The Moral Failure of American Liberals
Jonathan Cook is someone whose articles I have posted on my blog on many occassions. This article came as a disappoint to me. The best way to handle this is to quote some of his statements and give my rebuttal.
A defense of Helen ThomasI don't think he is really defending her here. He claims that she spoke in the heat of the moment. Cook does not care to explain what his source is for such revelation. Can we then deduce that her very brave statements in the past were all spoken in the heat of the moment? No! There is in fact another video only two months prior where she indicated how Ashkenazi Jewry had no ties to Palestine.
Undoubtedly, Ms. Thomas’ opinions, as she expressed them in an unguarded moment, were inappropriate and required an apology. It is true, as she says, that Palestine was occupied and the land taken from the Palestinians by Jewish immigrants with no right to it barring a Biblical title deed. But 62 years on from Israel’s creation, most Jewish citizens have no home to go to in Poland and Germany – or in Iraq and Yemen, for that matter.Perhaps Cook aught to remind his readers that millions of Ashkenazi Jews in Palestine are recent arrivals from Brooklyn, New York, the former Soviet Union, and that they have yet to stop the stampede towards Arab Palestine. In addition, the duration of time does not make theft legal. Many colonized countries of people of color were de-colonized after centuries. In addition, it is NOT true that the Jews in Palestine have nowhere to go. Let's start with Cook's own country, Britain. The former Jews who came from Britain and their descendants are in possession of British passports and if life were not comfy in Palestine due to American taxpayers' money that flows in their direction, these former British Jews would waste no time grabbing onto that British passport and heading towards England. Mr. Cook, please, do not be so generous with the Arabs' land. Give them yours!
There is also an uncomfortable echo in her words of the chauvinism underpinning demands from some Jews – and many Israelis – that Palestinians should "go home to the 22 Arab states."This is just silly and absurd. European Jews almost landed on Uganda to colonize it when Palestine seemed almost impossible. Would they then have told the Ugandans to go to the rest of the African countries? The colonizer, the invader, the predator's logic stands on its head, because how else to justify their occupation of stolen land.
if she had been asking Blacks to return to Africa, or Native Americans to Asia and South America, from which they came 8,000 or more years ago?"Totally silly and devoid of any sense. The blacks were taken to America against their will and they have no other country than America. They do not hold Nigerian or Ethiopian passports. Native Americans came from Asia and South America 8000 years ago? Came to where? To North America? Whom did they disposes and occupy? What nonsense is Mr. Cook engaged in? Native Americans are native to the land as the Palestinians are native to Palestine whereas the Europeans who arrived in North America were colonizers of the Native people as Ashkenazi Jewry is alien to Palestine but only a colonizer. Why does a brilliant writer like Cook let go of his sense of logic and reality in this article? I don't know, but he is not making sense!
Ms. Thomas let her guard down and her anger and resentment show. She generalized unfairly. She sounded bitter. She needed to – and has – apologized. But she does not deserve to be pilloried and blacklisted.No, she did not let her guard down! She spoke courageously as she always did! What part of what she said is perceived to be inappropirate? Let's take a look:
Rabbi: Any comments on Israel?
Helen Thomas: Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine. Remember: these people are occupied and it is their land, not Germany, not Poland,
Rabbi: So where should they go?
Helen Thomas: They go home!
Rabbi:Where is home?
Helen Thomas: Poland, Germany, and America and everywhre else.
Now please take a look at the picture of the Ashkenazi Jew on the left who now calls Arab Palestine home. Does he look in the mirror? And who would be staring back at him other than a European? What business does he have on Arab soil, except for the business of theft and plunder? Where is this man's homeland? Is it possible it could be Palestine? Is it possible that you could be blind? Is it then possible that Nigeria is the homeland of the Chinese and China the ancestral homeland of the Nigerian? The Ashkenazi Jewry's claim to Palestine is just as absurd. These Ashkenazi Jews do need to GO HOME!
This comment below was posted at a Zionist website by the name of Philip Weiss
Otto June 10, 2010 at 8:29 am It is in fact an entirely plausible political demand to ask that colonists leave: it is what happened in French Algeria and it is happening in South Africa as well, where the Afrikaaners and other whites ‘have no home to go to’ but are in fact leaving for Europe, the US and Australia etc as their privileges vis-a-vis the native population are withdrawn. It is also not correct to write that “the land taken from the Palestinians by Jewish immigrants with no right to it barring a Biblical title deed” but much better to say that “the land was taken from the native population by chauvinist colonists backed by European political power, as happened in many other places in Africa, Asia etc”. And there is no “uncomfortable echo in her words of the chauvinism underpinning demands from some Jews – and many Israelis – that Palestinians should “go home to the 22 Arab states” — the latter claims is as if the Apartheid government of South Africa had proposed to expel all black South Africans ‘home’ to the rest of Africa. Asking colonists to leave is very different from demand for the removal of the native population. In other words, this defence of Helen Thomas is not enough of a defence: asking for the decolonisation of relations between Palestinian arabs and jews, which will inevitable result in many jews leaving as their privileges are withdrawn, is entirely reasonable demand. In fact it is an essential part of any solution.
