America, Meet The Israeli Settlers

Abuses against the Palestinian people by Israeli Settlers


Keep your anger in check as you watch. It is important to know what is going on in this part of the world.
 

“To understand everything is to forgive everything” - Buddha

 

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. - Plato

¹⁴If you forgive others for the wrongs they do to you, your Father in heaven will forgive you. ¹⁵But if you don’t forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.
Matthew 6:14-15

Caution: strong language, violence

American Liberals Fail To Stand for Human Rights

Israel's murderous attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla has served to focus international attention on its longstanding, immoral siege of Gaza. Since the election of Hamas in 2007, Israel has tightened its hold on Gaza's borders, blocking essential goods from entering and Gazan products from leaving, effectively destroying Gaza's economy. Eight out of ten Gazans depend on international food aid to survive, and ninety-five per cent of its drinking water fails to meet safety standards for consumption. Seventy per cent of the population suffers from food insecurity. Thirteen per cent of the children of Gaza suffer stunted growth from malnutrition.

Do American liberals care about the fact that Gaza is a concentration camp? Some do. Some criticize Israel. But the prevailing image that continues to dominate is that of the vulnerable Jew, the perennial victim. Liberals are complicit in this myth.

The ostracism of Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, over her comment that Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home” to Poland, Germany, America and elsewhere is revealing in several ways.

In spite of an apology, the 89-year-old has been summarily retired by the Hearst newspaper group, dropped by her agent, spurned by the White House, and denounced by long-time friends and colleagues.

Ms Thomas earned a reputation as a combative journalist, at least by American standards, with a succession of administrations over their Middle East policies, culminating in Bush officials boycotting her for her relentless criticisms of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the reaction to her latest remarks suggest that, if there is one topic in American public life on which the boundaries of what can and cannot be said are still tightly policed, it is Israel.

It is true, as she says, that Palestine was occupied and the land taken from the Palestinians by Jewish immigrants with no right to it barring a Biblical title deed.

But 62 years on from Israel’s creation, most Jewish citizens have no home to go to in Poland and Germany -- or in Iraq and Yemen, for that matter.

But Ms Thomas did apologize and, after that, a line ought to have been drawn under the affair -- as it surely would have been had she made any other kind of faux pas. Instead, she has been denounced as an anti-Semite, even by her former friends.

The reasoning of one, Lanny Davis, counsel to the White House in the Clinton administration, was typical. Mr. Davis, who said he previously considered himself “a close friend”, asked whether anyone would be “protective of Helen's privileges and honors if she had been asking Blacks to return to Africa, or Native Americans to Asia and South America, from which they came 8,000 or more years ago?”

It is that widely accepted analogy, appropriating the black and Native American experience in a wholly misguided way, that reveals in stark fashion the moral failure of American liberals.

In their blindness to the current relations of power in the U.S., most critics of Ms Thomas contribute to the very intolerance they claim to be challenging.

Ms Thomas is an Arab-American, of Lebanese descent, whose remarks were publicized in the immediate wake of Israel’s lethal commando attack on a flotilla of aid ships trying to break the siege of Gaza.

Unlike most Americans, who were half-wakened from their six-decade Middle East slumber by the killing of at least nine Turkish activists, Ms Thomas has been troubled by the Palestinians’ plight for much of her long lifetime.

She was in her late twenties when Israel ethnically cleansed three-quarters of a million Palestinians from most of Palestine, a move endorsed by the fledgling United Nations.

She was in her mid-forties when Israel took over the rest of Palestine and parts of Egypt and Syria in a war that dealt a crushing blow to Arab identity and pride and made Israel a favored ally of the U.S.

In her later years she has witnessed Israel’s repeated destruction of Lebanon, her parents’ homeland, and the slow confinement and erasure of the neighboring Palestinian people.

Both have occurred under a duplicitous American “peace process” while Washington has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Israel’s coffers.

It is therefore entirely understandable if, despite her own personal success, she feels a simmering anger not only at what has taken place throughout her lifetime in the Middle East but also at the silencing of all debate about it in the U.S. by the Washington elites she counted as friends and colleagues.

While she has many long-standing Jewish friends in Washington -- making the anti-Semite charge implausible -- she has also seen them and others promote injustice in the Middle East.

Doubtless she, like many of us, has been exasperated at the toothless performance of the press corps she belongs to in holding the White House to account in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine.

