To many in Washington, two sets of rules seemed to apply for journalists covering the president: those for regular White House correspondents, and those for Helen Thomas.

Ms. Thomas, 89, made a name for herself asking tough, provocative questions of every president since John F. Kennedy, but her tart tongue may have finally brought her career to a close. Ms. Thomas said on Monday that she will retire, following an uproar over her recent remarks that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine.”

The departure of Ms. Thomas, 89, was a sudden and surprising twist to a controversy that has gone viral in the last several days. Her retirement marks a rather ignominious end to a career that was trailblazing and historic. Few White House correspondents ever achieved her high profile and respectability. From her coveted seat in the front row of the White House briefing room to her ability to cow even the most hardened White House press secretary, Ms. Thomas was a legend in Washington.

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Gus: Helen Thomas has seen most historical shenanigans from Israel than most of us... She would have sensed the ugly way the Israelis forced their way into Palestine. In 1947, she was 26 and I believe eager to understand the way the world worked. A lady friend of mine, dead by now, was the same age when she was working for "the double-cross system" in Lebanon, during "the war" (for the kiddies, the second world war — WWII). My friend also knew of the Israeli shenanigans.

Meanwhile at White House Comedy Central:

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In a statement posted on her Web site and dated Friday, Ms. Thomas said, “I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.”

Sometimes called the dean of the White House press corps, Ms. Thomas, 89, transitioned from correspondent to columnist about a decade ago and has been outspoken on the subject of Middle East politics. Last week at a White House briefing she described the Israeli attack on a flotilla in the Mediterranean Sea a “deliberate massacre, an international crime,” and said the response by the United States was “pitiful.”

On Sunday, the public speaking agency for Ms. Thomas said it would no longer represent her.

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Gus: Yes the brave woman has been abandonned by the techno-politico-hypocrite diplomaticus... As some other friends of mine, in their eighties said at a recent young 80th birthday: "the older we get the more radical we become... We can't seem to accept political shit... There is no time left for the tolerance of crap..." And that was directed at Tony Abbott for starters...

From the Washington Post

Ah, another teachable moment!

This one comes to us from Helen Thomas, the longtime White House reporter and columnist who announced her retirement on Monday. Thomas, of Lebanese ancestry and almost 90, has never been shy about her anti-Israel views, for which, as far as I'm concerned, she is wrong and to which she is entitled. Then the other day, she performed a notable public service by revealing how very little she knew. Asked at a White House event if she had any comments about Israel, Thomas said, "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. . . . Go home. Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else."

Well, I don't know about "everywhere else," but after World War II, many Jews did attempt to "go home" to Poland. This resulted in the murder of about 1,500 of them -- killed not by Nazis but by Poles, either out of sheer ethnic hatred or fear they would lose their (stolen) homes.

The mini-Holocaust that followed the Holocaust itself is not well-known anymore, but it played an outsize role in the establishment of the state of Israel. It was the plight of Jews consigned to Displaced Persons camps in Europe that both moved and outraged President Harry Truman, who supported Jewish immigration to Palestine and, when the time came, the new state itself. Something had to be done for the Jews of Europe. They were still being murdered.

In the Polish city of Kielce, on July 4, 1946 -- more than a year after the end of the war -- rumors of a Jewish ritual murder triggered a pogrom in which 42 Jewish Holocaust survivors were killed. The Kielce murders were not, by any means, the sole example of why Jews could not "go home." When I visited the Polish city where my mother had been born, Ostroleka, I was told of a Jew who survived Auschwitz only to be murdered when he tried to reclaim his business. In much of Eastern Europe, Jews feared for their lives.

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Gus: that's why they went to Palestine to murder Palestinians and take over their land...

Helen Thomas is not naive as Richard Cohen (a Jewish name?) makes out... Like many old people with the full set of marbles, she knows shit when she sees it... Most Europeans did not not want the Jews in their mists... But massacres were not everywhere, and were the exception rather than the norm after the war.

I knew many Jewish people who were very happy to be in Europe and were treated well — except they longed to go and settle in Palestine —"Israel", the land — given to them by god — of the "chosen people"...  As the belief goes, when all Jews of the earth are gathered there, the trumpets of the Armageddon would blow the end of time and the beginning of judgement day — unless it was going to be the first coming of the savior or the second coming (for the Christians)...

In your dreams.

