James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal continues to berate Helen Thomas, one of the few reporters in the White House briefing room to ever show any moral or intellectual integrity, for her comments that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine”.
Taranto boasts that “We’ve” — presumably meaning the folks at the Wall Street Journal — “been calling Thomas ‘American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic’ for years”, and suggests that their characterization of the woman is more accurate than the Society of Professional Journalists’, which explains what the Helen Thomas award is:
The Award is named after longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas, a living icon of journalism for her dogged pursuit of the truth in a career that has spanned almost 60 years.
Taranto obviously prefers journalists who choose not to ask real questions of White House officials. Not surprising, since he chooses to operate within the standard framework, which I’ll return to.
To paint Thomas as an anti-Semite for her “heinous views”, he cites David F. Nesenoff, who was the rabbi who interviewed Thomas when she made the statement:
[Thomas] didn’t say that the blockade was unjust, or that aid was not getting to Gaza, or that there was a massacre on the high seas, or that East Jerusalem is occupied, or that the settlements are immoral . . . and get out and go back to West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Eilat. No. This was not the two-state solution. This was get the hell out and go back to the places of the final solution, Poland and Germany. The Jew has no connection with the land of Israel.
That comes from an op-ed in the Washington Post, in which Nesenoff wrote:
Then I asked: “Any comments on Israel? We’re asking everybody today.” Like saying a password to enter a new, secret place. “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” she replied, and “go home” to Poland and Germany.
Nesenoff explains his characterization (the one cited by Taranto) as being necessary because “a strict transcription misses the accuracy of the audiovisual”. In other words, he’s embellishing on what Thomas actually said.
“And why?” would Thomas make such a remark, he asks, answering:
Because, as Thomas went on to explain to me, “I’m from Arab descent.” That’s it? That’s all you got?
But if we never mind the suggestion that a strict transcript is not enough to understand what she actually said and look to it for insight, we can see that Thomas did not say she was “from Arab descent” as an explanation for why she holds that view, and that Nesenoff is being disingenuous (transcript follows, video above):
Nessenoff: Any comments on Israel? We’re asking everybody today. Any comments on Israel?
Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.
N: Ooh. Any better comments than that?
T: Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not German and it’s not Poland.
N: So where should they go? What should they do?
T: They’d go home.
N: Where’s home?
T: Poland. Germany…
N: So you’re saying Jews go back to Poland and to Germany?
T: And America and everywhere else. Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries. See?
N: Now, are you familiar with the history in that region, and what took place?
T: Very much. I’m of Arab background.
As any honest observer will note, Helen did not say she was of “Arab background” in answer to a question about why she believed Jews should leave Palestine, but to explain her interest in and knowledge of the history of the region.
Moreover, in his op-ed, Nesenoff employs a literary device to equate Thomas’ statement with the Holocaust, saying that Thomas believes they should return to “the places of the final solution”. But Thomas did not suggest Jews should return to “the places of the final solution”, but to today’s Germany and Poland — which is not the Nazi Germany or Nazi-occupied Poland of the 30s and 40s.
Her remark has no bearing on the Holocaust, but Nesenoff employs the device in order to paint her as an anti-Semite.
Nesenoff also neglects to point out in his op-ed that Thomas, while rightly observing that many Jews in Palestine came from Germany and Poland, also said they should return to wherever else they might have come from, from “America and everywhere else.”
The reason for that omission is obvious — it has no propaganda value to mention it, as “America and everywhere else” cannot be described as “the places of the final solution”.
Nesenoff continues with his disingenuous tirade against Thomas by explaining his “ooh” response:
My “oooh” was the sound of the shofar ram’s horn calling a loud primal tikeya, the extended ancient whole note from my very core. My existence was being erased. Every room in every Holiday Inn in America has, next to the bed, in the drawer, a Bible, beside the yellow pages and the breakfast menu. Christianity believes in the Jewish ancestry. Islam believes in the prophets Moses and Jesus. Can we just rip away the history of Jews in Israel like a Band-Aid, one quick motion across the centuries? Oooh.
Ooh. Thomas didn’t say that Jews indigenous to Palestine should leave, but referred only to Jews who immigrated there from Europe and elsewhere, forcing Arab Palestinians from their homes. 700,000 Arabs were forced from their homes or fled out of fear of further massacres such as occurred at Deir Yassin during the war that followed the Zionist’s unilateral declaration of the existence of the state of Israel.
