Tag: Helen Thomas

Weasel Zippers:

Rabbi Who Interviewed Helen Thomas Says He Voted for Obama; Says “I’ve Been a Little Blind” about “Liberal” and “Conservative”

Here is video of Rabbi David Nesenoff talking with “Reliable Sources” Howard Kurtz about his interview with longtime White House Correspondent Helen Thomas, in which she destroyed herself by making anti-Semitic remarks, saying Jewish people should “get the hell out of Palestine.”

Nesenoff shocked Kurtz by saying his encounter with Thomas and the reaction by the “hate media” has caused him to have to re-evaluate his assumptions. Nesenoff said he voted for Obama, and has always seen himself as a liberal, Jewish Democrat. But the way the liberal media has tried to brand him as a right-winger with an agenda to trap Helen Thomas has caused him to look at their anti-Israel bias and re-evaluate his political beliefs about “liberal” and “conservative.” “I think I’ve been a little blind.”

Rabbi Nesenoff has posted some of the 25,000 hate mails/emails he has received as a result of the whole Helen Thomas encounter at his website – RabbiLive.com (CAUTION: Very Offensive Messages).

Update:

Another lefty gets it:  Daniel Hannan (UK) – ‘I admit it: I was wrong to have supported Barack Obama’; Obama’s Goal Is The Europeanisation Of America

And another: Lieberman: Obama Views on Islam Are Wrong, We Are at War With Islamists…/err, not. Islam has declared war on the world 1400 years ago. Lieberman is still not where its at…..

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WHEN LIBERALS ATTACK: Lessons Learned From The Helen Thomas Scandal

Yid with Lid

Much has happened since Rabbi Nesenoff emailed me his video interview of Helen Thomas containing her now-famous declaration that Jews should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to their homes in Germany and Poland. Upon first watching the interview, I saw it a big story and was determined to make it go viral. The objective was not to go after the 89-year-old newswoman per se, as a teaching opportunity, showing that anti-Semitism still permeated through normal American society. That teaching moment didn’t really happen; instead I was the one who did the learning, and the lesson was all about how the media really worked.

The White House Press corps seemed very reluctant to touch the story. On one hand it was understandable as Thomas was a respected colleague. Most of them had worked with her for a very long time. On the other hand it was big news, and if the Rabbi’s interview subject was a senior member of the Administration those same reporters would have been all over the story.

• The Consistency of Hatred, from Grand Mufti to Helen Thomas

When they got around to covering the story, media got the “facts” of the incident wrong. I am not talking about Rosie O’Donnell’s idiotic statement dismissing the anti-Semitism displayed by Thomas’ call for Israeli Jews to return to the scene of the concentration camps, or her ignorant belief that no Jews lived in the Holy Land before 1948. The traditional media’s biggest factual mistake was reporting that the controversy surrounded Thomas making an anti-Israel comment.

CBS for example, led their story with:

“Journalist Helen Thomas announced Monday she is retiring, ending her 50-year career as a White House correspondent in the wake of controversial comments she made about Israel.”

Newsweek said:

“… Helen Thomas, who turns 90 on Aug. 4, announced her sudden retirement Monday following a firestorm of controversy over some ill-chosen remarks about Israel, which found their way onto YouTube.”

Continue reading Rabbi Regrets Voting for Obama

Rabbi Receives Death Threats Over Helen Thomas Video

The New York rabbi who videotaped veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas telling Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” says he has received numerous death threats and thousands of pieces of hate mail in the days since Thomas’ abrupt retirement.

Rabbi David Nesenoff said he is facing an “overload” of threatening e-mails calling for a renewed Holocaust and targeting his family — a barrage of hate he said he planned to report to the police on Wednesday.

“This ticker tape keeps coming in,” Nesenoff told FoxNews.com. “We got one specific one saying, ‘We’re going to kill the Jews; watch your back.'”   Foxnews

Apologies to Our More Visually Sensitive Readers/Moonbattery

Obambi: Helen Thomas Remarks ‘Offensive’

“Comments were out of line” sez the anointed one. And “will it taint her career…?” what does that tell you about the interviewer?

• Helen Thomas, an unsung heroine of the Zionist cause
• Helen Thomas Forced Out For Ruining Journalists’ Respectable “Anti-Israel” Facade. She Shouldn’t Have Been./Mere Rhetoric
• Washington Post gets it/They say that it’s time to put some of the the blame on Turkey and make sure it is investigated.

Anchor accuses own network of ‘embarrassing’ bias in Israel coverage

Dare to compare:

Get the Hell Out of…My Face

A beautifully written rebuttal to Fuggly, written by sarke/thanks to Gramfan

Here’s the thing. I’ve been thinking about poor Helen Thomas, who I believe was probably just saying what everyone thinks and has therefore been made a scapegoat. Not that I really care, because we ought to share the scapegoat status once in a while. It’s the least we can do to dispel the stereotype that we are stingy, us irritating Jews.