Meanwhile the Israelis beat the shit out of the Palestinians... And that's a red card offence..

As everyone knows, Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the Washington Press Corps, has gone into retirement after making some heretical remarks about Israel and Israelis. The current wikipedia entry reads in part as follows:

"On May 27, 2010, outside a White House Jewish heritage event, Rabbi David Nesenoff asked if Thomas had any comments on Israel. Thomas replied, "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine... Remember, these people are occupied, and it's their land." She was then asked where the Israelis should go, to which she replied: "they should go home" to "Poland, Germany,... America and everywhere else."

Thomas subsequently issued an apology on her personal web site: "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."

She has seen it all, and if there's anyone who knows what the truth is, it is Helen Thomas.

She saw the pressure and treachery applied by the Zionist mafia that led to the birth of Israel as an American protectorate in the Middle East.

She saw her country that she so loved fall prey to a ruthless fifth column that has turned America into an obedient puppet of what a French diplomat once called "that shitty little state."

She watched as the Chicago Jewish political mafia picked out and groomed a nobody for the Presidency, the perfect Uncle Tom with a silken tongue who would smoothly carry out Massa's orders.

Who knows what the "rabbi" said to set her off, but whatever it was, she could no longer contain what she (and hundreds of millions of others who have not been duped or seduced by the Zionist) have felt all along, so she said what is so obvious - a bunch of genocidal settler-colonialist Eastern European fascists have no business being in Palestine in any other capacity than as tourists and should just get the hell out.

God bless Helen Thomas.

God Bless Helen Thomas

Acid tongue sinks the scribe who swam with anti-Israel sentiment
MIRANDA DEVINE June 10, 2010
They say the older you get, the less you care about what people think. The physical reason for elderly insouciance may be frontal lobe degeneration resulting in a loss of inhibition and social judgment.

But that's no excuse for the vile anti-Semitic outburst by Helen Thomas, America's "dean" of the White House press corps, who said Jews should "get the hell out" of Israel and "go home" to Poland or Germany.

Facing a barrage of well-deserved criticism, Thomas resigned on Monday from her job as a columnist with the Hearst News Service, just a couple of months before her 90th birthday. The doyenne of presidential press conferences going back to John F. Kennedy's days thus ended her 70-year career in disgrace.

...

Certainly, the initial analysis in much of the media was hysterical and unfair. Since then, coverage has been balanced by footage of the "peace" activists attacking Israeli commandos with iron bars and knives as they landed on deck.

Reuters news agency has been criticised for cropping two photographs to remove knives shown in the hands of activists surrounding bloodied Israeli commandos.

But the logic or fairness of Israel's position will never matter to Helen Thomas and her fellow appeasers, who see Israel as the sacrificial lamb.

There were 6 million Jews murdered in Germany and Poland whose silence is an eloquent answer to Thomas's solution to the Middle East's problems.

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May be all the Europeans countries that "have a latent problem" with their Muslim ghettos, should send them to "Palestine" — as Israel was know before the Jews from Europe (and the US) took the space from the locals, with rabid terrorism, the help of the US and that of the Europeans...

Yes Miranda... Your own tongue is forked...

The situation in the Middle East is a curly one and Thomas is far cleverer than you are, even in her old age. She has seen far more shit from Israel than you can make excuses about it.
In regard to the act of piracy on the high sea, the Israeli commandos were the aggressors, they had fired upon the people below and were roping down from helicopters. Let me say, the Israeli soldiers were lucky that the peace activists held back and did not kill them on the spot — giving just a bit of a bruising to a couple of commados stupid enough to "get their weapons taken away"... And the "iron bars" in the pictures gloriously shown by the Israeli government are no more than broomsticks — the same you may use to clean your floor after spewing on it.

You might have noticed that the Israelis have been VERY selective about the media release and have more or less destroyed all other recorded evidence that would show the Israeli bad will.

May we invite the dear Helen Thomas to become a valued commentator on this tiny website hosted by a degenerated bunch of old kooks (we make Abe Simpson look young). Thomas "frontal lobe degeneration" is far more able of eloquence and rationale than Devine's total frontal lobotomy.

I would get a great kick out of Helen Thomas opinions if you and John can encourage her to join in Your Democracy's forum.

I am a year older than Helen and I must say I appreciated her questions of President's when ever they were quoted. 

Smart girl who went through a lot of ups and downs and should not be put out to pasture.

