Sunday, June 06, 2010

The American Press

[Helen Thomas has been a member of the White House Press Corps since John Kennedy was President]


So the press' perennial nastiness toward Israel ISN'T fair and honest reporting? What a surprise!

7 June 2010 Monday
Yesterday Helen Thomas apologized to some group of rabbis. As though the problem was that she had accidentally mis-spoken and hurt somebody's feelings. What she was apologizing for was for having impulsively let down the mask.

The only thing Helen Thomas is guilty of that the majority of the mainstream press is not also guilty of, is getting caught. She is representative of widespread bigotry in the press. It is this press antisemitism that routinely calls the 'Arab Attack - Israeli Response' cycle Israeli aggression.

It is bigots like Helen Thomas and her less-open antisemitic colleagues in the press both here and abroad that brainwash empty-headed louts like Christy and Damien into believing Arab and leftist antisemitic nonsense.

The reason I so easily demolish Christy's and Damien's arguments is not just that I am a lot smarter than either of them, though I am. It is also because their arguments are mere propaganda constructs learned from the press. They are based on nothing but bigotry and fly in the face of facts and logic. They fall apart when prodded even lightly because they are so flimsy. The only thing that is solid and enduring about their ideas is the underlying racist bigotry they are based on.

The problem for the Jews and for all people with intellectual integrity is that the world is full of hundreds of millions of ignorant louts like Christy and Damien. At the same time, people who read critically and think independently are rare.

And the times when the mask slips for a moment, as just now with Helen Thomas, are also rare.



7 June 2010 Monday
Today, Helen Thomas retired. Forty years too late.

Does one imagine that every day of her reporting and her columnizing were not suffused with her barely-masked antisemitism? And are the rest, those still reporting and columnizing, any different? Most of them differ only in clutching the mask, the pretense of fairness and objectiity, more tightly than Helen Thomas did at the last.

What happened to the crone, quite literally, was that she lost her grip.

Nor is it insignificant that she was summarily forced into retirement by the Hearst News Service which could not tolerate the stink.

It is one thing to retire in triumph after a long career. To be toasted and honored, given honorary degrees, speaking at dinners and commencements, rounding out a long career, now called illustrious.

Instead she goes out despised and avoided, and everything she has ever done is now tainted because it is now revealed what underlay all her journalist scribblings.

She ends not in triumph but disgraced. Let me be among those standing in line to kick her when she is down. Whatever else she may have enjoyed in life, her career, her life, and her memory, all end in disgrace. A disgrace entirely of her own making.

What is most delicious about her fall is the hypocrisy of her colleagues in expressing pretend-horror for her having been caught on camera expressing bigoted views they themselves share. She lived by hypocrisy and falsehood, so now has she died by them.

11 comments:

  1. Christy11:04 AM

    The only reason you 'defeat' my arguments is because you deliberately answer them with things for which I have no reply. You only win because you are better informed. I am sure there are arguments and facts which would enable me to be right if I had ever had the time to learn more about the subject. The fact that I am uninformed is not my fault. It doesn't necessarily make you right and me wrong.

    I do read the Guardian regularly and they must surely know something. So if the Guardian says it, it must surely be so. Also I do not believe the Zionist lies about the Guardian being partly Arab-owned, in spite of the documents showing that it is. Those rumors are Zionist lies.

    Oh, and give the victimhood complex a rest. Its quite boorish. Just because Jews were massacred all over Europe for centuries is no reason for you to claim to be victims. Nor is the mass expulsion of Jews from Arab countries, Iran, and Ethiopia any reason for Jews to claim to be victims.

    Least of all is the endless merciless Muslim campaign of murder and terrorism directed against Jews and the one Jewish society any reason for Jews to view themselves as victims.

    Nor is the near-universal sympathy with Hamas-supporters in ships attacking Israeli soldiers any reason to view yourselves as victims, no matter how bigoted and one-sided it appears. It just isn't. Why can't you see that?

    The world is full of fair-minded people like me and Abood who wish you and your people well. Why do you persist in seeing yourself as victims of an ongoing campaign of antisemitism? There just isn't any. Never has been.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Christy11:45 AM

    This is getting rather boring Jack. You are exhibiting symptoms of mental derailment.

