Helen Thomas

If you've been under a rock this past week, here's what happened: Thomas was videotaped saying that Jewish people "should get the hell out of Palestine" and go back to Germany or Poland. As the public recoiled from her comments, Thomas issued an apology and said that her remarks "do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance." Nonetheless, she was dropped by a national speaker's bureau and canceled a high school commencement address she was expected to give. And now comes news of her retirement after 67 years in the journalism business.

Had Thomas retired a month ago, the news would have cued a celebration of her contributions to journalism. And let's be frank: These contributions are truly astonishing. In 1943, a year after she graduated from Wayne State University, she was hired by United Press International. So began a long trajectory of barrier breaking in the places where media and politics meet, places that are hardly welcoming to professional women. Thomas became the first female officer of the National Press Club -- which had been exclusively male for nearly a century -- and the first female officer of the White House Correspondents Association. She served as the WHCA's first female president in the mid-1970s. Thomas also helped persuade President Kennedy to sit out the press correspondent's dinner because women were not allowed to come. As well, Thomas plowed her way into the Gridiron Club, the oldest and most prestigious Washington journalism club, becoming its first female member and, later, its first female president.

But today, Thomas' career abruptly ends in what we are safe in assuming is a retirement not of her choosing. While I don't mean to be an apologist for her remarks about Jewish people, I must note one thing: Thomas has been working as a columnist, not reporter, for the last decade. So it isn't the fact that she's publicly editorializing on current news that is the problem here; her job is to have opinions. The uproar was inspired because people don't like her opinions.

I don't like how Thomas voiced her opinions in this video; it was sloppy and hurtful. But her views aren't exactly news; the gist of them are evident from her past columns. Meanwhile, Thomas joins a long line of opinion-makers who have uttered controversial, even despicable comments. Rush Limbaugh, anyone? Glenn Beck? Howard Stern? Sean Hannity? None of these voices seem to fear a forced retirement. What's different about Thomas? For one, she's old. For two, she's a woman. And while I won’t pretend this is a simple scenario where ageism and sexism are wholly to blame, it's hard to imagine that they aren’t factors at all.

Now, I'm afraid that this is the legacy Thomas will be left with: Because she wasn't perfect, she was terrible. In fact, of course, Thomas is neither perfect nor terrible. What she represents is that uncomfortable reminder that our heroes are not infallible. They are not everything we want them to be, no matter how much we pretend otherwise. Our heroes will disappoint, sometimes egregiously.

I hope Helen Thomas' accomplishments aren't diminished in light of her faults. I also hope her accomplishments don't keep us from holding her accountable when she errs. Perhaps the greatest takeaway from this debacle might be the realization that, yes, people with significant failings can accomplish great things. Knowing this, we close the distance between ourselves and those we admire. Our heroes are not other; they are us. Rather than being a disappointment, this can open the door to what we might expect from ourselves. This can be a push toward our own great trailblazing, our own groundbreaking, our own achievements.

RabbiLIVE got the damning video on the 27th, when they asked Thomas for comments "on Israel."

"Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," Thomas answered. That, as Gabriel Winant wrote this morning, is a justifiable sentiment. But, asked to elaborate, Thomas seemed to recommend what amounts to an ethnic cleansing, saying Israeli Jews should "go home" to "Germany, Poland, and America, and everywhere."

I imagine Thomas didn't understand that an off-the-cuff remark to a stranger with a tiny camera would be taken as a serious expression of the dark anti-Semitism that lurks deep in her heart, and then endlessly argued over and replayed. I also think it's fairly likely that she was very inartfully attempting to make a more defensible statement about colonialism, occupation, and the still-growing wave of settlers on Palestinian lands. But I can't speak to what she really meant any more than the critics who accuse her of anti-Semitism. (She did apologize, unconditionally, on her website.)

Thomas could be occasionally embarrassing even to her liberal fans, but she was the only member of the press corps to ask President Obama about Afghanistan at what turned out to be her last presidential press conference.

It's sad that a figure of this stature will have to end her career on such a sour note, but that's the way the news cycle works now. Thankfully, the half-life of collective memory is at an all-time low, so soon the angry villagers will have moved on to their next target, and Thomas can hopefully retire in peace.

The Hearst announcement came shortly after White House press secretary Robert Gibbs called her remarks "offensive and reprehensible."

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Controversial remarks about Israel by veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas drew sharp criticism from the Obama administration on Monday, as well as the cancellation of a high school graduation speech she was to deliver.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked at his daily briefing with reporters about President Barack Obama's reaction to Thomas' remarks. Gibbs called them "offensive and reprehensible."