Cheers Ern G. 

The BBC Middle East correspondent Tim Franks will this morning bid his farewell to Jerusalem with an extraordinary broadcast on the difficulties he has faced in reporting the troubled region for the corporation as a practising Jew.

"The Middle East has become occluded by prejudice... too many people have unshakeable views of others," says Franks forlornly in a special edition of From Our Own Correspondent, which is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and the World Service.

In a heartfelt dispatch at the end of a three-and-a-half year stint in Jerusalem, Franks says that he had to face rumours that his appointment was a sop to the Israeli lobby following pressure put on the BBC by the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The correspondent says that there was also a widespread assumption, from all sides in the region, that he had a political agenda. "There are many who believe that – as a journalist – I'm also guilty before I've broadcast a word: guilty of being in hock to the all-powerful Jewish lobby, guilty of being in thrall to the Palestinian culture of victimhood, guilty of stirring overheated controversy out of every spit and whistle in this corner of western Asia."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/tim-franks-is-he-really-biased-against-ubothu-sides-in-the-middle-east-1996200.html

How much should you care about where you sit at a daily press conference?

Quite a lot, judging by the unseemly scramble that is now going on to fill an empty place in the front row of the White House briefing room. The seat was vacated earlier this week by Helen Thomas, who made an abrupt departure having provoked a storm of protest by calling on Israel to "get the hell out of Palestine".

No sooner was Thomas out of the door than the battle began over who should take her place, which Ed Chen, a Bloomberg reporter, described as being like "musical chairs in elementary school … except it has the cut-throat viciousness of a snake pit". Thomas, who in recent years worked for the Hearst group of newspapers, sat in the centre seat in the front row of the briefing room, right under the nose of Robert Gibbs, press secretary to Barack Obama.

Gibbs has a way of calling on questions from reporters in order of their seniority, as reflected in their position in the room. First he turns to the front row, where Thomas sat and which also seats the big three TV networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, cable TV news channel CNN and agencies AP and Reuters.

By the second row things are already getting a bit second cousin. There's the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, titans among newspapers but under the shadow of television.

And by the time you get to the seventh and last row of seats, you are a nobody.

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Gus: Helen Thomas outburst woke the world of international politics out of a torrid carelessness in regard to the Middle East. Her words did more to illuminate the Gaza situation and cut more through the cheese than the well-intended peace boats and Israel muddled propaganda. I believe Thomas stirred the Administration to get its arse into gear and prod the peace process moving in earnest. It is possible that history will remember her cathartic part in finding a solution... May her seat be left vacant till the conflict is resolved. Then the oldest reporter can move up one notch and honour the previous tenant by being sharp and pointy.

It must be difficult for the governments of the US and some European nations to accept the blame for trusting the Jewish world wide financial lobby.

It is no longer a secret that behind the massive financial meltdown caused by toxic loans (but with profit for some) by the trusted US economy has destabilized so many nations who trusted them.

My question is - who runs the US economy - who is the biggest beneficiary of the US financial stimulus?

Give a dog a bad name.

What is the real or perceived effect on world affairs by the various and multi-national Jewish organizations?  Can the history of the Hebrew people after the defeat of the Canaanites and the acceptance of the principles of the Learned Elders of ZION be controlling their behavior?

Is it possible that, during may centuries of claimed persecution, the Zionists (and that is an ever increasing blame game by those Morlocks themselves) have broken just about every civilized law since the birth of Christ.

To me, the behavior of the Zionist invaders and murderers of occupied Palestine will forever be just as much a falsely claimed persecution as the centuries of their God given right to do as they like.

I just do not understand.

IF the facts are that the entire world over several centuries, and in different civilized countries, has found the Jewish Universal Cartel’s control of the economies of the so-called Democracies?  Why? Because they can and they have the money to prove it.

If, the Zionists of occupied Palestine use their alternative name for their own advantage, as far as I am concerned, I just cannot believe that the millions of lives, military and civilians in two world wars, manipulated to a great extent, by (what can we call them) a powerful financial cartel which sat on the sidelines of both disasters?

Shall we be criticized for being anti-Semitic when that excuse has long since been discredited ?    Should the world be subdued by the belief that one, and only one race or religion of a people have been God given the right to rule the Planet.

Horses for courses, all Australians of whatever persuasion have my support.

God Bless Australia and may we re-invent the Whitlam “lucky country”. NE OUBLIE.

