It's truly embarrassing and offensive to see the Republicans responding with more class to their crazed teaparties than the White House does to its labor union and netroots allies.

Benen

I would not be afraid to bet that over the next few weeks and months British Pensioners are going to have many friends they never had before.

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There has been an appalling rush to judgment here; a judgment that those few recent off-hand, isolated remarks on Palestine are indicative of a core antisemitism.  Yet, no credible authority can claim that there is any other corroborating evidence of antisemitism in her 50+ years of reportage and commentary -- if there were, Helen Thomas's career would have ended long before June 07/10.

What Thomas's record does reveal is a resolute, long-standing critique of Israeli political leadership and its U.S. enablers. More particularly, the ongoing encroachment  of Israeli settlements into the Palestinian territories (condemned by the UN);  the Israeli Defense Forces's  increasingly brutal treatment of the Palestinian civilian population (condemned by the UN); the inhumanity of the Israeli blockade preventing food and basic necessities of life from entering Gaza (condemned by the UN); and of course most recently, the IDF raid on the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Flotilla, which resulted in dozens of injuries to the people on the flotilla -- and nine deaths, including one American citizen, shot at close-range, four times in the head and once in the chest (condemned by the UN).

The political establishment, and the mainstream press -- the servile Fourth Estate -- have wanted Helen Thomas's head on a platter for as long as she's had a head on her shoulders. On May 27/10, an heretofore unknown individual, Rabbi David Nessenoff, stuck a flip-cam into Helen Thomas's face and asked her if she "had any comments about Israel". What the good rabbi captured on video, in 1:58 minutes, was not particularly remarkable, within the context of what Helen Thomas has been saying, albeit in more diplomatic terms,  for her entire life as a journalist.  But, Rabbi Nessenoff tucked it away for a rainy day nonetheless -- evidently, the foreseeable rainy day of May 31, when Israel had forecast the use of military force against the Gaza Humanitarian Aid Flotilla.

On Tuesday June 1st, Thomas confronted White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs for the administration's unwillingness to condemn the homicidal actions of the IDF. On Wednesday June 3rd, Rabbi Nessenoff carpeid the rainy diem and posted a 1:03 minute clip of his 'interview' with Helen Thomas on his website. (Apparently, the Rabbi felt that the interview, in its 1:58 minute entirety, was not sufficiently damning to Thomas -- whose manner is quite jovial and kind in the deleted portion.) Still, the video failed to sell itself -- even within the incendiary context of world-wide uproar over the IDF raid. According to mid-level right-wing blogger Jeff Dunetz, Nessenoff contacted him on the morning of June 4th, asking for assistance with getting some publicity for the video that was still refusing to go viral. Dunetz applied himself mightily.  He posted the video clip and his commentary on his own website The LId; he enlisted the assistance of high-level right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart; and he sent out a slew of tweets and emails. Dunetz gloated in the afterglow:

[Within five hours] the video was posted on the Big sites on the net. By the end of the day it was on radio and TV and the calls for Thomas' head were all over the place.

Dunetz wisely failed to give credit to former GW Bush White House Press Secretary, Ari Fleischer, who is widely reported to have shopped the story to numerous entities over the June 4th weekend. Firedoglake adroitly discusses Ari's role and his motives in this story, from June 8th: Who hired Ari Fleischer to take out "antisemite" Helen Thomas?

The Firedoglake story correctly surmises that Helen Thomas's recent remarks are reflective of " anti-ZIONISM" -- the presumed divine right of Israelis to occupy increasingly larger swathes of Palestine. American public opinion may be turning -- in the wake of  IDF violence against the Gaza flotilla; and the subsequent firing of its most vocal critic. Last night, Stephen Colbert interviewed the unsurprisingly belligerent Israeli Ambassador to the UN. At one point, Stephen ironically suggested that the Arab-Israeli conflict would be resolved if all the Palestinians "went back to where they came from". For a moment reality was turned on its head. The audience, and the ambassador went silent as the tomb, as they collectively grasped that the Palestinians "came from" the place that became the state of Israel in 1948. Nobody is saying the clock can, or should, be turned all the way back; but there has been an undeniable wake-up call to the plight of the Palestinian people.