{"id":54,"date":"2010-06-07T10:10:51","date_gmt":"2010-06-07T10:10:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/rabbishmuleyunleashed\/2010\/06\/helen-thomas-and-open-season-on-jews.html"},"modified":"2010-06-07T10:10:51","modified_gmt":"2010-06-07T10:10:51","slug":"helen-thomas-and-open-season-on-jews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/rabbishmuleyunleashed\/2010\/06\/helen-thomas-and-open-season-on-jews.htm","title":{"rendered":"Helen Thomas and Open Season on Jews"},"content":{"rendered":"

Helen Thomas’s stomach-turning comments about the Jews returning to Germany and Poland, where six million were gassed and cremated into piles of ash, are striking for their racism and insensitivity. Whether she said them out of senility or anti-Semitism is beside the point. Either way she has no business working for any respectable media organization or sitting as the senior White House correspondent directly in front of the President of the United States. When Don Imus made racially charged statements against a woman’s basketball team, candidate Obama demanded he be fired. It will be interesting to see how President Obama, who could not offer a single word of support for Israel since the flotilla affair, will react.<\/span><\/p>\n


\n<\/p>\n


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One can only imagine the uproar against Thomas
\nhad she said that all blacks should go home to Africa, or illegal immigrants to
\nTijuana. It seems that Jews are the only group that you can attack with
\nimpunity because they are the only ones unwise enough to tolerate it. Better
\nyet, we’re the only group often so filled with so much self-loathing that we
\nactually initiate<\/i> many of the attacks.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Few of us are surprised that it is a coterie of
\nJewish advisors to President Obama who have joined him in condemnations of
\nIsrael over Jews building in Jerusalem. This week the New York Times published
\nan article by Michael Chabon arguing that many Jews are ‘blockheads’ and
\nnotions of Jewish intelligence are highly overrated.  He may be correct.
\nBut as I read this strange screed from one of America’s most celebrated Jewish
\nnovelists I wondered if, say, Maya Angelou would ever pen an article about how
\nmany black dumbbells there are. Attacks on one’s own seems to be an art form
\nperfected specifically by Jews.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Helene Cooper wrote a column in the New York
\nTimes (funny that so many derogatory articles on Israel and Jews always appears
\nin a Jewish-owned newspaper) asking whether Israel has become a strategic
\nliability to the United State. She quoted many senior Jewish political advisers
\nto the democratic party who advised that if Israel continues to embarrass the
\nUnited States it might be time for the superpower to distance itself from the
\nlittle Jewish irritant.  The criticism made for interesting reading,
\nimplying as it did that while Israel is an embarrassment to the United States,
\nits relationship with such great human rights exemplars as Saudi Arabia, Egypt,
\nand Turkey ought to be sources of downright pride.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Turkey merits special mention because not only
\ndoes its media accuse the American military of harvesting organs from helpless
\nIraqis, which it cites as one of the reasons for the American invasion, but
\nbecause Prime Minister Erdogan  sees fit to call Israel barbarous, lecture
\nJews about not murdering, and refers to Hamas as freedom fighters. Curiously,
\nat the same time he was spewing his venom toward the Jewish state this past
\nweek, the Pope was in Cyprus where he was being publicly begged by Archbishop
\nChrysostomos II, the leader of the Orthodox Church of Cyprus, to stop the
\nillegal Turkish occupation of Cyprus, now in its thirty-forth year, and protect
\nChristians from growing attacks by Turks. Just prior to the Pope’s visit a
\nChristian bishop had been stabbed to death outside his home in the
\nMediterranean port of Iskenderun. The archbishop said that Turkey had “barbarously
\ninvaded” Cyprus and “continues to carry out its obscure plan, which includes
\nthe annexation of the lands now under military occupation and then conquest of
\nthe whole of Cyprus. They wish to make everything Greek and Christian disappear
\nfrom occupied Cyprus.” Of course, Turkey won’t even acknowledge its genocide of
\nthe Armenians, a position that President Obama has shamefully supported in
\norder not to offend Turkey’s belligerent leader.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, Cooper’s article quotes the ubiquitous
\nJ Street head Jeremy Ben-Ami whom journalists have come to appreciate because
\nof his consistency and reliability in always saying something disparaging about
\nIsrael. In this case Ben-Ami is quoted as saying ‘he represents Jews who… are
\nraising the issue of Israeli government actions as a strategic liability for
\nthe United States.’<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I lived in England for 11 years and was sickened
\nby the regular abandonment of Israel by some of the most high-profile
\nAnglo-Jews whenever Israel’s actions became controversial. For those wondering
\nwhy a floodgate of anti-Semitism has opened in Britain over the last few years,
\nlook no further than the fact that Israel’s greatest haters can often point to Jewish<\/i>
\ncritics as being much more strident than them. And still it continues, with
\neven high profile Jewish leaders like Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks remaining
\nmum on Israel even while it was assailed by countless countries for enforcing a
\nblockade against a terror organization that has fired 10,000 rockets against
\nit.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Still, I never believed that American Jewry would
\nemulate this cowardice. But President Obama’s public abandonment of Israel is
\ndirectly traceable to the small price he pays among American Jews. On my radio
\nshow on WABC in New York many callers contend that President Obama is an
\nanti-Semite. I condemn such character-assassination in the strongest possible
\nterms. Obama has elevated Jews to some of the highest positions in the land,
\nincluding his most recent nominee for the Supreme Court, Elena Kagan. Rather,
\nthe President inability to condemn Hamas and support Israel, which is a stain
\non his presidency, results from his considerable moral confusion and a
\nmisguided sense of right and wrong. Under Obama America has retreated
\nsubstantially from President Bush’s policies of promoting democracy and human
\nrights and has reverted to Kissingerian realpolitik, ready to make deals with
\ntyrants so long as it promotes an artificial sense of peace.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

