Just wondering…
Yes, I understand that we just had a Democratic Party convention here in the state, and there are lots of big national and international news stories to be covered.
But can anyone explain why the comments by White House press corps member Helen Thomas–Jews “should get the hell out of Palestine” and go back home, to Germany and Poland–have not been reported in any major media or blog in the Boston area except for redmassgroup?
Please share widely!
for such a weighty topic.
You don’t pass, you have to keep posting here for another year.
The auditor’s race is shaping up as a compelling reason to stay pretty far away from this site for the next few months. The fur is already flying and people are on the offensive and defensive just two full days after the convention. Bad moon rising.
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p>I think I’m going to have to skip the final, take my 0, fail for the quarter, and hope I pass for the year.
I believe you are still eligible to go Pass/Fail. You get full credit and it will not hurt your GPA.
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p>Me? I’m just auditing the class. I have enough credits to graduate, but because I’m a transfer student I never fulfilled the junior year symposium requirement and the dean won’t clear my graduation papers. I mean, I could even walk, but I don’t want to be one of those kids that gets the empty diploma case. Plus, this year’s speaker is kinda boring.
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p>Screw it, I’m going to the beach.
and fill the bottles with something more interesting. Don’t forget to bring the tunes and some sun screen. I burn easily and can’t find mine.
And … well, this is mostly a blog about MA politics. I’m not sure how the views of a Washington-based AP reporter have much to do with that.
We talk about national politics all the time, there was a big post a few weeks back on the recent primaries and the racist statements of the GOP nominee for Senate in KY. I think Helen Thomas is fair game.
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p>That said she is an old woman, and I am sure she meant ‘Israeli’s’ when she said ‘Jews’. Doesn’t make the statement any better but perhaps its time AP quietly gave her a nice retirement package. Her quote was about as wince worthy as when my grandma would occasionally lapse into calling African Americans ‘colored’. Its a sign that the times have passed her by, and she should hang up the press pass, not that she is racist or an anti-semite.
Ms. Thomas is leaving the building post haste.
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p>As for your apologia – not so much. Back in 2006, Tony Snow once acidly thanked her for offering ‘the Hezbollah point of view’ for defending the random bombing of Israli civilian areas. Now that she is leaving, some of her fellow reporters have quietly acknowledged that her views on Isreal were ‘sort of out there’, and have stated that some of her antipathy towards Bush was due to his bias towards Isreal. Now much is being made of her Lebanese heritage.
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p>I’m sure we’ll see more of this, and to me saying it AFTER the fact is just cowardly. It SHOULD have been said while she was still the doyenne of the press corps.
I was about to link and say my prediction proved accurate.
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p>I think the official statement also asked a good question about why ‘opinion’ columnists were at the Press Corps in the first place, although that would really throw the bloggers into a tantrum since their credentialed but also highly opinionated. Thomas’ views were certainly out of the mainstream back in 06′, but she was more careful then to phrase it as an attack on Israel and its policies, attacks I disagree with, but that are not on their own anti-semitic. These statements certainly were, though like I said above I will give her the benefit of the doubt that it was old age that made her confuse those terms.
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p>It is really unfortunate she didn’t just leave with Clinton, her assaults on the Bush administration and her comments recently have really left a sour taste in many peoples mouths and this was clearly a trailblazing reporter who was far past her prime. I wish she could have retired under brighter circumstances.
She got it as lead reporter for UPI. When she ceased to have that job, they were just afraid to ask her to move. Towards the end, when she wasn’t even a reporter but a columnist, it was too late to ask.
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p>She had a remarkable career – ‘first woman’ all kinds of stuff. Now, nobody will remember any of it, which is a shame.
I’m sorry, for her sake, that she stayed on a bit too long.
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p>Her accomplishments are legion, she more than paid her dues, and I think most folks will treat this episode as a minor senior-moment brain fart at the end of a distinguished career.
Though one does wonder if the comment had been said about another group if so many people would be treating this as just a brain fart.
The illustrious career of James Watson, co-discoverer of the double-helix structure of DNA, came to a similar end when he made offensive remarks about the intelligence of “people of African descent” (in comparison to “people of European descent”). My sense is that almost everyone viewed this a “senior moment brain fart” — as did Dr. Watson (apparently).
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p>This stands in rather stark contrast to the biography of William Shockley, who co-discovered the transistor and essentially created Silicon Valley. His racist remarks (reflecting his advocacy of Eugenics) began earlier in his life (in his sixties and seventies), and he rather vigorously stood by them. While his contributions to physics, science, and engineering are widely acknowledged, he has (correctly, I think) been widely condemned for his ignorant, offensive, and destructive remarks about race.
that this was a sincere question, not a criticism. Discussion of national politics and local media make it onto BMG’s pages fairly, even though it’s “mostly a blog about MA politics.” Helen Thomas’s comments have been a big news story for the past couple of days; Huffington Post is carrying it near the top of the page with 6000 comments, and Google News shows that over 400 publications have carried the story. So I was hoping the savvy contributors at BMG might have some insight about why the story wasn’t even mentioned in the mainstream and influential alternative media in Massachusetts.
A journalist said something stupid that repulses any decent American. She quickly apologized for it, and her fine body of work outweighs that one mistake.
