Flashback: Taking Down Helen Thomas June 4th 2010, The MSM Still Ignores The Truth

My “association” with Helen Thomas began Friday June 4th, 2010 when my friend Rabbi David Nesenoff sent me a video which contained a short explosive interview he had conducted with Helen Thomas at the White House on Jewish Heritage Day. On tape the veteran White House correspondent gave a statement that was seen as telling the Jews to go face another Holocaust. That was probably one of the more pleasant things Thomas publicly said about Jews during the last three years of her life.

David asked me if there was anything I could do with the video. He explained he’d already offered it to the mainstream media and even to The Jewish Week, a weekly progressive newspaper for the Jewish community, but no one wanted to take on Ms. Thomas who at the time was seen as the dean of the White House press corps.

Taking up David’s challenge, I guaranteed the video would have a half a million hits before he turned on the computer again after the Sabbath (I was wrong–it was over 750 thousand).

I quickly wrote it up for The Lid,  Breitbart’s Big Journalism, and sent it to Scott Baker (who at the time was running Breitbart TV). To help the posts gain some traction I sent out tweets and emails to most of the large sites. Before leaving on a five-hour car ride to my brother’s house for the weekend, the video was posted on the all the “Big” sites and as a banner Drudge headline.

Turning on the TV news five hours later, the same Helen Thomas video they had rejected a few days earlier was dominating the headlines of the mainstream media .

While Ms Thomas’ comments were horrible and very anti-Semitic, my follow-up post disagreed with the calls that Ms. Thomas should be fired for her anti-Semitic rantings. Helen Thomas was merely a symptom of the problem, not the disease,  her firing would be like treating HIV with a band-aid.The mainstream media which is politically correct about every other ethnic group, features anti-Semites all of the time without barely a peep about their hatred. Even today, bigots such as Al Sharpton and Pat Buchanan are featured on TV and print media. But three days after the video was published, Thomas announced her (forced?) resignation from Hearst Newspapers (June 7).

In the three years between that video going viral and her death Helen Thomas, unencumbered by a “front line” media job, grew more aggressive in making anti-Semitic comments, Her colleagues in the media protected her by claiming her slanders were political, not hateful. Their claim is that she wasn’t anti-Semitic, but simply anti-Israel—a dangerous affront to the truth.

For example Michael Calderone wrote at Huffington Post:

Thomas, a former WHCA president who covered 10 administrations before retiring from Hearst newspapers in 2010 over controversial comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Charles Lewis former investigative producer for ABC News and the CBS’s 60 Minutes  created a  website to honor “independent” journalists.One of the site’s initial honorees was Ms. Thomas. In their chronology of her career the site reported:

After making controversial comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Thomas retires from Hearst Newspapers.

Proving that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, on December 2nd, almost six months to the day the original video went viral, another Lid scoop reported that Helen Thomas spoke at an anti-Arab bias workshop in Dearborn Michigan spewing more anti-Semitism. At the anti-Bias conference, Thomas explained that she absolutely stood by her ugly comments about Jews made earlier this year and added  the anti-Semitic canard  that Zionists control U.S. foreign policy and other American institutions.

“We are owned by propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where there mouth is…We’re being pushed into a wrong direction in every way.

The video below is her speech in Dearborn.