Everyone is talking about Helen Thomas' career suicide a few days ago, in which she menacingly invited the Jews to return to the killing fields of Poland. When asked by a rabbi what she thought of Israel, she replied that they (the Jews) should get the h--- out of "Palestine" and go "home" to Germany and Poland, among other Edens. Quite a few things to unpack in those statements: For one thing, Thomas is signaling quite clearly that she rejects the U.N.-approved state of Israel, and that 62 years of history needs to be rolled back. Then, chillingly, she fairly cackled that the Israelis should return to the scenes of The Destruction.
I actually heard a patron at a sports bar in Los Angeles suggest that "dirty Jew" entrapped Thomas. Once again, the czar's secret police are peddling their Zionist conspiracies, which never go out of style.
Needless to say, Thomas loathes Israel. She also has contempt for the reality of the awfulness of the bloodstain on mankind, the Holocaust. Her remarks rightly cost her the job that has given her an identity for many decades, a high-profile post covering the White House for Hearst Newspapers (not to mention the coveted center seat among the press corps).
What kept coming to my mind, though, as I reflected on her brutally cold statements, was this: What lies has she written in the past 50-plus years?
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As a young reporter fawning over Jack Kennedy, Thomas carved out her niche in life. She gained a reputation as a hard-nosed reporter who asked the tough questions. In reality, she used her position as a means to ask pointed questions that furthered her leftist bias.
It's amazing, the contrasting views out there about Thomas and her ilk. Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" several years ago (while light on the anti-Israel invective among media elites) was a courageous look into the cesspool of biased reporting. The former CBS reporter finally had enough of left-wing bias in journalism and said so publicly. Would that there were more books about such things, so that the public could be better informed (I do find the investigative work of groups like CAMERA quite fascinating and important).
One has only to read a political "analysis" by Joe Klein or a book on the Middle East by Hanan Ashrawi to ingest enough bias to choke a horse. One wonders, seriously, what such people think as they peck away at the keyboard. In fact, this is the age-old question among friends of mine who study and discuss such things.
Do leftists in the media intentionally bend the truth? Or are they really purists who believe, for example, that common citizens in Venezuela can "say anything they want" and not worry about suffering the wrath of Hugo Chavez, as filmmaker Oliver Stone recently alleged on Larry King?
Is Stone serious? Does he believe what he said about Chavez? How could he know? As a world-famous Hollywood director, could he really discern the truth on one of his Walter Duranty tours of dictatorships?
A recent editorial in The Economist, that fountain of truth from enlightened Europe, blamed Israel – and in particular, Bibi Netanyahu – for the turmoil in Gaza, including the suffering of the Palestinian Arabs, which in reality is perpetrated and fed by Marxist groups like Hamas.
Since, say, 1967, how many times has Israel been blamed in news articles, op-eds, TV chats and blogs? A hundred trillion?
Does anybody in the media get tired of this?
Some have made fun of Helen Thomas' looks. I say that's a cheap shot. What's truly ugly about her is her anti-Israel invective. Theoretically, a person is entitled to those views, but never, ever as a journalist. In the tony Washington circles that Thomas has roamed through since the Eisenhower administration, anti-Semitism is a rite of passage.
One wonders what the effect would be among the West's enemies (hint: those purists who continually get a tingle down the leg as they fantasize over the mirage of Muhammad riding across the Arabian sands) if The Economist had the cojones (to quote the left-leaning Madeleine Albright) to blame the real villains in the Middle East. What would happen if journalists stood up to the world's biggest bullies?
It might have some positive effect.
Helen Thomas was dumb enough and arrogant enough to say out loud what tons of Eastern media elites really believe about the Jewish state. She really believes what she said. She doesn't believe the apology she pathetically trotted out the next day.
If you ever have the chance, read some of David Bar-Illan's old columns from the Jerusalem Post. David, a fearless defender of Israel, routinely lampooned the Jew-haters who work for some of media's biggest propaganda houses. Bar-Illan's rapier wit and intuitive understanding of journalistic bias should be housed in a think tank, where young journalism students could learn to use critical thinking.
Critical thinking is vital if our country is to survive in some decent form. For too long, we've swallowed what Walter Cronkite, Helen Thomas, Tom Brokaw and Katie Couric have been feeding us – much, much to our detriment.
This is one of the reasons the mainstream media so hate groups like WorldNetDaily and other investigative units. The powers-that-be want the public to continue obsessing over "American Idol," so that we don't pay too close attention to what we're told by Brian Williams, Oliver Stone and NPR. The very real popularity of WND is proof positive that a massive number of Americans believe they're being lied to by the mainstream media. Almost comically, those very leftist media outlets insist the real numbers of such Americans are relatively small. They are either lying to themselves or to us, again.
I think it's horrible to make fun of Helen Thomas' looks and label her ugly. That's cruel and unfeeling. Perhaps those kinds of taunts drove her to develop her reputation as a tough old broad who made politicians and public figures afraid to cross her. After all, everyone needs an identity.
It is rather in print that she was a dog. But she's not the only one. There are plenty of rabid mongrels roaming the back alleys of establishment journalism.
That's the ugly truth.
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