The world will finally be happy if Israel stops using guns to fight its enemies and instead uses those whistles the British police are fond of.
The world may then be happy, but not Helen Thomas. Helen was the 89 year old veteran American journalist who was so esteemed in Washington she was given a special seat in the front row amid the White House press corps. The president brought her cupcakes for her 89th birthday. By custom, she would conclude White House press conferences at the president's signal by saying, "Thank you, Mr. President." (Bush II put that custom to rest.) What do you think this esteemed journalist called Israel’s action last week against the blockade-runners? That’s right, a “massacre” (it's on Youtube). A massacre no longer means what you thought it meant. The UN and Helen Thomas have a new definition. In their dictionary, massacre now means: “When people die in an IDF military action.” It doesn’t matter how they died, why they died, how many died—if Israel was behind it, it’s a massacre.
We’re used to hearing this unabashed distortion of language from the usual cast of propagandists. But we weren’t sure that Helen Thomas was one of them. Many thought she was a professional, esteemed journalist who was simply “critical” of Israel.*
Thankfully, a candid video interview now on Youtube revealed Helen’s true colors. She stated that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine and go back to Germany, Poland, the US, wherever.” Thanks to her outburst, we now know that her decades-long criticism of Israel had nothing to do with how Israel fights its enemies but that Israel fights back at all. Israel is always the aggressor, since it has no right to defend what is not hers.
Fortuitously, the Helen Thomas scandal hit just after the hypocritical double-standard applied to Israel last week by the “international community.” Shocked Jews were scratching their heads wondering how this could be. Helen Thomas gave us the answer: Israel has no right to exist and thus had no right to defend itself. Even according to moderates, including some Jews sadly, Israel’s validity is questionable. Israel must therefore show uncommon “restraint” when responding to its enemies. The US may attack countries across the world to protect its security. But Israel must “show restraint” when fighting its immediate neighbors.
Many are calling on Hearst to fire Thomas. I say, keep her! She is now the poster child for the duplicity of the blame Israel first crowd.
PS I wrote this article this morning, before she “retired.”
*See CAMERA’s article about her from August 2008 or Tony Snow’s comment to her during the latest war with Lebanon: “Thank you for providing Hezbollah’s point of view.” In 1991, during the Gulf War she asked Bush why he was condemning Iraq’s scud missile attacks on Israeli civilians: “Mr. President, two days ago you launched a war, and war is inherently a two-way street. Why should you be surprised or outraged when there is an act of retaliation?” In other words, an attack on Israeli civilians, in Thomas’s worldview, was a sensible reaction to the allies’ bombing of Iraq. See Jack Shafer in Slate, March 12, 2003.
Vernon Soudyn wrote...