Plenty forPat Buchanan.
Buchanan referred to Capitol Hill as “Israeli-occupied territory.” (St. Louis Post Dispatch, 10/20/90)
During the Gulf crisis: “There are only two groups that are beating the
drums for war in the Middle East — the Israeli defense ministry and
its ‘amen corner’ in the United States.” (McLaughlin Group, 8/26/90)In a 1977 column, Buchanan said that despite Hitler’s anti-Semitic and
genocidal tendencies, he was “an individual of great courage…
Hitler’s success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His
genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws,
the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the
statesmen who stood in his path.” (Guardian, 1/14/92)Writing of “group fantasies of martyrdom,” Buchanan challenged the
historical record that thousands of Jews were gassed to death by diesel
exhaust at Treblinka: “Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon
monoxide to kill anybody.” (New Republic, 10/22/90) Buchanan’s columns have run in the Liberty Lobby’sSpotlight, the German-American National PAC newsletter and other publications that claim Nazi death camps are a Zionist concoction.Buchanan called for closing the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of
Special Investigations, which prosecuted Nazi war criminals, because it
was “running down 70-year-old camp guards.” (New York Times, 4/21/87)Buchanan was vehement in pushing President Reagan — despite protests
— to visit Germany’s Bitburg cemetery, where Nazi SS troops were
buried. At a White House meeting, Buchanan reportedly reminded Jewish
leaders that they were “Americans first” — and repeatedly scrawled the
phrase “Succumbing to the pressure of the Jews” in his notebook.
Buchanan was credited with crafting Ronald Reagan’s line that the SS
troops buried at Bitburg were “victims just as surely as the victims in
the concentration camps.” (New York Times, 5/16/85;New Republic, 1/22/96)After Cardinal O’Connor criticized anti-Semitism during the controversy
over construction of a convent near Auschwitz, Buchanan wrote: “If U.S.
Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as
indicative of our submission, it is mistaken. When Cardinal O’Connor of
New York seeks to soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him
‘there are many Catholics who are anti-Semitic’…he speaks for
himself. Be not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are
bishops and priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith.”
(New Republic, 10/22/90)The Buchanan ’96 campaign’s World Wide Web site included an article
blaming the death of White House aide Vincent Foster on the Israeli
intelligence agency, Mossad — and alleging that Foster and Hillary
Clinton were Mossad spies. (The campaign removed the article after its
existence was reported by a Jewish on-line news service;Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2/21/96.)In his September 1993 speech to the Christian Coalition, Buchanan
declared: “Our culture is superior. Our culture is superior because our
religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free.”
(ADL Report, 1994)
Not so much, Helen Thomas:
Rabbi David Nesenoff, who interviewed Thomas and published the clip on hisRabbiLive.com site, told Yahoo! News that she should lose her job with Hearst Newspapers. “Of course they’ve got to get rid of her,” he said.
A.
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Yes, Pat is a racist who, in my opinion, should not keep his job. His employer feels differently. Yes, Helen is a racist who should not keep her job. Her employer agrees. Just because the right thing isn’t getting done with Pat does not justify a pass for Helen. It just means we have to change Pat’s employer’s mind.
Good luck with that, TB.
Once again, IOKIYAR.
@Lex,
Especially if you’re a far right wing Republican!
HT’s problem is that she’s a stinkin’ Arab. And the Israeli’s need a shiny object to distract the stenographers (who also despise the old woman) from the ever more disturbing truth of the flotilla raid and gaza prison.
SP
Just because the right thing isn’t getting done with Pat does not justify a pass for Helen
Normal person’s reaction: Yeah, no shit.
Reaction of a person who just spent the last 45 minutes reading comment threads on liberal blogs: Tolling, your country needs your wisdom and insight!
If she had just said that all the Palestinians should get out of Gaza and the West Bank and go back to where they came from she might now be working for the Washington Post.
