied terrorities? Is it to save the lives of those slowly starving Palastinians?
No. Mark is here to increase Israel’s power over America. Hell! They knowingly shot an American repeatedly in the head - well after he was dead. Does that sound like self-protection?
Having said what she said, she couldn’t function as a journalist, even as an opinion journalist.
This is surely true, but is it a good thing? Mike Huckabee has used his Fox News platform to advocate making all the Arabs get the hell out of Greater Israel, and you (probably) never heard a peep about it. Is a double standard a good thing? Which side should the standard fall on?
Kleiman: “When Helen Thomas suggested that Israel’s Jews “go back to Germany and Poland” – I suppose we should be grateful she didn’t quite say “go back to the gas ovens” ….
You are beyond belief to even insinuate that Helen Thomas would say or even thinks in private “back to the gas ovens.” It’s one thing to make the case — clumsily and rather uglily, as Helen did — that Israel has treated the Palestinians (many of whom have an equal claim to the land) as an occupier would. Israel treats the Palestinians shabbily and is losing moral ground day by day on its behavior.
It’s another entirely to propose a 90 year old woman meant to suggest more genocide.
You should get out more and read the comments on NY Times articles and well-reasonsed political blogs.
They are not running 100% or even 75% in favor of Israel; people can see what is going on. I was amazed so many people were taking Israel to task for its actions.
There are two sides to this issue, inconvenient as that might be for Mr. Kleiman. Who purports to be factually-attuned.
You are WAY out of line—and I don’t like the glimpse of the interior of your mind in the reading you gave of what Ms. Thomas actually said. She was clearly saying that Israel has no business occupying Gaza—and she didn’t even mention the on-going construction of ILLEGAL settlements, supported by Israel. She was expressing frustration—felt by many—at the way Israel ignores and flouts its own agreements and international law and expects us to support everything they do, however illegal and ill-advised. And then when it blows up, they refuse to cooperate with the international community and the UN.
Your comments are ugly, much uglier than what Ms. Thomas said, and I hope you have the common decency to acknowledge your error and retract your comments.
“2. Helen Thomas is of Lebanese ancestry. That doesn’t excuse her racism, but it does give it a context, just like anti-German racism still common among Jews (and the anti-Arab racism becoming more common among Jews) and the anti-Turkish racism still common among Greeks and Armenians. The attempts to link it to her supposed liberalism are nonsensical.”
I’m sorry, but the feelings you reference above are not racism. All the peoples (Jews, Lebanese, Turks, Greeks, Armenians) involved are Caucasians, so it’s ethnic (or national origin) hatred, not racism. On the other hand, you are correct that linking her unfortunate remarks to a particular political ideology is a crock and should not be tolerated.
She was clearly saying that Israel has no business occupying Gaza
No, I’m pretty sure she was saying that the Jews should go back to Germany, Poland, America and everywhere else they came from.
Far be it from me to argue with Abe Foxman and his acolytes on this page, but it really takes an obstinacy bordering on the willful to convert an objection to Israeli colonization of the Palestinian territories into an invitation to Israel’s Jews to self-deport.
Even given some ambiguity, you’d think that liberal-minded people would default to the more charitable interpretation, especially since Ms. Thomas has no prior history of express bigotry. So why the rush to condemnation?
Part of Israel’s difficulties derives from having its own share of extremists and having a form of government wherein those extremists have influence all out of proportion to their numbers.
I don’t think that Thomas can be excused as easily as some of the commenters here would like; it seems clear that she’s urging *all* Israeli Jews to leave, and not just the ones in the “settlements”.
Having said that, Thomas was definitely *not* calling for the re-activation of ovens and gas-chambers; she was calling for something more like the de-colonisation of Africa that occurred in the 60s and 70s.