At the time, Jews legally owned only about 7% of the land of Palestine, most of the rest of which was owned by Arabs. The Zionist declaration effectively said to the Arabs: “This is our land now.” That was why the neighboring Arab states launched a war on the Zionist forces, to protect the rights of the indigenous population and prevent them from being so unjustly disenfranchised. Ooh.
Thomas was decrying this extreme act of injustice, and further injustices such as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since the June 1967 war, in which Israel once again expelled many Palestinians from their homes — a practice which continues to this day, as Arab houses are demolished to make way for illegal Jewish settlements. Ooh.
What in God’s holy name (Yahweh) do Thomas’ remarks have to do with Nesenoff’s “existence”, and how do her comments “erase” him from being? What do they have to do with “Jewish ancestry” and Christianity’s belief in it? What do they have to do with Islam’s belief in the prophets Moses and Jesus (Yeshua)?
Answer: Absolutely nothing. Ooh.
Nesenoff’s purpose in these remarks is to whitewash the history of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the Zionists and the grave injustices committed against Palestinians since, at the hands of Jews who are not indigenous, who immigrated to Palestine to steal Arab land. He would instead have his readers believe that Jews had some kind of “right” to do commit such crimes because of the ancient historical connection to the land 2,000 years ago. Ooh.
Returning to Taranto, he next attacks Foreign Policy Journal contributor Paul Craig Roberts, for his article “Helen Thomas: In Appreciation“, in which he wrote:
The propagandists for the Israel Lobby, who occupy the Wall Street Journal editorial page while pretending to be journalists, are determined to remove Helen Thomas from the annals of journalism.
Roberts, who is a former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal (as well as former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during the Reagan administration, among other distinguished positions) continued with the observation that:
Helen excepted, American journalists are cowards. With the concentrated ownership of the corporate media today, no independently-minded journalist can have a career in print or TV media. You defend the Washington/Tel Aviv line, or you are out of work….
Helen Thomas’ opinion that Israelis should stop stealing the villages, homes, and lands of Palestinians, while confining Palestinians to the equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto, is equated by Taranto to the advocacy of “ethnic cleansing” by Helen.
Of course, it is the Israelis who are doing the ethnic cleansing. Many Jews have documented Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, such as Uri Avnery, a former member of the Israeli terrorist organization, Irgun, Ilan Pappe, Israel’s most distinguished historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and the Israeli peace group, ICHAD, who have been my house guests. The Israeli newspaper, Haaratz, is far more critical of Israeli policy than Helen Thomas, and so is MIT professor Noam Chomsky, the distinguished British journalist and film maker John Pilger, and the distinguished scholar, Norman Finkelstein, the son of Holocaust survivors.
But Taranto prefers an 89-year old adversary.
Indeed, it would be lovely to see Taranto take on the actual facts about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, rather than attack Thomas for simply decrying that same ethnic cleansing of the Arabs by the Jews. But Roberts is right: Taranto is a moral and intellectual coward, so we can expect him to continue to obfuscate the real issue in favor of propagating an manufactured scandal.
Taranto takes a swipe at Foreign Policy Journal, also:
You can read Roberts’s piece in full at Foreign Policy Journal, whatever that is.
I’ll tell you what that is. Foreign Policy Journal is a source for world news, political commentary, and opinion analysis from outside the standard framework — unlike the Wall Street Journal, which prefers the usual dishonest propagandist accounts of history and international affairs.
While Taranto and the rest of the mainstream media were touting the official line on Iraq and “weapons of mass destruction”, I was observing that the government was lying, that there was no credible evidence Iraq still possessed WMD, or that it had ties to Al Qaeda — something any journalist with an ounce of intellectual and moral integrity could see, just by barely scratching the surface of the Bush administration’s patently false claims.
But Taranto, like so many others in the mainstream media, preferred not to be journalists worthy of the name, leaving it for bloggers and independent researchers like myself to tell people the truth.
This wasn’t Taranto’s first slam against me. After the June 2009 Iranian presidential election, I was writing that there was no evidence Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stole the vote, and that the claims to the contrary were part of a propaganda campaign.
Taranto named me as being among a list “Lefties for Ahmadinejad” for saying so. “It seems that some people really do believe ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’–even when the enemy is a theocratic, Holocaust-denying thug”, he wrote.
For the record, I’m conservative. It’s also asinine to say that because I wrote that Ahmadinejad didn’t steal the election, I therefore favor him. Classic projection. Bottom line: I was right on Iraq and Iran, and Taranto was wrong.