Pat Buchanan is a twisted son of a bitch, and why anyone solicits his opinion on anything is beyond me.
However, Helen Thomas was a member of the White House press corps and should, like all members of that elite body, be held to the highest possible standard.
the rite just had to wait for something they could use to say WITCH! WITCH! DROWN HER!
shame they can’t accept the truth helen said.
occupations are occupations.
I can’t fuckin’ stand people who think every single Israeli came from someplace else, as if there were no Jews living in what is now Israel before 1917 or 1948 or whenever the fuck it is they’re counting from. There werealwayssome Jews there; not all of them migrated elsewhere. I mean, fuck, where do these idiots think Judaismcame from?!
I also can’t fuckin’ stand people who think that because most of the Ashkenazim are descended from Eastern European-origin converts (from 900 years ago), they’re somehow not “real” Jews or something. By that standard, pretty much everyone from the British Isles and Scandinavia aren’t “real” Christians, because a significant chunk of their ancestors weren’t actually Christian 900 years ago, and most of the world’s Muslims are not “real” Muslims, either. But somehow or other, we don’t see people saying that Ottoman-Empire-converted Muslims are actually not Muslims, they’re [insert nationality here], instead, we see the same damn kind of bigots trying to insist that all Muslims are Arabs, even the Chinese-descended ones in Malaysia, for fuck’s sake. So that smells a lot like knee-jerk antisemitism to me.
I further can’t fuckin’ stand people who seem to think that Israel somehow magicked itself into existence because of Jews. Wrong, motherfucker, it was created originally by good, Bible-believing, Armageddon-anxiousBritish Christians. Look up the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement and get back to me. The only thing the Jews did was run the British out, and forAmericans to be criticising Israelis for taking over their country in a bloody revolution is, um…
*head explodes*
Also, the fact is that if you get aggressively colonised by the British Empire, you arenever getting your land back, and you might as well just learn to deal with it. After all, if we’re going to start cancelling countries because they were created by fiat by the British, a fuck of a lot of us are going to have to start packing. I support Israel’s right to exist because I am a Canadian and I amnot a hypocrite. Or a political Indian.
I used to respect Helen Thomas a lot. I respect her quite a bit less now.
Ido, as a matter of fact, think the Palestinians should go where they were originally supposed to go in the 1947 treaty, which was an area of land that is now part of Jordan. Funny thing, the Jordanianswon’t let them go there and never would let them go there. The Palestinians are getting kicked from both sides (by the Israelis and by the local Arabs) and the local Arabs like it just fine that way — using the Palestinians to keep the heat on Israel means there’s much less scrutiny on them for human rights abuses and political corruption and so on.
The damnedest thing about it is a lot of those states’ leaders are playing Israel like a violin and the Israelis don’t even know it. It works like this: Gin up Israel’s fear response with eliminationist rhetoric so they’ll do something else egregious, and continue doing whatever you’re doing while everyone’s screaming at Israel. (Heard much about human rights abuses in Syria lately from anybody other than shit-disturbers like me? Thought not.)
The current generation of Israel’s leaders and thinkers were almost all born just after the Holocaust, some to survivors, some others to parents who would have been in the Holocaust if they hadn’t left before it happened. So, like how it’s hard for the children of Depression parents to throw things away, it’s hard for them not to bite when scared. So far, they’re doing an atrocious job of it, considering that as national leaders, part of their job is not to be scared. Also, as probably non-Jewish North Americans, it’s hard for us to understand how much (ordinary) Israelis fear antisemitism when they’re not at home.
I also think Israel, like Canada, Australia, and the UK, is a US client state; you can pretty well tell by the existence of the aphorism, “When the US sneezes, [country] catches a cold/catches the flu/gets pneumonia/etc.” I once told an Israeli friend of mine that Americans think Israel controls the US, and he laughed so hard he damn near died. Speaking as a Canadian, itis pretty fucking funny; it’s rather like saying that Canada dictates US policy on raw materials…