Now perhaps that’s just as crazy, and you can certainly argue(as Mark does) that it’s wrong to view Israel as though it was just another European colonial outpost. However the two positions are morally distinguishable (Thomas is not preaching genocide), and if we choose to view her words as a prediction rather than as a prescription, she may well turn out to be right.
it really takes an obstinacy bordering on the willful to convert an objection to Israeli colonization of the Palestinian territories into an invitation to Israel’s Jews to self-deport.
It takes an obstinacy bordering on the willful to ignore the fact that she told ‘the Jews’ to go back, not to Israel, or to the other side of the Green Line, but to Europe or America. It takes a charitable interpretation bordering on the apologetic to suggest that she was only referring to the settlers.
I can’t find it at the moment, but I remember a Doonesbury cartoon wherein a West Bank settler is being interview with the caption of “We didn’t come all the way from Miami to be Arabs.”
Mr. Kleiman, did Helen Thomas actually say the words you put between quotation marks?
If not, you owe it to your readers and Helen Thomas to correct the quote and supply relevant context. She didn’t say anything that could be interpreted as “go back to the gas ovens,” but you misquoted her and omitted context to make it look close.
Got ethics?
Yes, she did say those words. And the complete video shows that she wasn’t ambushed or asked a trick question. She jumped in with both feet.
The relevant part of the transcript:
Okay, now I see that she didn’t say the exact words “go back to Germany and Poland,” so it shouldn’t be in quotes, but it is accurate to say that she expressed exactly such an opinion.
[...] is, of course, no defense for Helen Thomas’s anti-Semitic remarks, and in isolation the consequences are [...]
Temple Houston: “All the peoples (Jews, Lebanese, Turks, Greeks, Armenians) involved are Caucasians, so it’s ethnic (or national origin) hatred, not racism.”
The Caucasian racial category is an extremely iffy late-Victorian construct based on craniometry, not intuitive at all. I or Aristotle or Jefferson Davis can perfectly well be a racist without subscribing to, or even hearing of, it: all we have to do is create a category based on appearance or putative ancestry, and despise other people for belonging. Your distinction between ethnic and racial hatred does not work, unless you shorten “race” to “degree of melanin deficiency”.
I suppose we should be grateful that Mark Kleiman didn’t dishonestly make up an absurd quote that NEVER HAPPENED in order to further demonize an 89 year old woman who ONCE said something stupid…
… oh, wait, that’s exactly what he did.
UNreality Based INVENTED quotes in order to attack someone completely discredits the entire premise of Mark Kleinman’s website.
What a schmuck.
Helen Thomas was asked whether she recognized the right of Israel to exist. She said that it had no such right. She then suggested that Israeli Jews belonged in Germany or Poland. This isn’t about Gaza or the West Bank: she was suggesting that all of Palestine be ethnically cleansed.
I’m still waiting to hear someone suggest why Thomas picked specifically Germany and Poland (rather than, say, Rumania) unless she had the Holocaust on her mind.
Neil:
“Okay, now I see that she didn’t say the exact words “go back to Germany and Poland,” so it shouldn’t be in quotes, but it is accurate to say that she expressed exactly such an opinion.”
If the exact words that she actually said in the actual context in which she said them represent exactly such an opinion, Kleiman wouldn’t have misquoted her. Note that he has yet to admit it, chose a misleading paraphrase, and has raised his misrepresentation up to ethnic cleansing.
Kleiman:
“I’m still waiting to hear someone suggest why Thomas picked specifically Germany and Poland (rather than, say, Rumania) unless she had the Holocaust on her mind.”
I’m still waiting for your to suggest why she picked America if she had the Holocaust on her mind.
Disgusting. This is not a reality-based blog.
Mark, you are reading her mind, which is an UNreal power.
It was a callous remark that is easily interpreted to imply the worst.
But it’s like inferring that the current leadership of Israel wants “all of Palestine be ethnically cleansed.”
Which inference has more evidence behind it?
While she said something callously stupid it’s not like she raided a humanitarian vessel in international waters and slaughtered 11 of those that defended their ship.