As two of the few who also got it right on Iran’s election and it’s aftermath, Flynt and Hilary Mann Leverett, recently wrote in Foreign Policy, most mainstream journalists got it wrong, because “willfully bad journalism and analysis, motivated in at least some cases by writers’ personal political agendas.” They continue:
In fact, it was possible to get the story right, and some did so. (At the risk of seeming immodest, we count ourselves among them.) It was also entirely possible for those who got the story so wrong to have gotten it right — but, to do so, they would have had to care more about reality and analytic truth than their personally preferred political outcomes or having a “sexier” story to sell.
From literally the morning after the election, the vast majority of Western journalists and U.S.-based Iran “experts” rushed to judgment that the outcome had to have been the result of fraud. These journalists and commentators largely succeeded in turning the notion of a fraudulent election in Iran into a “social fact” in the United States — just as journalists like Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times, and “experts” like Kenneth Pollack, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, helped turn myths about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction into “social facts” before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
But there has never been a shred of hard evidence offered to back up the assertion of electoral fraud.
The Leveretts point readers to two definitive studies of the claims of fraud. The first is a response to the Chatham House report claiming fraud by Reza Esfandiari and Yousef Bozorgmehr. I first became aware of this report when Esfandiari contacted me to share it with me personally after having taken note my own work on the subject.
The second is “Did Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Steal the 2009 Iran Election?” by Eric A. Brill. Again, I first became aware of this report when Brill contacted me prior to publication inquiring whether I had any further insight. I replied that I thought it was very comprehensive and that he’d pretty much addressed every critical aspect.
I strongly encourage readers who still believe the mainstream media’s propaganda on a “stolen” election to read both of those essays, both excellent, as the Leveretts point out.
Returning to Taranto and his attacks on Helen Thomas, here’s a relevant fact: Arabs are also Semitic people. So I leave a question to readers:
Who is really anti-Semitic? Helen Thomas, for expressing her view that Jews should return the land to the Arabs that they ethnically cleansed and stole? Or James Taranto, for expressing his view to the contrary?
Wow! It’s just unbelievable how dishonest this article is. In order to interpret David Nesenoff’s reference to “the places of the final solution” the way you do one would have to make either one of two assumptions about him:
1) David Nesenoff believed in 2010 that the Holocaust was still occurring in Poland and Germany.
2) David Nesenoff wanted his readers to believe that in 2010 the Holocaust was still occurring in Poland and Germany.
But there’s absolutely no evidence that either of those possibilities are true nor do you present any evidence to show how it could be true. So in order to interpret Nesenoff’s statement the way you did you had to be either an enormous moron or an enormous liar. It’s amazing how many straw men you make of others’ statements considering how much you yourself accuse others of making straw men of your statements.
Nesenoff referred to Poland and Germany as “the places of the final solution” but you act as if he referred to them as “the time and places of the final solution” even though such an assumption is completely unwarranted. Poland and Germany are in fact “the places of the final solution”. That is completely undeniable. So Nesenoff said nothing that was inaccurate.
How can you not be totally ashamed of yourself for telling such lies?
Please quote which statement you are asserting is a lie. Thanks.
“Moreover, in his op-ed, Nesenoff employs a literary device to equate Thomas’ statement with the Holocaust, saying that Thomas believes they should return to “the places of the final solution”. But Thomas did not suggest Jews should return to “the places of the final solution”, but to today’s Germany and Poland — which is not the Nazi Germany or Nazi-occupied Poland of the 30s and 40s.”
Please identify which statement there you are asserting is a lie.
“But Thomas did not suggest Jews should return to “the places of the final solution”, but to today’s Germany and Poland — which is not the Nazi Germany or Nazi-occupied Poland of the 30s and 40s.”
There is no factual error there. You seem desperate to miss the point.
Your statement I quoted is an obvious lie. It’s obvious to anyone old enough to read it that it’s a blatant lie. Claiming that there’s nothing factually wrong in the statement is just another blatant lie.
Time and place are 2 completely different things. You know that and you can’t pretend otherwise. David Nesenoff referred exclusively the *places* of the Final Solution. He said nothing about the *time period* of the Final Solution. But you dishonestly characterized his statement as if he did through your time-based references to “today’s” and “the 30s and 40s”. No person could possibly interpret Nesenoff’s reference to “the places of the Final Solution” to mean “the time and places of the Final Solution”. Therefore, it’s a lie. It’s a blatant lie. The only one who is desperate is you. You were desperate to act as if you didn’t understand Nesenoff’s point.
There is no way in hell I’m going to pretend that you don’t know with every fiber of your being that what you said is an absolute lie. You’ve known that it was a lie ever since the day you wrote this article. You can’t explain how I’m wrong about you lying. You couldn’t explain how I’m wrong if your very life depended on it. I already clearly explained how your statement was a lie in my first comment here. But you didn’t dare try disputing a single thing I said when you first read that comment because you were utterly incapable of doing so.
