Helen Thomas. Two months ago, her famous career ended in disgrace. A blogger with a video camera asked her about Israel, and she said “Get the hell out of Palestine,” and said Jews there should go back to “Poland, Germany and America, and everywhere else.”
Within days she was forced into retirement. She said something ill-tempered and nasty, and paid a terrific price for it.
There’s no way anyone can defend her comments on that afternoon in May. Yet for six decades before that, she had an amazing career best remembered for the doors she opened for women. First, by showing that a woman could write wire service stories from the White House on deadline, often several times a day, as well as any man. No woman did that before Helen Thomas.
She also blasted open doors closed to women at institutions including the National Press Club. This daughter of Lebanese-American immigrants made history, and the Arab-American community, especially in Detroit, has long been proud of her.
There already was a Helen Thomas exhibit in the Arab-American National Museum in Dearborn, and they had plans to add a statue. They still need to raise a further $10,000 to finish it. But there are now massive protests against it. The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants says a statue would be “immoral.“ They accused her of telling Jews to “go back to the places where we were gassed and burned.”
Meanwhile, some Arab groups are trying to make her a martyr, punished for speaking the truth. The truth, as I see it, is that everyone needs to get a grip on reality. Thomas didn’t say that Israel has no right to exist. It isn’t clear what she meant by “Palestine.” From talking to her over the years, my guess is that she meant all the territories occupied by Israel after the 1967 war. There are plenty of other people, even some Jews, who agree.
Now suggesting that Jews return to Germany, and especially Poland, was callous and insensitive. But she did not say anything supporting genocide. The director of the Arab-American museum, one Anan Ameri, put it best. He denounced her infamous comments, but said it would be unfair to wipe out her whole glorious history because of one stupid statement.
That makes sense to me. By the way, why hasn’t anyone remarked that Detroit is full of statues to Henry Ford, who was openly Anti-Semitic? Comerica Park has a statue of Ty Cobb, a virulent racist. We honor them in spite of those qualities, not because of them. Shouldn’t we include Helen Thomas as well?
You know, there was one western which didn’t show the world in strictly black and white terms: John Ford’s The Searchers.
Partly as a result, critics regard it as the greatest western of all time. In it, John Wayne utters a line over and over which could serve as the answer to the question about when intolerance might end.
To quote the Duke, “That’ll be the day.”
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