I’m a Jew and a Zionist (in some sense of the term), but that doesn’t mean I can’t get along with people who dislike Jews and Zionists. In my experience, a person’s feelings and opinions about Jews and Israel don’t correlate strongly to any positive or negative character traits, and they don’t tend to indicate belief or disbelief in much of anything else. I don’t find Jew-haters icky at all. In some cases they seem like normal people who just find Jews insufferable like I find the Irish (no offense if I have any Irish fans, but your country is crap).
But there are some things that I expect Jew-haters to keep to themselves, no matter how great they think Auschwitz was. Anyone who tells me that I should go back to the gas chambers where my cousins were exterminated and the ovens where they were incinerated is, as my parents loved to proclaim, “cruisin’ for a bruisin’.” That is to say, his or her jaw is on a fast collision course with my fist, and I don’t care if the offender is a 90 year old woman; she’ll get one fair chance to take it back, but if she says it to my face and stands by it, some teeth from that face are going to be on the floor in a minute.
On the other hand, I don’t see a reason to make a big deal out of this. An insult earns a punch to the face. She wouldn’t have to lose her job, or suffer any public disgrace. Why can’t the world work this way? Violence is so much better than the horrific public shaming that Helen Thomas is enduring. Right about now we’re at the stage where cunning young reporters take camera crews around to nursing homes to find Jews who worked with Thomas back when she was young and it was socially acceptable for people to say what they really thought. They’re going to dig up some decrepit corpselike person to say that Helen Thomas once used the word “kyke” as a verb. Then she’s going to respond by releasing canceled checks that she wrote to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a copy of the article she wrote praising Brown v. Board of Ed. Is this really necessary? Or can we just skip the whole charade?
So Helen Thomas doesn’t like Jews very much, enough to suggest that we return to where we were annihilated. Big deal. Now everything she writes about Israel is tainted and discredited. But doesn’t it feel a little excessive to squeeze a public apology out of her? To make sure her career is ended?
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What I don’t get is why when someone says something so completely ridiculous, so completely beyond the pale in its absurdity as well as offensiveness and stupidity, why we can’t just (a) first of all, laugh at the insanity of saying such a thing, and then (b) moving on and forgetting about it, and henceforth either laughing at or ignoring everything else the person says.
If it was a nobody who said these things, it never would have gotten recorded and put on Youtube, and if it had, nobody would have cared to watch it. But Helen Thomas isn’t just some nobody. Her opinions do matter, and her reputation matters.
I, for one, can’t laugh at the insanity of saying it because I don’t think she was insane to say it. I do think she regrets saying it – but not believing it, since it seems to reflect her actual beliefs. But I don’t hate her for it.
Fair enough. I don’t necessarily think she’s insane; just her opinion is. But I suspect her vocalization may be a sign of dementia / senility, whereas until recently she had the sense to keep any such opinions to herself. Old people often reach a point where they just say whatever the hell they feel like.
I’m sure that’s how they got her to resign her position: someone came to her and said, “You should resign not because you have these opinions, to which you’re entitled, but because you’ve lost the ability to know when not to say what you really think.”
I don’t agree; it was not excessive to demand a public apology. Yes, she’s certainly entitled to her opinions; we all are. but this woman went too far. As a friend of my recently blogged:
“Anti-semitism is alive and thriving and mainstream among our liberal elites. Not exactly a front page story. And could it be that black people in America have a problem with Jews? I know that’s so politically incorrect to admit, but we all know it. If you can’t admit this, you probably think that black love Korean grocers too.”
Go here for the full post:
http://hlet.wordpress.com/2010/06/08/r-i-palestine-helen-thomas/
Well that’s nice, but I don’t necessarily hate all anti-semites and I don’t think they have to be silenced. The opinion that Jews are terrible can be allowed to exist without the world coming to an end.
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