It’s not like she blockaded humanitarian relief to an entire people who are receiving collective punishment in the form of ghettos.
But focusing on the singularly stupid thing an 89 year old woman said sure conveniently changes the subject from greater offenses.
Which of course was the larger propaganda objective of the right-wing blogswarm that you are assisting with you incendiary inferences.
[...] UPDATE #3: Mark Kleiman [...]
Mark, I do think you should correct the words in quotation marks, as they are not quite a quotation.
One doesn’t need to be charitable to assume that Helen Thomas didn’t mean that Jews should “go back to the camps to die” but that “they’re safe in Europe and America now, so they can give back the Palestinians’ land.” Why else would she have added ‘or America?’ She knows perfectly well that Jews are now welcomed and respected in America, as well as Germany and Poland. This doesn’t, in my opinion, make her opinion acceptable; just not as bloodthirsty.
Nor, I hasten to add, does it mean it wasn’t a racist comment. I can’t believe some of her defenders-I wonder what they’d say about a reporter/columnist who announced that the Mexicans should “get the hell out of America” and go back to Mexico? Would they say it was only a suggestion? Not racist at all? Blown out of proportion by the Hispanic-run MSM? Just a stupid slip?
I’ll just toss in another voice who’s very disappointed with Mark for the “gas ovens” quip that simply has zero factual support. This is exactly the sort of demonizing spin that I thought the RBC was meant to avoid.
Blaming people for what we think they must be thinking, despite counter-evidence in the very same statement (“Or America”) is not rational discourse.
Neil:
“Mark, I do think you should correct the words in quotation marks, as they are not quite a quotation.”
What odds will you give in favor of his embracing reality in this case?
And let me clarify what I mean by “disgusting” in this case. It’s all about distracting us from the immoral actions of the Israeli government. Note that I wrote “Israeli government,” not “Israel,” and not “Jews.”
The thing that is so vile in this case is that there is more criticism of the Israeli government over this raid than there is in the US.
Note that while he corrected the false quotation, he strategically didn’t include “America” in the list of places Helen Thomas mentioned.
Still disgusting.
I don’t think the people criticizing Mark quite grasp the emotional valence of telling Jews (especially Jews whose parents and in some cases grandparents were born in Israel) that they should go back to Germany and Poland. And make no mistake, this is exactly what Helen Thomas said all Israeli Jews should do - go back to the lands they and their ancestors escaped.
But, of course, for many Israeli Jews this is impossible. A million or so Jews escaped the Muslim (mostly Arab) world to Israel, many by the skin of their teeth, and they are fully aware of what their fate would be if they returned to the lands of their parents and grandparents.
For those Jews whose recent ancestors hail from Europe or from the Soviet Union, the situation is more complicated. Anti-semitism, sometimes including violence, is still rife in Poland and in the former Soviet Union. Poland is governed by conservative Catholic nationalists whose rhetoric stirs ugly echoes. Germany is probably safe, at least the western part, but I spent a year in one of its most liberal small cities in the 90s, and even then and there the Shul was a purpose-built fortress, with car barriers, a semi-secret back door into a neighboring building, and armed police patrolling outside of services. Jews remember that throughout most of Europe (Denmark being a notable exception) they were handed over by their neighbors, abandoned by their friends, and betrayed by the society to which they belonged. And they remember what happened to those Jews who did try to go back to Germany and Poland after the war.
If Ms. Thomas had said that the Jews had no exclusive claim to the land of Israel, it would have been entirely unremarkable. If she’d said that the Jews had stolen the land from its preexisting holders and should return the land, it would have left open the question of where they should go, but would not have ignited this firestorm. If she’d said that it was the responsibility of the Jews’ former persecutors and not of the Palestinians to provide a secure homeland, it would be impractical but not insane. But saying that the Jews should return to the lands whence they came, when those lands had so emphatically and murderously rejected them, and when some of those lands stand ready to do so again - that is the result either of bigotry or of a truly appalling degree of ignorance.
