The 1,2,3 of anti-Semitic bigotry in Europe: White washing Helen Thomas

Robin Shepherd
robinshepherdonline.com
10 June '10
Posted before Shabbat

Roy Greenslade is a professor of journalism at City University in London. In the 1990s, he edited the Daily Mirror, a top selling Leftist tabloid. Now he is one of Britain’s most respected media commentators. He writes for the Guardian. He is an establishment man.

In yesterday’s edition of that paper he turned his attention to Helen Thomas, the veteran White House reporter who recently advocated the annihilation of the State of Israel via the transfer of its Jewish inhabitants “home” to Germany and Poland: vicious, bigoted, anti-Semitic and, in the current international climate, not far short of incitement to genocide.

America was appalled. Europe too — not by what she said, of course, but by the “disproportionate” response, as Greenslade put it, that her remarks have elicited. I will come to the details in a moment (in all their shocking glory), but the nub of the matter is this: in a west European political culture gripped by a kind of anti-Israeli group hysteria, Helen Thomas’s views seem unremarkable. The notion that the Jews are imposters who took advantage of Holocaust guilt to get a state they never had a legitimate claim to is commonplace. It informs the prevailing narrative. Thomas might have been a little crass, but as to her substantive point, what’s to get excited about?

Guardian blogger Michael Tomasky,displaying an astute knowledge of his readership, was quite explicit in making precisely that point a couple of days ago:

“Now I know a lot of you are going to say well, she only said what’s factually true about the land,” he said “but she didn’t only say that. It’s that Germany and Poland business. Without that, these remarks wouldn’t have been nearly as controversial as they are. And those were really terrible things to say (while kind of laughing, as if it were a joke; check out the video).”

In other words, if she hadn’t made an oblique reference to the Holocaust, her remarks about the total illegitimacy of a Jewish state in the Middle East would have been perfectly acceptable.

(Read full post)

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