Helen Thomas on anti-Semite charge: 'Baloney!'
The Associated Press reports:
Former White House correspondent Helen Thomas acknowledges she touched a nerve with remarks about Israel that led to her retirement. But in a radio interview, she says the comments were "exactly what I thought," even though she realized soon afterward that it was the end of her job.
"I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive," Thomas told Ohio station WMRN-AM in a sometimes emotional 35-minute interview that aired Tuesday. It was recorded a week earlier by WMRN reporter Scott Spears at Thomas' Washington, D.C., condominium.
Thomas, 90, stepped down from her job as a columnist for Hearst News Service in June after a rabbi and independent filmmaker videotaped her outside the White House calling on Israelis to get "out of Palestine." She gave up her front row seat in the White House press room, where she had aimed often pointed questions at 10 presidents, going back to Dwight D. Eisenhower.
She has kept a low profile since then.
It was "very hard for the first two weeks," Thomas said. "After that, I came out of my coma."
Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the website rabbilive.com, said he approached Thomas after he'd been at the White House for Jewish Heritage Day on May 27. He asked whether she had any comments on Israel.
"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she replied.
"Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland," she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, "They should go home."
"Where's home?" Nesenoff asked.
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," Thomas replied.
"I told him exactly what I thought," she told Spears.
Spears said during the interview that some accounts left off her reference to America and gave the wrong impression that Thomas was referring to World War II.
"I was not talking about Auschwitz or anything else," she said.
"They distorted my remarks, which they obviously have to do for their own propaganda purposes, otherwise people might wonder why they continue to take Palestinian land," said Thomas, a daughter of Lebanese immigrants who over the years did little to hide her pro-Arab views. There was no explanation of whom "they" referred to.
When she soon began getting calls about her remark, "I said this is the end of my job."
She issued an apology, she told the radio interviewer, because people were upset and she thought she had hurt people. "At the same time, I had the same feelings about Israel's aggression and brutality," Thomas said.
Asked whether she's anti-Semitic, she responded "Baloney!" She said she wants to be remembered for "integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism" and would like to work again.
Spears said Thomas granted him the interview because the two had developed a friendship during previous interviews she had done with the station in Marion, 42 miles north of Columbus in central Ohio.
Their discussion also touched on current politics, particularly on women.
Thomas described Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton as "a hawk." "I thought women in politics would have more compassion, be more liberal," Thomas said.
As for Sarah Palin, Thomas said she believed the former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate was ambitious enough to run for president.
"That would be a tragedy, a national tragedy," she said, describing Palin as "very conservative, reactionary, unbelievable."
Asked about tea party-backed Republican Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell, Thomas responded with one word: "Frightening."
Comments
Thomas might want to be remembered for her "integrity and my honesty and my belief in good journalism," but her personal biases are so profound I can't see how they could not have influenced her work. Also, she's 90. She had a good long run and it was time for her to go regardless of any controversy.
Posted by: brstevens | October 13, 2010 6:15 AM
Come on brstevens, you accuse Helen Thomas of an anti-Israel bias and you exhibit an anti age bias--I suppose bias is ingrained in humans. The woman was a brilliant journalist. She brought to her profession an incisiveness, honesty and integrity, lacking in many of the toadies who now populate journalism--I can't even tell the difference between journalists and politicians at the current time. Israel is a holy cow to America--watch the Americans kow-tow to Israel's expansionistic ambitions--America has tried and has not put an end to the moving Israeli settlements. Some Israelis have been to the Palestinians, what some Germans were to the Jews. History has repeated itself, with weak men rising and strong men falling--the Jews in remembering the wrongs of the past, have become intransigent and unyielding and the end to this ancient conflict seems to lie in the awful truth: exterminate or else be exterminated. Helen Thomas is of Lebanese origin. No one is completely free of bias. She has seen the people of her father suffer. She has seen the ravages in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East this conflict has wrought. She is human. To punish her for a moment of passion and emotion, a moment of truth, ignoring all the stellar journalism she has practiced in the past, and then to say, "She is old enough to go anyway!" is a piece of crap. What happened to Thomas is the same as what happened to Octavia Nasr of CNN. Journalism like politics has become an asinine industry of cowards. "NO, no--we needed to placate the Israelis, our friends, who have been dissing us and flouting us, even as they have been dipping into our pockets, for years with impunity." What a bunch of malarkey.
R Anon
Posted by: Anonymous | October 13, 2010 8:31 PM
I didn't accuse Thomas of any specific bias. I accused her of profound personal biases. Please don't put words in my mouth. You're the one who highlights her bias against Israel, but since you apparently agree with her you're comfortable with that bias in your "objective" reporting. I'm not.
I don't believe that at 90 years old, after having her beliefs ingrained for decades and decades, Helen Thomas can still uphold the honesty and integrity that she might have had when she was an up and comer more than half a century ago. People change, and she has obviously not bothered to maintain honesty and integrity as it pertains to how she covers news in many, many years. That's why it was time for her to go. She's lucky she wasn't squeezed out 20 years ago.
Posted by: brstevens | October 14, 2010 11:12 AM
Whatever one thinks of her comments, and her attitudes towards Israel, she is still one of the great great journalists of her time.
Posted by: michael thomas | November 2, 2010 7:21 PM