Last semester I wrote an article about the disgraced press corps dinosaur, Helen Thomas. I called her an old shrew whose racism seemed to catch up with her advancing age, but it turns out I was wrong about her. In actuality, she is much worse than I made her out to be. After reading the eye-opening interview that Playboy magazine has in this month’s issue, it is clear that Helen Thomas is nothing but a coward who hid behind the White House press corps for years.
By now, everybody knows about Helen Thomas’ anti-Semitic ranting and raving which forced her early retirement, if you can call it that; at age 90, most people are either already retired or long dead. Either way, she is quite an anomaly.
The interview she did with David Hochman in this month’s Playboy clearly shows Thomas’ true colors. Not only is she a believer in the ridiculous notion that Jews somehow control not only the media, but everything else in the world, she also seems to be a terrorist sympathizer and apparently can’t even get the facts straight.
Numerous of her points in the interview are overshadowed by a clear disregard for the truth and the simple twisting of facts to support her own lunacy. Take, for instance, when she claims that President Obama offered Israel $22 billion for new fighter jets. In February, this story detailed that the actual sum was $3 billion, not Thomas’ inflated figure.
She later claimed in the interview that Israel has a series of “Jewish-only roads,” meaning that only Jews can travel through them. Israel does close some select roads to Palestinians for safety, but in recent months Israel has begun opening up more previously closed roads to members of the Palestinian Authority, according to Israeli news source Arutz Sheva.
In addition, Israeli citizens enjoy free access to roads, as do other nationals, and religion has nothing to do with it. Thomas may be unaware of this fact, but there aren’t any “Jewish-only roads” in Israel, and to put it that way shows a clear anti-Semitic attitude.
At another point, Hochman reads an excerpt from an article written about Thomas, to which she asks if a Jew wrote the article. In her mind, only Jews believe Thomas is an anti-Semitic piece of garbage, while the rest of the world sees her as a stalwart journalist who always asked politicians the “hard questions” and has never faltered.
As someone who studied journalism, I can say that Thomas brings pallor over the entire field as a whole. Manipulating facts and using Nazi-esque tactics to opine on who is and isn’t a Jew, Thomas hearkens back to a time that should be long over.
In one point of the interview while talking about the Holocaust, Thomas says, “There’s nothing wrong with remembering it, but why do we have to constantly remember?” Someone who has been covering news as long as she has should know the answer to this question. If we forget the past or become complacent with it, we are doomed to repeat it.
Give it a rest and leave us alone, Helen.
Gerry Wachovsky is a graduate student and columnist for the Daily 49er.
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