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p>We don’t mention Jan Brewer’s near-daily assaults on American (at least Arizonan) freedom and good sense, and she hasn’t apologized for any of it. Or the CEO of BP whining that his life is being impacted by the worst environmental disaster in American history.
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p>And that doesn’t even get to the really important stuff that keeps happening, peskily in places that aren’t this country.
The Right tends to be much more tribal. By their view, Helen Thomas is part of “our” tribe and we are responsible for anything she says since every member of our tribe (remember Ward Churchill?) represents all of us.
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p>So of course they comment on it. Unless we keep up with our regularly scheduled condemnations, they claim it’s another sign of liberalism’s bankruptcy.
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p>To me it seems like a waste of time.
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p>We have to figure out how much she said was plain daft or ill-considered, what she might have really meant, and then evaluate it. Complicated. Messy. Controversial. Of course, Huffington is picking it up and maybe TPM will offer something sage and reasoned.
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p>Isn’t our time better spent, though, on issues that we can influence and that have a greater bearing on our world?
Why don’t you read the paper every day and post five diaries every day asking why no one else has already posted a diary on some story or another? There are simply tons of news items that are actually relevant to MA politics but are never discussed here. This is not a newspaper. There is no implied responsibility to cover all of the events of the day. People write about what they want to.
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p>If you want to write about Helen Thomas, please go ahead, but doing nothing more than asking why no one else has done so is extremely lame.
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Short-lived projects are a legacy of blogging, but I’d love to see History Mondays pick up again, or a regular Comment of the Day. Heck, I’d do a global update every week but I know I’d let it slack after about a month.
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p>Sigh….
want a topic to be a discussion? post it. You’ve done that here, thereby making it a BMG topic. It’s not David, Charley and Bob’s job to decide each and every topic on this site. They’ve delegated that to us by giving us the ability to post diaries at our own whims.
Age isn’t necessarily a deterrent to clear thinking or intelligent speaking, but I’ve noticed that some elderly lose their ability to censor their thoughts.
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p>There are lots of intellectually high-functioning elderly, but like the body, mental faculties decline with age. This could be the situation with Helen Thomas.
My gran gran loved to talk about those “dirty Irish muckers” in her old age — old acquaintances who managed to rob her of X, etc. The fact that she was 100% Irish with off-the-boat parents was lost on her… LOL.
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p>I miss her greatly (she died a few months ago), even if some of her views were, shall we say, ‘old-fashioned.’
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p>Helen Thomas probably should have retired a long, long time ago, because old people not only have old ideas, but their internal censors have almost always been long, long gone. And I think we’ve all had thoughts for moments that we’d never, ever really mean if we took even a second to really consider the full implications, but we’re mostly young enough to still have those internal censors which hold us back and rethink things before speaking.
never failed to point out an acne bloom on my adolescent face. I miss her too, but then again, I have less acne at 46.
Like I said above, while I disagree with her views on Israeli policy I think it is quite clear old age and senility made her turn off her internal censors and say “Jew” when she meant “Israel/Israeli”. If one were to say “I wish Israel would get out of Palestine” that is a legitimate, albeit reprehensible, political opinion. But if one were to say “I wish the Jews would get out of Palestine” then it seems that she is endorsing all sorts of things I don’t think she intended to. I think retirement was the only option for everyone to save face, and if it wasn’t this mistake some other gaffe would have brought her down. The elderly are like that. Tommy LaSorda was hugely influential in bringing African Americans into Major League Baseball, but his comments about why they couldn’t swim or coach made him a pariah and were likely due to his old age. Things like this happen. My grandmother had a jar when my dad was a kid where all the spare pennies went to the Civil Rights movement, and she herself was the butt of a lot of anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discrimination in her day. But in spite of being an FDR-JFK-MLK liberal, she still said ‘colored’ and ‘negro’ every now and then and its because she was old, not racist. Ditto Thomas.
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p>Here’s your explanation. You won’t like it, but it is what it is…
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p>Reporting on the comments made by Thomas would require the media, under their ‘equivalence doctrine’ to point out that Thomas is saying something about the Jews that isn’t all that different than what Israelis have long said about the Palestinians (“get out” and “it’s our land, not yours”). After pointing this out, they will then have to weather a crapstorm of outrage (as I am about to…) frenetic in it’s willingness to jump to a conclusion of insufficient fealty to Israeli, even anti-semitism.
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p>So they choose to be silent. It is moral cowardice in the face of moral bullies, to be sure…
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p> Perhaps Helen Thomas believes the Palestinians have the moral high ground. She certainly seems partisan with respect to this. For certain, many Americans believe the Israelis are the ones with the moral high ground. . Truly objective observers, some of them even in the media, seem unwilling to comment on that. I will: I think that neither side has any claim, whatsoever, to the moral high ground; it’s simply a case of feckless thug against feckless thug in a vicious race to the vicious bottom. American exceptionalism in the service of Jewish exceptionalism only enables this cycle and does nobody any good at all, least of all common Palestinians and Jews.
Thanks for an analysis that includes all of the elements of this story: international politics, the media, and morality. I hadn’t intellectually reached the notions of “moral cowardice” on the part of the media nor of “moral high ground” on the part of the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel cadres, but they’re helpful in determining my own response to this seemingly endless, painful conflict (both the verbal conflict and the actual one).
she just got the boot for it. National news type of stuff. Settle down there.