Thomas, a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, has apologized for comments that were captured on video by an interviewer for the website http://www.rabbilive.com. On the May 27 video, Thomas says Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine," suggesting they go to Germany, Poland or the U.S.

"She should and has apologized," Gibbs said. "Because obviously those remarks do not reflect certainly the opinion of most of the people here and certainly not of the administration."

Thomas had been scheduled to speak at the June 14 graduation of Walt Whitman High School in the Washington suburb of Bethesda, Md., but Principal Alan Goodwin wrote in a Sunday e-mail to students and parents that she was being replaced.

"Graduation celebrations are not the venue for divisiveness," Goodwin wrote.

Thomas wrote on her website that "I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians."

She added: "They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."

The national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham H. Foxman, said Sunday that Thomas' apology didn't go far enough.

"Her suggestion that Israelis should go back to Poland and Germany is bigoted and shows a profound ignorance of history," Foxman said in a statement. "We believe Thomas needs to make a more forceful and sincere apology for the pain her remarks have caused."

Thomas, 89, began her long career with the wire service United Press International in 1943, and started covering the White House in 1960, according to a biography posted on her website. She became a columnist for Hearst in 2000.

For once, though, conservatives are piling up on someone who really did cross some kind of line. Video recently emerged of veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas saying, at the White House Jewish Heritage celebration last month, that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine," and that Jews should "go home ... to Poland and Germany."

At the first part of that -- getting the hell out of Palestine -- I was thinking, "You tell 'em, Helen." But you can see where it gets problematic. You don't have to believe in the mystical connection of Jews to the Holy Land or even the initial wisdom of the Zionist project to recognize that, by now, with their parents and grandparents buried there, this is home for Jewish Israelis.

At the same time, however, the gross second half of an 89-year-old's rant is now being used to discredit the perfectly reasonable idea that Israel should, indeed, get the hell out of the occupied territories. Here's Jay Nordlinger, writing at the National Review Online (NRO):

Over the years, however, I have watched anti-Semitism become less stigmatized and less stigmatized, less taboo and less taboo. Before we know it, it may even be cool. That is very bad news. This anti-Semitism usually expresses itself in the anti-Israel temper. But there's a difference between being against the Jews and being against Israel, right? Of course there is. But it's strange how the world works out -- how people work out. I quote Paul Johnson: "Scratch a person who is anti-Israel, and you won't have to dig very far before you reach the anti-Semite underneath."

(Nordlinger then goes on to suggest that historian Tony Judt offers a cautionary example of slippage from legitimate criticism of Israeli policies toward criticism of Israel itself, which is beyond the pale. Judt, of course, is the child of Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe.)

Moreover, while they're busy wielding Thomas' statement like a club, conservatives are happily ignoring the fact that figures from their movement have made parallel comments, equally atrocious, about the Palestinians. And, unlike Thomas, they haven't even bothered to apologize.

Sarah Palin, for example, was quick to jump all over Thomas' comment. On Twitter, Palin wrote, "Helen Thomas press pals condone racist rant? Heaven forbid 'esteemed' press corps represent society's enlightened elite; Rest of us choose truth." (I've added some spaces in there to make it readable.) I'm not entirely sure what Palin means there, except that she's calling Thomas racist. Palin herself, however, has called for Israel to continue expanding settlement in Palestinian territory. This is, de facto, a call for Israel to deny the Palestinians a state, and eventually to expel them.

Then there's Mike Huckabee, who explicitly called for Israel to deport the Palestinians from the West Bank, so Israel could complete settling it. That's ethnic cleansing, folks. Scarcely a peep was to be heard from the right while major political figures like Huckabee and Palin -- not 89-year-old cranky columnists -- were calling for it.

Just moments ago, Jonah Goldberg wrote at NRO that the Thomas "scandal" isn't surprising at all, since everyone knows she's a "nasty piece of work" but liberals keep her around anyway:

Also, let's just get the liberal bias thing out of the way. If there was a rightwinger who'd spouted so much bile, hate and ideological agenda-driven nonsense in the White House briefing room for half a century it would be ... oh wait, no such person would have ever been allowed to become a Washington "institution" in the first place.

It's true. No conservative could ever have become a Washington institution similar to Thomas. Instead, the GOP would have seriously considered such a person to run the country, provided the right kind of racism was on display.

In other words, their problem with Thomas isn't that she’s in favor of uprooting an established ethnic community and shipping it out in the name of another group’s nationalist aspirations. She just chose the wrong group.