“The View” Panelists Sympathize with Helen Thomas
Not everyone found Helen Thomas’ remark that Israelis “should get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” — which she then identified as “Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else” — ignorant or anti-Semitic.
Sympathy for the 89-year-old Thomas, not to mention celebrity ignorance of Jewish history and anti-Semitic themes turned up on the June 7 broadcast of ABC-TV’s weekday morning gabfest, “The View.” Thomas, the long-time “dean” of White House correspondents, already had apologized and then, as criticism grew, resigned as Hearst Newspapers’ Washington-based opinion columnist. Her anti-Zionist verbal grenade, videotaped by Rabbi David Nesenoff (RabbiLive.com), led Nine Speakers, Inc., to drop her from its speakers bureau and literary agency.
“The View” regular Joy Behar said Thomas’ “incredible lack of understanding of history is just appalling to me. That she would tell Jews to go back to Germany and Poland, Auschwitz, and Dachau. It’s unbelievable she would say something like that.”
Whoopi Goldberg, another show regular said:
Let me ask you this. Because for many, many, many years, there were not Jews in Israel. Okay?
Statement or question, Goldberg’s premise was wrong. Jews, and only Jews, have maintained an unbroken presence in Eretz Yisrael (the land of Israel), for more than three millennia. And despite repeated conquests and expulsions, Jews also returned from foreign exile in small numbers beginning more than 500 years ago, then in larger groups starting around 1880.
After Behar replies only with “yeah,” Goldberg ventures some mistaken, generalized diplomatic history, empathy for poor Helen Thomas kicks in.
“It’s with the way she put it. I think if she had put it maybe a diplomatic way ….” Behar suggests.
“The View’s” other panelists don’t ask what a more diplomatic way to declare “Jews back to the Third Reich” might be. “Peace activists” onboard the “Free Gaza flotilla” gave it try, reportedly taunting Israeli commandos with “back to Auschwitz.” In any case, “The View” team, including Goldberg, end by discussing Thomas’ resignation as an example of suppressed free speech.
Nearly half a century ago Federal Communications Commission Director Newton Minow, declared television a “vast wasteland.” Some things, new technologies notwithstanding, never change.
— Traci Siegel, Eric Rozenman
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