Warren, 7 of 10 Israeli Jews were born there. Most have no other citizenship. It’s not just foul memories or concern for how friendly their reception might be that prevents them from fleeing back to the countries their forebearers fled from. Thomas presumably knows this. Her point isn’t so much to encourage another country to accept them as to justify hatred of them in their one & only home.
Warren wrote:
“I don’t think the people criticizing Mark quite grasp the emotional valence of telling Jews (especially Jews whose parents and in some cases grandparents were born in Israel) that they should go back to Germany and Poland.”
And America. And especially when it comes from a threatening 89-year-old woman.
I don’t think that you or Mark quite grasp the emotional valence (your use of it makes no sense here, but what the hey) of Helen Thomas after a fellow Arab-American was murdered by the Israeli government. Oh, sorry, the multiple shots to his head clearly implied that it was self-defense.
Helen Thomas was speaking. Mark Kleiman had ample time to reflect before misquoting her in writing and removing context.
Helen Thomas is 89 years old. Mark Kleiman is somewhat younger, I think.
Helen Thomas apologized. Mark Kleiman didn’t.
“And make no mistake, this is exactly what Helen Thomas said all Israeli Jews should do – go back to the lands they and their ancestors escaped.”
Like America—sorry, but I’ve never encountered anyone who moved from the US to Israel and characterized the move as an escape.
Look, what she said exactly were the words that came out of her mouth. One of those exact words was “America,” which Mark Kleiman and you omitted. “All,” which you italicized for emphasis, was not one of those words.
I’m not defending what Helen Thomas said. I’m attacking Mark Kleiman’s sleazy, dishonest misrepresentation of it.
I’m not defending what Helen Thomas said.
Oh? Does it ease your mind to tell yourself that? If you claim the weight of what someone says is prettier than it’s represented to be, you’re defending her. In this case, badly.
She added “America” as a qualification, a concession, after she sensed she’d let something slip. She wasn’t saying that all Israeli Jews should or could “go home” to America, which most of them have never been near & have no legal permission to live in. She only meant to acknowledge that Germany & Poland aren’t “home” for all of them. Those for whom they are, she instructs to go there. It’s beside the point that, as she must know, few still living were born there. She isn’t offering a practical proposal; she’s expressing blank contempt. The fact that she’s 89 years old doesn’t make it nicer. Lots of bigots are old.
I don’t agree with what Thomas said, but I think her punishment was much too harsh. Who cares if she thinks Israel shouldn’t exist? I hate to tell y’all, but there are a non-zero number of other people who also believe that. Do we need to ostracize/fire all of them? Think that will accomplish anything?
I vote for getting over this entire historical question. Do any of us here in California ask about whether we should give back our land to Mexico? No. We consider it a settled question. We stole the land fair and square, we held it for X number of years, and it’s done. And anyone who brings it up gets laughed at. I don’t think even Mexicans think about it much. They have their own problems (many caused by US!) So what is everyone freaking out over? Israel has a much better claim to its pre-67 land than we have to the land I’m sittin’ on right now!
Israel’s not going anywhere. I think it ought to find some way to get out of the West Bank, but I am glad it exists. So are most Westerners. There will always be a few outliers, and maybe much of the Arab world will remain a little nutso about Israel. But as for Palestinians, they have some genuine grievances, and that’s a *good* thing, because it means maybe we could solve them.
But frankly, this whole thing just makes it look *more* like ____s run the media. Seriously. Imagine if you were some far-leftie, what would this make you think about the current state of America? She’s not even allowed to have a different opinion? Say what?
“I’m glad she said it. Finally. Because she’s thought it and things like it, for a long, long while . . .”
And you’re in a position to know this, how, exactly? I mean, if you can read minds, I know someone who has a million dollar prize waiting for you.