Show some decency for the first time in your life and admit that you lied.
Thanks for reiterating my whole point for me.
Wow! So not only are you a liar but you’re also a coward. You actually banned me from posting comments on your website. Now everyone who reads these comments will know that you weren’t man enough to actually respond to my exposure of your lie. Everyone who reads these comments will know that you’re a total coward. If you ban me again then I’ll e-mail every notable person mentioned on your website about your lie. If you ban me again I’ll expose you as a liar to a much wider audience.
Now, to actually respond to your last comment. No, I did not reiterate your point. You’re just blatantly lying again. You’re obviously just pretending that I reiterated your point. You’ve now created total straw men of both David Nesenoff’s statement and what you said about it. What you said about Helen Thomas’s suggestion really being that Jews should return to “today’s Germany and Poland” is clearly meant to contrast with what Nesenoff said. The obvious implication of what you said is that Nesenoff said the opposite of your interpretation of Thomas’s statement. The obvious implication of what you said is that you’re interpreting Nesenoff’s statement to mean that he believed (or wanted his readers to believe) that Thomas suggested that today’s Jews should go to Poland and Germany during the time of the Holocaust. That’s the obvious meaning of what you said. There’s no possible way for anyone to interpret your statement otherwise.
And that’s why I obviously did not reiterate your point. Your “point” in your article was that Nesenoff was referring to both the time and place of the Holocaust. You can’t deny that. There’s absolutely no way for you to deny that. In contrast, my point was that Nesenoff was referring exclusively to the place of the Holocaust. There’s an obvious and total difference between what you said about Nesenoff’s statement in your article and what I said about it in my last comment here. You’re merely pretending that we said the same thing about Nesenoff’s statement. And for you to do that is to tell another lie.
The entire basis for you criticizing Nesenoff’s complaint about Thomas’s statement is the unwarranted assumption that Nesenoff was upset at the notion of Israeli Jews traveling through both time and space to Germany and Poland during the Holocaust. But Nesenoff’s actual complaint was with the idea of Israeli Jews going “to today’s Germany and Poland”. Nesenoff interpreted Thomas’s statement the exact same way that you did. But actually being honest and acknowledging that at the time would have prevented you from criticizing Nesenoff the way you did. There was simply no way for you to criticize Nesenoff’s statement without pretending that it meant something totally different from what it obviously meant.
I know that you lied. I know that you know that you lied. I know that you know that I know that you lied. Stop this ridiculous charade of pretending otherwise. It isn’t fooling anyone. Show some decency for the first time in your life and admit that you lied.
Actually, you did in fact reiterate my point; and all you’ve done here is illustrate the validity of the reason for which you were banned. No trolls allowed.
No, I obviously did not reiterate your point because your “point” was based on an obviously wrong interpretation of what David Nesenoff said. Your “point” was inherently invalid because you and Nesenoff interpreted Helen Thomas’s reference to Poland and Germany the EXACT SAME WAY. “The places of the final solution” ARE “today’s Germany and Poland”. There is no “point” unless you and Nesenoff interpreted Thomas’s statement differently. There is no basis for your criticism of Nesenoff’s statement unless you and Nesenoff interpreted Thomas’s statement differently. But you and Nesenoff interpreted that statement to mean the EXACT SAME THING. So there was absolutely no valid reason for you to criticize what Nesenoff said about Thomas’s statement. I obviously did NOT reiterate your “point” by explaining how your “point” was a total straw man of Nesenoff’s statement. QED
You’re not fooling anyone. Your responses to me in this thread all completely lack any transparency. That’s obvious to anyone who reads this. We both know you’re completely wrong. Why can’t we ever have a real conversation? You know, a conversation in which we’re both honest with each other instead of one in which only I’m honest?
Hey, here’s an idea. Instead of being totally vague and non-transparent, why don’t you actually *EXPLAIN* HOW I’M WRONG. Instead of merely acting as if I’m wrong, why don’t you actually *SHOW* how I’m wrong. Why don’t you actually *EXPLAIN* how I reiterated your point? Or is that too hard for you because you have no freaking clue how to show how your obvious lie is not an obvious lie?
