Her first comment to a Rabbi when asked what she thought of Israel had her saying that they should get the hell out of Palestine and go back to New York, Poland or Germany.
Thomas later claimed that she really meant the Israeli settlers in the West Bank, not all of the Jews in Israel.
But, as we shall see, her argument was not very convincing.
Thomas, for a second time, placed herself in some hot water by claiming in a speech that the 'Zionists' control the Congress, the White House, Hollywood and Wall Street.
Of course, most Arab Americans and Arab American organizations have subsequently defended all of her comments, including many Arab moderates.
However, one Arab American has felt that he is now forced to weigh in on Thomas' statements in light to the reaction of other Arab Americans regarding Helen Thomas:
Which brings us back to Helen Thomas. I really had intended to stay out of this altogether, and I'm not going to ultimately pass any definitive judgment on her recently expressed sentiments, but some observations seem necessary. Her initial comment was very disturbing, but could certainly have been dismissed as an off-the-cuff remark to a hectoring videographer by an exasperated and elderly journalist who was trying to be deliberately obnoxious to someone it seems may have been pestering her. The explanation offered at the time that she was referring to the occupation was never very convincing because she referred to Jews getting out of Palestine and going home to Germany, Poland or the United States, but not to Israel. But had it been isolated and off-the-cuff, as it first appeared, it really shouldn't have been that big a deal, especially since she apologized right away.
The author also manages to address the arguments from Arabs/Muslims that Arabs cannot really be anti-Semitic because they themselves are Semites!
The recent brouhaha over remarks by Helen Thomas regarding Jewish influence in American political life has again raised the hoary old argument that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic because they are Semites. This unworthy semantic game either deliberately elides the point about anti-Jewish sentiment or stems from a profound ignorance of the history and meaning of the term anti-Semitism. There are many important points that need to be made about this matter. First of all, anti-Semitism is not the optimal term for anti-Jewish sentiment, among other things because there are other Semites than Jews, but it is the one we have, and comes with a long history and a well-established meaning. Rather than critiquing the term or coining a neologism to substitute for it, speakers of English should simply understand the term's history and commonly accepted definition and use it accordingly.
For this reason, it is both ignorant and meaningless to suggest that other Semites or speakers of Semitic languages such as Arabs are incapable of being anti-Semitic because they are also Semites. Anyone who makes this argument is only revealing either their own paucity of knowledge or their willingness to dissemble with semantic games. Frankly, I think among Arabs and Arab-Americans the first is much more common, but I've seen what is incontrovertibly the second as well, and it's clearly the worse of the two.
http://www.ibishblog.com/blog/hibish/20 ... i_semitism