Irritating enough, apparently – like the too-talented and bossy fame-hog Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) on Fox’s Glee – in our discovery of the written word, monotheism, modern physics, psychology, vaccinations, and the film industry, that every country that has ever “hosted” us has found it necessary to tell us to get the hell out, like Thomas did. (Ironically, the aforementioned Jewish character Rachel, in a particularly annoying moment in one episode, was told by classmates to move to Israel. I doubt the writers coordinated this telling joke – Jews do equal Israel in the eyes of the world, sorry J Street - with the State Department.)

Anywho. Helen, you know why we were in Germany and much of Eastern Europe in the first place? (And by the way, if I follow your advice, do you think the nice old ladies who got my grandmothers’ large houses and farms from the Nazis in what was once Czechoslovakia will kick the property back two generations? That would be cool because I’d love a vineyard and an agricultural estate.)

…We were in Germany and Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Russia (where we were regularly just plain killed by Cossacks), and also, for many centuries, Poland (ditto), cuz we were told to get the hell out of England, France, and Spain. (Or, you know, just plain killed by handsome and heroic fairytale knights.)

And you know why we were in Western Europe to begin with? Cuz we were told by the Greeks and the Romans – wait for it – to get the hell out of “Palestine,” where we had been living since the beginning of recorded history.

Continue reading Get the Hell Out of…My Face

update, just for laughs:

Arab News:  “Helen Thomas a victim of American media bias”

Evil Jooozzz entrapped her, true story:

“The blogger-rabbi used clever verbal gymnastics to extract “incriminating evidence” and had her say: “Remember, these people are occupied. And it’s their land. Not Germany. Not Poland.”

Yep. Those Jooozzz are clever! Read it all….

Mark Steyn/via Tim Blair:

Helen Thomas was an unreadable and unread columnist, and the only time she generates so much traffic that it crashes the site is the announcement that her career’s self-destructed. That tells you a lot about American newspapering right there. Good thing two columnists didn’t say something dumb or the site could have been out for weeks.

But what exactly did Helen say? America’s ABC was gentle:

In the opening of ABC’s “World News,” anchor Dianne Sawyer says Helen Thomas retired because of “age and outrage.” No mention of her anti-Semitic remark.

Jeremiah sez:

They All Knew!

The thing that really upsets me about Helen is that for more than 30 years the entire media has known full well of her hatred, of her anti-semitism – and they did nothing.  It was no secret – they all knew; every one of them heard her, everyone was fully aware of it.  And yet not once did the MSM broadcast this – we were forced to do it ourselves.  It wasn’t a CNN, CBS, NBC or ABC cameraman that taped this truth about Helen; instead, it was an independent cameraman trotting alongside her on the sidewalk that taped in 30 seconds what the media has refused to tape for 30 years – the truth about Helen’s hatred, her anti-semitism.

They all knew, each and every one of them knew about her hatred for decades – and yet they did nothing.

I am in at least partial agreement with those who suggest Helen Thomas offered a service to the rest of us by voicing what we suspected the rest of her colleagues also believe. She has removed herself from the field, so to speak, and will enjoy the remainder of her days in comfort and obscurity (perhaps she can move back to Lebanon, Hezbollah could use another propagandist/ed).

I consider the remainder mortal enemies.

• Michelle Malkin » Whitewashing Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas Complete (original)

YID with LID posted the second clip from the Helen Thomas interview by Rabbi Nessenoff in Washington DC.
The darling of the White House Press Corps was speaking to Jewish children at a White House Jewish Heritage Month observance. (via Gateway)

A Macaca Moment

[Victor Davis Hanson]

What has been missing from critiques of Helen Thomas’s anti-Semitic diatribe is any discussion of the precise way in which it trumped the usual slurs we hear from political figures (e.g., Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown,” Reverend Wright’s “them Jews”). By picking Poland and Germany as the ultimate destinations to which she wishes Israelis would go, Thomas was, deliberately or carelessly, saying that they should be uprooted and sent to places where 6 million of them were liquidated. In other words, Thomas was not voicing the usual prejudice, but something much creepier, a sort of flippant pop blueprint for a repeat of 1939–45, echoing the shout from one of the seaborne “peace” protestors, “Go back to Auschwitz!”

Of course, Thomas doesn’t care that nearly half the Israelis are of Middle Eastern heritage, that many Israelis can claim a family residence in “Palestine” longer than her own in the United States, that a Jewish presence in Israel dates to the dawn of recorded history, that many of Israel’s older generation were ethnically cleansed from cities like Baghdad and Cairo after the 1967 war, or that her views are in sync with the Hamas charter and Iranian promises. Note also that Thomas is not concerned with occupation in such places as Tibet, Cyprus, or Ossetia; such human-rights violations as Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds; such violence on the high seas as the North Korean attack, Iran’s hijacking of a British ship, or the pirates off Somalia. All these are mere abstractions — unless they involve the Jews.

The Forgotten Refugees – 1,000,000 Jews Expelled (Part 2)