It’s obvious just how limited you are in the extent to which you can defend your article and dispute what I say about it. Like a basketball player who has stopped dribbling the ball, you’re extremely limited in your movement. The best you can do is to repeat vague, non-transparent claims that there’s no factual error in your statement or that I’m actually reiterating a point you made. You can’t actually *explain* how any of that is true. In order to do that you would have to go out on a major limb and just tell more obvious lies. And that would just further expose you as an enormous liar. There’s simply no way for you to adequately defend yourself from the charge that you lied without telling more obvious lies.
Trying to ban me didn’t prove anything except that you’re a coward. Now everyone who reads these comments will know that you weren’t man enough to actually respond to my exposure of your lie. Labeling me a troll is obviously just a cowardly, self-serving attempt to avoid addressing my completely valid criticisms of your article. You’re clearly defining the word ‘troll’ wrongly but I’m sure you already knew that. Calling you out for an obvious lie clearly does not make me a troll. Criticizing the honesty of what someone wrote can’t make anyone a troll. Calling me a troll in this context just exposes you as a completely dishonest coward who isn’t man enough to engage in a substantive discussion of the validity of a claim you made. By your logic, you were a troll for criticizing David Nesenoff the way you did.
This statement of yours in fact precisely reiterates the same point I was making.
No trolls allowed.
It’s very interesting that you accused me of seeming desperate to miss “your” point because your response to Nesenoff that I quoted as well as your coy descriptions of the “point” you claim to have been making actually make *YOU* SEEM DESPERATE TO MISS NESENOFF’S POINT! So please don’t throw stones in your glass house. I challenge you to fully explain Nesenoff’s point. I challenge you to honestly and accurately explain to me Nesenoff’s point. You can’t do that without exposing the utter dishonesty of your “point” that you made in response to it.
GO AHEAD. PROVIDE AN HONEST AND ACCURATE EXPLANATION OF NESENOFF’S POINT. I DARE YOU.
I see no point in beating a dead horse with a troll.
LIAR LIAR PANTS ON FIRE!
You never explained Nesenoff’s point in the first place! You never explained his point in mentioning that Germany and Poland were the places of the Final Solution. You never explained it in your article and you never explained it in any responses to my comments on the article. The horse is alive and well and has never been the victim of any physical abuse.
Nesenoff’s obvious point in mentioning that Germany and Poland were the places of the Final Solution was that it would be traumatic for Israeli Jews to go back to live where their ancestors were slaughtered by the millions. The trauma that Jews associate with Germany and Poland because of the Holocaust has not magically disappeared from “today’s Germany and Poland”. Hence, Israeli Jews whose ancestors lived in Germany or Poland don’t want to go back and live there. When it comes to the issue of large numbers of contemporary Jews going to live in Germany and Poland there is no distinction between “today’s Germany and Poland” and “the places of the final solution”. That’s why “today’s Germany and Poland” are in fact “the places of the final solution” and claiming otherwise is a blatant lie. Therefore, you lied by claiming that Helen “Thomas did not suggest Jews should return to ‘the places of the final solution’”.
You’re not even going to try proving me wrong about any of that. Admit your dishonesty.
My observation that the Germany and Poland of today are not the Nazi Germany or Nazi-occupied Poland of the 30s and 40s is hardly subject to debate.
Hey, I just proved that you lied back in May when you claimed that you had already explained Nesenoff’s point. DO YOU AT LEAST HAVE THE DECENCY TO ACKNOWLEDGE THAT OBVIOUS LIE?
Your “observation” was a lie because it was actually a FALSE ACCUSATION against Nesenoff. You falsely claimed that Nesenoff was not referring to “today’s Germany and Poland” in his article. That claim can’t be true unless you’re also accusing Nesenoff of believing that it’s possible to TRAVEL BACKWARDS THROUGH TIME. Pretty much everyone knows that it’s impossible to travel backwards in time so it’s dishonest to accuse someone of believing in the possibility of time travel unless you have SOLID EVIDENCE that they believe it. There is no such evidence so it must be concluded that Nesenoff’s reference to the “places of the final solution” is a reference to “today’s Germany and Poland”.
False.
How stupid do you think I am?! I really, really hope you don’t actually think that these tactics are fooling me. Your attempt to avoid this issue by completely ignoring it in your last response didn’t work at all. Why do you think this form of blatant dishonesty will work any better? If you really believed it was false that I proved your claim about the horse was a lie then you would have made at least some effort to prove me wrong. I can’t completely discount the possibility that my claim that you lied is inaccurate. But I’ll never really know unless you take the time and effort to at least try to prove me wrong.
Why do you give up so easily? Doesn’t it bother you that a supporter of Israel is able to get the best of you so easily? When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
My observation that your claim to have proven I lied is false is itself false does not have any implications regarding your intelligence.