Helen Thomas’ remarks were no mistake

Why Helen Thomas’ remarks can’t be a ‘mistake.’

Lorne Gunter
National Post
June 7, 2010

Over on the Fox News blog, Fox Forum, Ellen Ratner implores readers to give Helen Thomas a break. Ms. Thomas is the 89-year-old White House correspondent who retired today over remarks she made last month about Israeli Jews. The remarks were captured on a video camera and have recently been making the rounds on the Internet.

When asked about recent arrests of Palestinians by Israel (this was before the terrorist-activist flotilla attempted to run Israel’s blockade of Gaza), Ms. Thomas shot back “get the hell of Palestine. Remember, these people are occupied. And it’s their land.”

Ms. Thomas later added Jews living in Israel should go “home — [to] Poland, Germany . . . and America, and everywhere else.”

Fox’s Ratner says, “Helen is three months short of 90 and her brain’s filters might not work as well as a 40-year-old’s. Give her a break.”

Okay, maybe that’s true. The internal inhibitors in Ms. Thomas’s brain may be worn out and incapable holding back her true feelings any longer. But that does change one salient fact: Those were her true feelings.

True, most of us probably have true feelings we keep to ourselves. These little secrets are the key to some marriages and much of civilization. But the point is, when you can no longer trust your inhibitors, it’s time to hang it up.

It’s fine to ask people to chalk this incident up to malfunctioning brain filters, if in the same breath you are also going to say Ms. Thomas should resign, nonetheless. Because without her brain filters, Ms. Thomas journalistic professionalism cannot be counted on. She has lost an essential tool of her trade and, so, should call it a day.

But there is no way, as Ms. Thomas herself blaims, that her remarks were a “mistake.”

How can someone say the things she did in any way other than knowingly. It can’t be a mistake; it has to be how she truly feels. It’s everything nice she may ever have said about Israel (which couldn’t have been much; the Bush White House referred to her a the reporter from Hezbollah) that had to be insincere. It might have been a mistake last month to say out loud what she truly felt. But it’s not as if the sentiments she expressed were mistaken representations of her true feelings.

She was right to resign.

Her brain filters may not work as well as they did decades ago, but that just means we're seeing the real her at last. It's time for her to ride off into the sunset.

She's always been sort of a kook, imo, but she really went off the cliff with her latest. lol