{"id":189019,"date":"2010-06-07T16:09:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T21:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/06\/07\/i-suppose-that-i-must-comment-on-this\/"},"modified":"2010-06-07T16:09:00","modified_gmt":"2010-06-07T21:09:00","slug":"i-suppose-that-i-must-comment-on-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/06\/07\/i-suppose-that-i-must-comment-on-this\/","title":{"rendered":"I Suppose that I Must Comment on This"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Helen Thomas has <a href=\"http:\/\/thehill.com\/homenews\/administration\/101731-helen-thomas-announces-retirement\">resigned as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In an interview, she said:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should &#8220;get the hell out of Palestine&#8221; and &#8220;go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Thomas has never made a secret of her Lebanese-American background, and I think that anyone with a bit of skin in this game, myself included, can be a bit nuts, but the statement here is wrong on a number of levels:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It appears to be a call for ethnic cleansing.<\/li>\n<li>About 60% of the Jews in Israel came from the Arab world, Iran, India, Etc.<sup>*<\/sup><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Needless to say, while I respect Thomas&#8217; contributions to journalism, I do not appreciate when <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">anyone<\/span> sounds like Meir Kahane.<sup>\u2020<\/sup><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll miss her at press conferences<\/p>\n<p>The tragedy is that Pat Buchanan still has a job.<\/p>\n<p>(<span style=\"font-style: italic;\">on edit<\/span>)<br \/>I think that a refreshing bit of perspective comes from [url=http:\/\/motherjones.com\/kevin-drum\/2010\/06\/helen-thomas-affair]Kevin Drum[\/url]:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>Helen Thomas is retiring. Thank God. On a substantive level, this is a good thing. Her remarks about Israel were obviously odious and she&#8217;s doing everyone a favor by stepping down. Equally important, though, maybe this means we don&#8217;t have to spend the next week listening to every windbag in the country rant on about Thomas&#8217;s remarks, using them as an excuse to grind every axe ever invented and suck media attention away from actually important stories. Of which, you might have noticed, we have quite a few these days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Say what you will about Thomas, she really was never a part of the pundit class.<\/p>\n<p><sup>*<\/sup><span style=\"font-size:78%;\"> They are generally referred to as Sephardic, but this is a misnomer, as Sephardic Jews trace their origins back to the Iberian peninsula.  Jews from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, India, etc. are more accurately referred to as &#8220;oriental&#8221; Jews.<\/span><br \/><sup>\u2020<\/sup><span style=\"font-size:78%;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/lmgtfy.com\/?q=Meir+Kahane\">Let me google that for you<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Helen Thomas has resigned as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. In an interview, she said: Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should &#8220;get the hell out of Palestine&#8221; and &#8220;go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else.&#8221; Thomas has never made a secret of her Lebanese-American background, and &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1114,967,1159,1129,986],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189019","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antisemitism","category-bigotry","category-israel","category-journalism","category-middle-east"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189019"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189019\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}