But Obama can get away with it because American
\nJewry has become so silent and so weak. Whenever Israel undertakes
\ncontroversial action, American Jews begin writing op-eds in The Atlantic<\/i>
\nand The New Yorker<\/i> about how the once-moral nation has lost its way.
\nFunny how those same writers do not condemn President Obama’s policy of
\nPredator drone strikes against Taliban leaders that inevitably involve
\nconsiderable civilian collateral casualties<\/span><\/p>\n

Sorry guys. Israel is going to remain
\ncontroversial, as one might expect from any country under a constant
\nexistential assault from nearly all its neighbors. When threatened by Hitler
\nBritain leveled whole German cities. The United States did the same to the Japanese.
\nIsrael has never even pondered such actions, even as thousands of its citizens
\nhave been blown to smithereens.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The Jews who were murdered in Germany and Poland
\ncannot speak out in support of a Jewish state. The rest of us, however, have
\nabsolutely no excuse.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is founder of This World:
\nThe Values Network. His new book, ‘Renewal: A Guide to the Values-Filled Life,’
\nhas just been published by Basic books. Follow him on Twitter @RabbiShmuley.<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Helen Thomas’s stomach-turning comments about the Jews returning to Germany and Poland, where six million were gassed and cremated into piles of ash, are striking for their racism and insensitivity. Whether she said them out of senility or anti-Semitism is beside the point. Either way she has no business working for any respectable media organization…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion-and-spirituality","category-values"],"yoast_head":"\nHelen Thomas and Open Season on Jews - Rabbi Shmuley Unleashed<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/rabbishmuleyunleashed\/2010\/06\/helen-thomas-and-open-season-on-jews.htm\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Helen Thomas and Open Season on Jews - Rabbi Shmuley Unleashed\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Helen Thomas’s stomach-turning comments about the Jews returning to Germany and Poland, where six million were gassed and cremated into piles of ash, are striking for their racism and insensitivity. 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