James Wimberley wrote:
The Caucasian racial category is an extremely iffy late-Victorian construct based on craniometry, not intuitive at all. I or Aristotle or Jefferson Davis can perfectly well be a racist without subscribing to, or even hearing of, it: all we have to do is create a category based on appearance or putative ancestry, and despise other people for belonging. Your distinction between ethnic and racial hatred does not work, unless you shorten “race” to “degree of melanin deficiency”.
Your response confuses me greatly. While the “definition” of Caucasian people may indeed be an “extremely iffy late-Victorian construct”, your subsequent assertion that the idea of Caucasoid humans (shortened: white folks, or perhaps more accurate ‘those folks who are obviously not Negro or Oriental’ given both the age and society from which this idea sprang) is “not intuitive at all” is, um, not intuitive at all. I think it is plain as day that there are racial differences that are exceptionally obvious and intuitive: i.e., that if one were to line up side-by-side 3 ‘prototypical’ peoples - one from Scandinavia, one from the Congo and one from Korea - that most people would immediately intuit that there are striking racial differences between the three. Rather, it makes a bit more sense to think of the construct of definition of ‘the races’ as a cultural overlay of pseudo-science onto existing notions about differences among people. And of course my example was cherry-picked; it is the ‘in-between’ peoples (the peoples historically residing betwixt more ‘obviously clear’ racial divisions) that give problem to the whole ‘science’ of defining race. Trinary definitions as applied to a continuum of feature types obviously will lead to a lot of the granularity being unacknowledged.
The examples given (Jews, Lebanese, Turks, Greeks, Armenian) might very well fall under the auspices your second definitional condition of “putative ancestory”, though I thought the proper definition for this was xenophobia. As written, it seems you would describe the Serbs as motivated by racism against the Bosnians & Croats in the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.
The simplistic first condition, that of ‘”melanin deficiency”‘ is the thing that really “does not work”. I’m guessing one would find the melanin differences between the five peoples cited by Temple Houston to be imperceptible if viewing a line up similar to that described above. And what about hair straightness, eye shape, etc.?
I’ll grant that I may be misreading your comment, but if racism is simply defined as hatred/mistrust of those that look different from you or come from a different background, I am left wondering if that is a definition so loose as to be meaningless? Or maybe we need a different ‘ism’ to describe certain behaviors accurately?
Re-reading what I just wrote I suppose I should make it clear that I believe the ‘science’ of race is questionable. But the the effects of people’s empirical perceptions and judgments about race does have very real consequences in the real world (even if what is perceived to be racial differences are without merit)…
That old racist (Lebanese) ARAB woman Helen Thomas’ ‘ethnic cleansing’ view reflects the ‘conflct of the middle east’ Arab racism & Islamic bigotry that is.
You have to thank that old Arab hag for being honest, at least, at her last days…
Take a good look at this “moderate” Arab and tell me it’s not about Arab racism.
The basic attitudes of the intolerant Goliath Arab Muslims world is that: ‘You Jews are “outsiders” here in the middle east!’ The Arab Palestinians who’s parents or grandparents came over from Arab land and occupy the Jews’ original homeland? they’re OK, they’re “home.”
Because the entire middle east is ‘Arab Muslim land’ all other non-Arab non-Muslim minorities are “outsiders” especially the Jews, Why? Because they’re neither Arab nor Muslim…
Now, let’s here some radical liberals defending the Arab Muslim bigotry with “occupation and poor palestinians” slogans.
The same radical liberals that couldn’t care less what the Islamic Palestine or Hezbollah have in store for them, exactly what kind of Islamic states are in line with liberals’ supposed claim for defending human rights, or even women’s rights?
I guess, that Palestinian crimes against humanity like torturing fellow “rivals,” honor killing epidemic and oppressing Christians are OK with liberals’ values.
Not to mention the total fear in totalitarian like “Palestine” for speaking out, unlike in democratic free Israel, there’s virtual no freedom of the press or speech.
That’s besides Palestinian & Hezbollah’s routinely horrindeous crimes like taking the lives of their civilians for no more as toys in their games of bloodshed, in use of war.