It is with this context in mind that we can draw a more fitting analogy. We should ask instead:

How harshly should Helen Thomas be judged were she a black professional who, seeing yet another injustice like the video of Rodney King being beaten to within an inch of his life by white policemen, had said white Americans ought to “go home to Europe”?

This analogy accords more closely with the reality of power relations in the U.S. between Arabs and Jews. Ms Thomas is not a representative of the oppressor white man disrespecting the oppressed black man, as Mr. Davis suggests.

She is the oppressed black man hitting back at the oppressor. Her comments shocked not least because they denied an image that continues to dominate in modern America of the vulnerable Jew, a myth that persists even as Jews have become the most successful minority in the country.

Palestinian Refugees Speak

Occupation 101 - Voices of the Silenced Majority (Documentary) (2007)

Helen Thomas is let go

Helen Thomas criticizes Israel

By Patrick Martin

The sacking of veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas, after an anti-Zionist comment on Sunday, is yet another demonstration of the politically foul and utterly conformist milieu of official Washington. No one dares criticize Israel.

Hearst Newspapers announced the “resignation” of Thomas Monday a day after her comments were widely publicized in the media.

Thomas, an 89-year old veteran reporter, made the statements May 27 when approached by Rabbi David Nesenoff, who was visiting the White House for a ceremony honoring Jewish Heritage Month.

Asked what she thought of Israel, Thomas said:

"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied, and it’s their land. It’s not German. It’s not Poland."

Asked where to go, she added, "They could go home…Poland. Germany. And America. And everywhere else. Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries?"

In her decades-long career as a White House reporter, no one has suggested that Thomas, known for her opposition to US wars and Israeli policy, is anti-Semitic.

The resulting media uproar was predictable and disgusting. It was prompted not so much by Thomas’s reference to Jews going back to Germany and Poland, but by her reference to the Palestinian people as suffering under occupation in the land they had lived in for centuries.

Thomas showed anger over the basic injustice that underlies the establishment of Israel, the dispossession of the Palestinians.

She therefore violated the self-censorship rules of the American mainstream media, which effectively prohibits not only any challenge to the legitimacy of the state of Israel, but any questioning of the predatory motives of American foreign policy.

The venom of the White House press corps against its senior member was expressed in the online posting of Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz, who noted snidely that “her hostility toward Israel has been no secret within the Beltway.

"Though she gave up her correspondent’s job a decade ago, she retained her front-row briefing-room seat, even as colleagues sometimes rolled their eyes at her obvious biases.”

In a 2006 article in the New Republic, cited by Kurtz, Jonathan Chait denounced Thomas for “unhinged rants,” including such supposedly bizarre questions, asked of Bush “Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women, and children are being killed there… It’s outrageous.”

CBS correspondent Mark Knoller made the clearest statement of the reasons for press hostility to Thomas, telling Kurtz:

“She asked questions no hard-news reporter would ask, that carried an agenda and reflected her point of view, and there were some reporters who felt that was inappropriate.

"As a columnist she felt totally unbound from any of the normal policies of objectivity that every other reporter in the room felt compelled to abide by, and sometimes her questions were embarrassing to other reporters.”

No doubt her fellow reporters were embarrassed when she challenged Bush and Obama administration lies and propaganda for what they were.

Helen Thomas was doing what any self-respecting journalist should have been doing, but few among the hacks and shills in the White House briefing room would dare to do.

Thomas was born to a Lebanese immigrant family on the east side of Detroit, in one of the oldest Arab-American communities in the United States. She has long been a critic both of Israel and of US military intervention in the Middle East.

She was also a path breaker as a female journalist, the first woman White House correspondent for a major wire service, network or newspaper, and the first woman to head the White House correspondents association.

In 2000, when her longtime employer, United Press International, was bought by the ultra-right Unification Church, she quit UPI in protest and took a position at Hearst.

The campaign against Thomas was spearheaded by two of the most odious figures in Washington circles, Ari Fleischer, the former Bush administration spokesman, now working for a sports and entertainment firm, and Lanny Davis, a Clinton White House aide, who last year served as Washington spokesman for the Honduran military junta.

With his usual instinct for accommodating himself to right-wing bourgeois public opinion, President Obama joined in the pileup against Thomas after her resignation was announced, calling her comments about Israel “offensive” and her forced retirement from Hearst “the right decision.”