Helen Thomas

Helen Thomas, 89 year-old legend, became a victim of her own mouth and the vindictiveness of the Israel lobby, and was forced into retirement. To be sure, her suggestion that the Jews in Palestine should go back to Germany and Poland was absurd - two, three, or more generations down the river of time there is no way that that could happen. To pretend that it's some deadly anti-semitic insult, though, rather than just some exasperated blowing off of steam is equally absurd.

I'm not the brightest history student in the class, but I never managed to figure out why the terrible crimes committed on the Jews by the Germans and their collaborators deserved to be expiated by the Palestinians - their long lost cousins who never left the original homeland. If there were a principle of fairness in the world, the Jews would have been given Bavaria or maybe Austria - I personally would have offered them Texas West of the Pecos.

What is done, though, cannot be undone. Jews are not about to leave Israel, but that doesn't mean that they have the right to endlessly persecute the people they have dispossesed.

Back to Helen, though. No doubt it is time for her to retire. Frankly though, the whining and hysterical hand wringing over the supposedly terrible thing she said makes me puke.

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