    Please stop moderating comments so I can go back to pretending to be "Abood" and calling you "filthy Jew rat", "covetous Jew bastard" and other intelligent items of conversation. Please, please, please.

    I really do have worthwhile things to say. I do. Really.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Christy, you don't get it do you? Once you were exposed as "Abood", you stopped being just an unpleasant Irish lout in denial about the antisemitic basis of what you imagined to be leftist opinions.

    When you became "Abood" and started spewing racist venom you illustrated who you really are. You thought you it was just good nasty fun, being an asshole in public but OK because you could get away with it. Just more vandalism. "Ha ha! I vandalized shit! Is that cool or what?" First my house, now a blog. You would be a childish asshole if you were fourteen and behaving like that. But you are approaching your mid-twenties.

    When you spoke mental derailment, you revealed more about yourself than you realized. You are angry and screwed up, and most of what you are angry about is borne of your own shortcomings.

    You are a considerably less interesting person than you imagine. You are getting bored? Imagine how sad and sympathetic I am to your plight.

    You and "Abood" are free to take your racist crudities elsewhere.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Christy2:19 PM

    I continue to deny being "Abood". Even while I continue to call you names.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Christy2:33 PM

    I only call you names because I am so inarticulate that I cannot think of anything else to say. You are doing some rather insane things. Other than that I don't really mind you.

    And I continue to imagine that repeated denials will convince you that I am not "Abood".

    ReplyDelete
  6. David Pelfrey7:51 AM

    Hello All:

    I guess what surprises me most about the the recent Helen Thomas episode (although the fact that I am surprised demonstrates a certain naivite on my part), is the total (and I do mean total) disregard for the historical record availible in several countries.

    After WWII (this date varies in Eastern Europe because local partizan groups in some areas continued to fight the Soviet army into the the late-1940s as in Estonia), many Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were urged by Western European governments to do exactly what Helen Thomas suggested, go home. Unfortunately, many of those who took this advice were killed by their former neighbors. The murder of Jews in Europe did not stop with the defeat of Nazi/Wermacht forces.

    Because the British opposed immigration into Israel by Jews after the war, the displaced Jewish and DP populations in Europe continued to be housed in camps (in many cases the same camps they occupied during the war)into 1948 and 1949 until the War for Independence finally created broke the impass.

    Helen Thomas, as a senior member of the press and White House Press Corps, certainly had both duty and opportunity to consult the facts during her long tenure in her professional position. That she did not speaks volumes for the state of news media coverage on Israel and the middle east in the United States.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Christy, It just occurred to me that in the eighteen years I have been renting out parts of this house, you are the only person whose security deposit I have had to keep to repair damages he had caused. AND in the five years I have been maintaining this blog, you are the only person who has made it necessary to moderate comments. You are twice over the only person.

    So don't let anyone ever tell you aren't special. You are. And your alter ego "Abood" makes you even more special. An antisocial dysfunctional petty hoodlum, a racist, a sociopath, but special.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Christy10:21 AM

    I am not Abood.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Of course you aren't "Abood", Christy. And you didn't vandalize my house either.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Christy1:54 PM

    I continue to deny writing the despicable messages I wrote as "Abood". Even though I have inadvertently admitted to that and to being the one who lost my housemates their security deposit, I continue to also deny having vandalised your house.

    You are a terrible person and it all your fault. We left that house spotless when we left it, at least according to my notions of spotless, which admittedly is what anyone else would consider disgusting and uninhabitable.

    My attempt to justify my behavior is to claim that when we got it it was a disgrace - there was dirty carpets, the freezer didn't work, huge sections were ant infested the day we arrived, etc. etc.

    Whether any of this is true of not doesn't matter. I am simply not going to ever admit that my being juvenile and destructive was why I lost my housemates their deposit.

    But full-throated denial has worked for me all my life. It has made me what I am today. Admittedly what I am today is a sponge living on other people's tolerance. But is it my fault that they don't think my vandalism and drunken parasitism is as cute as I think it is? Fuck 'em

    ReplyDelete