This article is full of nonsense. Take that statement about Rodney King. What has Rodney King got to do with a colonized Palestinian Arabs fighting to de-colonze their land? I think Mr. Cook was in a panic mode when he wrote this article; the panic arising out of the fear that his own Jews from England now colonizing Palestine might be stampeding back! That is very worrisome to him. Lest we forget, it was Mr. Cook's country that gave away Arab land to international Jewry!
Here is that article in its entirety
The Moral Failure of American Liberals
A defense of Helen Thomas
by Jonathan Cook, June 11, 2010
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The ostracism of Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, over her comment that Jews should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to Poland, Germany, America, and elsewhere is revealing in several ways. In spite of an apology , the 89-year-old has been summarily retired by the Hearst newspaper group, dropped by her agent, spurned by the White House, and denounced by long-time friends and colleagues.
Ms. Thomas earned a reputation as a combative journalist, at least by American standards, with a succession of administrations over their Middle East policies, culminating in Bush officials boycotting her for her relentless criticisms of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. But the reaction to her latest remarks suggest that, if there is one topic in American public life on which the boundaries of what can and cannot be said are still tightly policed, it is Israel.
Undoubtedly, Ms. Thomas’ opinions, as she expressed them in an unguarded moment, were inappropriate and required an apology . It is true, as she says, that Palestine was occupied and the land taken from the Palestinians by Jewish immigrants with no right to it barring a Biblical title deed. But 62 years on from Israel’s creation, most Jewish citizens have no home to go to in Poland and Germany – or in Iraq and Yemen, for that matter. There is also an uncomfortable echo in her words of the chauvinism underpinning demands from some Jews – and many Israelis – that Palestinians should "go home to the 22 Arab states."
But Ms. Thomas did apologize and, after that, a line ought to have been drawn under the affair – as it surely would have been had she made any other kind of faux pas. Instead, she has been denounced as an anti-Semite, even by her former friends.
The reasoning of one, Lanny Davis, counsel to the White House in the Clinton administration, was typical. Mr. Davis, who said he previously considered himself "a close friend," asked whether anyone would be "protective of Helen’s privileges and honors if she had been asking Blacks to return to Africa, or Native Americans to Asia and South America, from which they came 8,000 or more years ago?"
It is that widely accepted analogy, appropriating the black and Native American experience in a wholly misguided way, that reveals in stark fashion the moral failure of American liberals. In their blindness to the current relations of power in the US, most critics of Ms. Thomas contribute to the very intolerance they claim to be challenging.
Ms. Thomas is an Arab-American, of Lebanese descent, whose remarks were publicized in the immediate wake of Israel’s lethal commando attack on a flotilla of aid ships trying to break the siege of Gaza. Unlike most Americans, who were half-wakened from their six-decade Middle East slumber by the killing of at least nine activists, Ms. Thomas has been troubled by the Palestinians’ plight for much of her long lifetime.
She was in her late twenties when Israel ethnically cleansed three-quarters of a million Palestinians from most of Palestine, a move endorsed by the fledgling United Nations. She was in her mid-forties when Israel took over the rest of Palestine and parts of Egypt and Syria in a war that dealt a crushing blow to Arab identity and pride and made Israel a favored ally of the US. In her later years she has witnessed Israel’s repeated destruction of Lebanon, her parents’ homeland, and the slow confinement and erasure of the neighboring Palestinian people. Both have occurred under a duplicitous American "peace process" while Washington has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into Israel’s coffers.
It is therefore entirely understandable if, despite her own personal success, she feels a simmering anger not only at what has taken place throughout her lifetime in the Middle East but also at the silencing of all debate about it in the US by the Washington elites she counted as friends and colleagues.
While she has many long-standing Jewish friends in Washington – making the anti-Semite charge implausible – she has also seen them and others promote injustice in the Middle East. Doubtless she, like many of us, has been exasperated at the toothless performance of the press corps she belongs to in holding the White House to account in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, and Israel-Palestine.
It is with this context in mind that we can draw a more fitting analogy. We should ask instead: How harshly should Ms. Thomas be judged were she a black professional who, seeing yet another injustice like the video of Rodney King being beaten to within an inch of his life by white policemen, had said white Americans ought to "go home to Europe"?
This analogy accords more closely with the reality of power relations in the US between Arabs and Jews. Ms. Thomas is not a representative of the oppressor white man disrespecting the oppressed black man, as Mr. Davis suggests; she is the oppressed black man hitting back at the oppressor. Her comments shocked not least because they denied an image that continues to dominate in modern America of the vulnerable Jew, a myth that persists even as Jews have become the most successful minority in the country.
Ms. Thomas let her guard down and her anger and resentment show. She generalized unfairly. She sounded bitter. She needed to – and has – apologize d. But she does not deserve to be pilloried and blacklisted.