From the American Conservative

Even among Israel’s harshest critics, I’m not aware of anyone serious who believes or espouses what veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas said recently—that Israeli Jews should return to their nations of origin in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe, where they or their ancestors resided prior to World War II. Such a statement grossly ignores the almost unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust and Thomas should be ashamed and embarrassed for even making it.

But if we are to be honest, Thomas’s sin had more to do with who she dared to criticize than what she actually said. For instance, what if Thomas had suggested white Australians should return to where they came from, out of respect for the occupied Aborigines? Or perhaps white Americans should vacate parts of the Southwest United States that once belonged to Mexico, or even go back to Europe altogether, giving the Chicora and the Cherokee back their rightful land? Of course, these suggestions are as silly as what Thomas said, but it’s hard to imagine anyone being forced to resign over them. It’s also not hard to imagine some pundits on the Left, or perhaps leaders for Hispanic-advocate groups, making such statements about the U.S. in particular, with little or no repercussions.

Writing for the LA Times, UCLA professor Saree Makdisi notices a blatant double standard concerning the Thomas controversy, “(If) it is unacceptable to say that Israeli Jews don’t belong in Palestine, it is also unacceptable to say that the Palestinians don’t belong on their own land… Yet that is said all the time in the United States, without sparking the kind of moral outrage generated by Thomas’s remark.” Makdisi notes that when Israel was created in 1948 “Europeans and Americans were, at the time, willing to ignore or simply dismiss the injustice inflicted on the Palestinians, who, by being forced from their land, were made to pay the price for a crime they did not commit.” Makdisi then goes on to outline many instances of well-respected pundits and politicians making the same sort of harsh and unreasonable—and outright racist—comments Thomas did, only with the criticism directed at the Palestinians, concluding, “An endless deluge of statements of support for the actual, calculated, methodical dehumanization of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular goes without comment; whereas a single offhand comment by an 89-year-old journalist, whose long and distinguished record of principled commitment and challenges to state power entitles her to respect — and the benefit of the doubt — causes her to be publicly pilloried.”

My purpose here is not to defend Thomas, or even Israel or Palestine, but free speech. Being politically incorrect should mean more than a politician’s willingness to oppose some liberal policy or some shock jock’s eagerness to make a crude remark. Political correctness implies many things, but perhaps the best definition is that some subjects are so beyond reproach that to even “go there” means the inquisitor should be immediately discredited, read out of polite society, or as in Thomas’ case, forced to end their career. Challenging the status quo—the alleged role of the press—necessarily requires questioning the very premise upon which our conventional wisdom rests. How can anyone possibly challenge the status quo without occasionally saying, thinking or writing things that sometimes stray outside the limits of respectable opinion? The very notion seems impossible.

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Gus... I quote:

UCLA professor Saree Makdisi notices a blatant double standard concerning the Thomas controversy, “(If) it is unacceptable to say that Israeli Jews don’t belong in Palestine, it is also unacceptable to say that the Palestinians don’t belong on their own land… Yet that is said all the time in the United States [including by many US administrations (Gus parenthesis)], without sparking the kind of moral outrage generated by Thomas’s remark.

Now it's the holiday season, allegedly a time of peace and forgiveness when presidents issue pardons to convicted criminals and reflection is theoretically permitted, a time when even a State Department hawk like Richard Holbrooke can, on his deathbed, it is said, call for an end to the Afghan war that he had dogmatically supported.

We have watched the rehabilitation of so many politicians over recent years who have stumbled, taken money or disgraced themselves in sex scandals, including senators and even presidents.

Helen Thomas is not in that category.

Yet, many of those "fallen" are back in action, tarnished perhaps, but allowed to recant, to work and then reappear in the media.

But, to this day, there has been almost no compassion, empathy or respect shown for one of our great journalists, Helen Thomas, who has been presumed guilty and sentenced to oblivion with barely a word spoken in her defense.

How can we expect Israelis and Palestinians to reconcile if our media won't set an example by reconciling with Helen Thomas?

Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org. He directed Plunder The Crime of Our Time, a film on DVD about the financial crisis as a crime story. (Plunderthecrimeofourtime.com)

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2010/12/20101229124751864918.html

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But it does reflect Gus' view. Helen Thomas said what many honest people think but few are prepared to say. Unless the zionists desist, they will deserve any vitriolic words available in any language...