OMG!! Helen Thomas Is In PLAYBOY!

The April Issue of Playboy which hits the newsstands today, features disgraced newswoman Helen Thomas. I know what you are thinking, suicide, volunteering to fight for the Libyan insurgents, or staring at the sun for about an hour to make yourself blind, just to ensure that you never gaze upon those nightmare-inducing pictures. Calm down folks, I assure you that at age 85 Hugh Hefner still knows what is pleasing to the eyes as witnessed by his latest fiance. Ms. Thomas’ was simply this month’s Playboy interview, no pictorial involved.

Ms. Thomas’ Playboy appearance is just as disgusting (albeit in a different way) as if she did do a pictorial. It is totally clear that the former Dean of the White House press corps does not understand why she has become a pariah that her hurtful words (and many of those made since) were not just anti-Israel but crossed the Rubicon into the world of Antisemitism.

Thomas trades on the stereotype that Jews control world, or as she said in a December rant:

As if Thomas was reading directly from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, she was saying those rich Jews control the world.

Thomas toned that sentiment down a tad in the Playboy piece, when asked if she had a personal antipathy toward Jews themselves see set out to deny the Jewish connection with the Holy Land and to brand Jews as Arab-hating racists:

I think they’re wonderful people. They had to have the most depth. They were leaders in civil rights. They’ve always had the heart for others but not for Arabs, for some reason. I’m not anti-Jewish; I’m anti-Zionist. I am anti-Israel taking what doesn’t belong to it. If you have a home and you’re kicked out of that home, you don’t come and kick someone else out. Anti-Semite? The Israelis are not even Semites! They’re Europeans, and they’ve come from somewhere else. But even if they were Semites, they would still have no right to usurp other people’s land. [my emphasis]

Thomas is ignoring the fact that Jews have lived in what is now Israel without interruption since the Biblical Joshua won that little skirmish in Jericho almost 3,600 years ago. She is also forgetting that there were more Jews kicked out of Arab lands and moved into Israel than Arabs who left the Holy Land in 1948. Beyond the numbers, Semite means descendant of the Biblical son of Noah, Shem. Abraham, the father of the Jews was a Semite. Does Ms. Thomas feel (as fellow Anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan does) that today’s Jews are impostors and have nothing to do with the Jews of the Bible?

Later in the interview, when confronted with an article that says there is no difference between Antisemitism and Anti-Israel (a position I do not agree with), Thomas’ first reaction was to ask derisively “Was the writer Jewish? As if Jews are unable to be fair.

She goes on to say:

Why do they think they’re so deserving? The slaughter of Jews stopped with World War II … But they were liberated since then. And yet they carry on the victimization. American people do not know that the Israeli lobbyists have intimidated them into believing every Jew is a persecuted victim forever–while they are victimizing Palestinians.

The Jews are “deserving” because it has been their homeland for thousands of years, and it was occupied by foreign powers since the year 76 C.E. Then she starts on the Israeli (nice way to say Jewish) lobbyists). She believes that those whiny Jews are still “kvetching” about the Holocaust. First of all, Jews have been praying for a modern Jewish state ever since the last one was destroyed two millennium ago. As for the victimization, Jews have never asked to be victims or as Tevya said in right after a pogrom destroyed his daughters wedding in Fiddler on the Roof, “Lord I know we are the chosen people, but once in a while, pick someone else.”

Jews have faced horrible violence at the hands of its Arab neighbors before the Holocaust such the 1929 Hebron massacre, and after, such as in 1974 when they attacked a school in Ma’alot Israel and killed 21 kids, or even last week when they went into the village of Itama to brutally massacre a Rabbi, his wife and three of their five children.

As far as the victimization of the Arab Palestinian refugees, (before 1948 the Jewish residents of the Holy Land were also called Palestinians), the term refugee give you the indication of people sleeping in tents carrying their clothes on their backs. They live in permanent houses, and the condition of their original living quarters had more to do with former Egyptian President Nasser than any war with Israel. As for their present conditions, they can thank Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, both of whom turned down peace deals that would have given them almost everything they wanted, and both of whom raided the territory’s cash to enrich themselves and their cronies.

Leopards do not change their spots, and neither does Helen Thomas. This exchange happened a little later in the piece:

PLAYBOY: That stereotype of Jewish control has been around for more than a century. Do you actually think there’s a secret Jewish conspiracy at work in this country?

THOMAS: Not a secret. It’s very open. What do you mean secret?

PLAYBOY: Well, for instance, explain the connection between Hollywood and what’s happening with the Palestinians.

THOMAS: Power over the White House, power over Congress.

PLAYBOY: By way of contributions?

THOMAS: Everybody is in the pocket of the Israeli lobbies, which are funded by wealthy supporters, including those from Hollywood. Same thing with the financial markets. There’s total control.

In the end that is the difference between being Anti-Israel and Anti-Semitic. It is entirely reasonable to say that I disagree with Israel’s polices and here’s why, but once you complain of an Israeli lobby that runs the world, suggest that the Jews are not really the Jews, or start making up IDF infractions against the Palestinians such as the Muhammad Al-Dura hoax (a revival of the “blood libel”), one is no longer being Anti-Israel, but like Helen Thomas, they are being Anti-Semitic.

Cross-posted From NewsReal Blog