For what it’s worth – and like fellow Big Journalism contributer Jeff Dunetz – I don’t think Helen Thomas should have been forced out. Now that she’s resigned, the story can be expected to die. And with it will die discussion of how anti-Semitism is not only rampant in some liberal elite media circles, which is what Jeff ran down, but also how it manages to make itself respectable.
First a very thin silver lining, which is that Hamas is going to be grumpy:
Thomas:”Jews do not belong in Israel” – White house correspondent Helen Thomas told Jews to get out of Palestine. In an interview with her, Jewish man named as David, asked Helen for her comment on Israel, she responded by saying: “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” Turning her attention to the Palestinians, she said, “Remember, these people are occupied. And it’s their land,” adding the Jews should “go home” to Poland and Germany. No doubt that Thomas Helen has told the truth that everybody in the world knows, but as American in a very important position , she was attacked by Zionists who went mad from the reality she mentioned in front of all people.
And it’s not like this fiasco doesn’t have an upshot when it comes to elite liberal anti-Semitism. But the point isn’t merely that many leading anti-Israel reporters and academics are driven by pathological anti-Jewish bigotry.
That’s true, but we already knew that. The real significance is that this is another example of the nudge-wink game that they’re all allowed to play, where they channel their anti-Semitism into ostensibly respectable displays of anti-Israel journalism and scholarship.
Everyone knew that Thomas had a deep, borderline clinical obsession with Jews. But – until she had her meltdown – pointing that out was equivalent to “stifling legitimate criticism of Israel.” Not because anyone was fooled, but because everyone was required to pretend that they were fooled.
When Thomas was screeching at Robert Gibbs about how the White House should have harshly and immediately condemned Israel last week, she was already an anti-Semite. When she was conveying to Tony Snow the Hezbollah view, she was already an anti-Semite. When she was grandstanding to Obama about Israel’s nuclear program, she was already an anti-Semite.
The only thing that’s changed is that now they have to admit it.
The same thing happened when foreign policy experts righteously insisted that Chas Freeman was being persecuted because of his “legitimate criticism of Israel,” until Freeman melted down on Iranian TV and started ranting about Jewish conspiracies.
This game isn’t limited to the United States either. In Britain, high-ranking diplomat Rowan Laxton was taken as a respected adviser on Middle East affairs. His scapegoating of Israel for Western-Muslim tensions was accepted as objective analysis. That was until he melted down at his gym during Lebanon II and started screaming about how “fucking Israelis, fucking Jews” should be “wiped off the face of the earth.”
But this is a rigged game. The breakdowns have to be so severe that the pathologies become undeniable, and that doesn’t always happen. I’ve seen tape of Mearsheimer physically shaking when talking about Jews. He clutched the podium until his knuckles turn white. But everyone treats him as a levelheaded and suave analyst of realpolitik, because he hasn’t melted down publicly. Yet.
But back to Thomas specifically. I understand the argument about how taboos are only taboos if you enforce them. I’ve made the same point in the context Ahmadinejad and Walt And Mearsheimer. It’s been obvious for at least a decade that anti-Israel partisans were using insincere “legitimate topics of debate” to mainstream anti-Semitism. But the premise behind all those examples is that a legitimate speaker – either someone invested with formal institutional authority like Ahmadinejad or someone with academic credentials, such as Walt or Mearsheimer – is doing the mainstreaming.
But Thomas had reached the point where she’s self-discrediting. In a very precise sense, then, she was anything but a taboo-stomping trailblazer. She was also a liability to the anti-Israel camp, whereas now she’s just a martyr to the Israel Lobby.
It’s a pity. She used to be a 24/7 reminder of what liberal elites tell each other behind closed doors. Her presence is a reminder of the nudge-wink game that people had been playing for years – and proof that it’s absurd.
Ultimately I guess I’m just uneasy with this rush to discredit a lone anti-Zionist for saying out loud what most anti-Zionists believe. Her pathological rage just made her temporarily more honest than the typical one-stater. Usually that topic gets smuggled into public discourse via tirades about the horrors of Israeli “apartheid” or whatever, because Israel is the problem in a region where tens of millions of Muslims live in areas that are legally off-limits to Jews. But there are undoubtedly thousands of liberal elites who believe that the creation of Israel was a historical mistake.
Some of them may even help run American Jewish organizations.
I get the sense that frustration over media prevarication – conditions in Gaza, circumstances of the flotilla raid, etc – created a desperate urge to do something. That combined with her offensive sentiments made her an attractive target for righteous indignation. But it seems too much like the drunk who looked for his keys under the lamp post, because that’s where the light is – and now thinks he found them.