helen-thomas-palestine-press

BEATING UP ON A VENERABLE OLD LADY

                                          By Uli Schmetzer
                                           www.uli-schmetzer.com

Venice, June 8, 2010 – The mass media always produces shrieks of protest from its conformist members whenever they feel a colleague has violated the lopsided ethics of their profession.
The indignant storm now lashing Helen Thomas, the feisty 89- year-old doyen of the White House press corps, has been fanned by the very people who never ask the kind of questions our corporate and political leaders need to answer.
What Ms Thomas said may have been unacceptable in its expressed form though what she obviously meant was valid. She had every right to tell rabbi David Nessenhoff that Israel should ‘get the hell out of Palestine’ but then she added that Israeli Jews should ‘go home to Germany, Poland and America……’ instead of saying what she intended…that unless Israeli Jews can live in peace with the Palestinians they might as well go back to where they came from after World War II.
Our self-anointed guardians of correctness had a heyday with the old lady’s gaffe. For years Zionists and government serfs in the press corps winced each time Thomas asked questions at presidential press conferences, questions they did not have the courage to ask themselves, questions like:
      “Does the President think that the Palestinians have a right to resist 35 years of brutal military occupation and suppression?.......or “Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women and children are being killed there. It’s outrageous.”
       In private conversations Thomas made no bones where her sympathies rested in the Middle East. In one famous conversation she blamed Israel for precipitating ‘’99 percent of terrorism.’
        Finally her critics had their revenge as well as evidence that the venerable old lady was not quite kosher (after all her parents were Lebanese) and that her latest statement was pure Hamas terrorist jargon.
          No doubt these indignant scribes who have been loyally towing the official line throughout their careers also intended to purify their own conscience for past omissions and gullibility while at the same time illustrating to their public – and those in power - their solid pro-Zionist credentials.
       Still, one gaff - a badly expressed reply to the question ‘what do you think of Israel?’ - will never eradicate Thomas’ decades-long role as the lady with the dewlap chins who asked ten successive presidents the most uncomfortable questions.
One hopes, though 89 years old and relieved from duty following the outrage over what she said, Thomas will not be forced into complete retirement by the clamor of those indignant colleagues, mediocre even in hypocrisy.
(Uli Schmetzer, a veteran foreign correspondent for Reuters and the Chicago Tribune, explains from personal experiences in his books ‘Times of Terror’ and ‘Gaza’ (available on www.amazon.com) how such gaffs are used to permanently discredit media dissidents.