It was said that she was a ‘trailblazer’ (do I smell journalistic cliche?), and perhaps as one of the early women in the WH press corps she was. But what great stories did she break throughout her career? She may have been good at grandstanding in the WH press room and at hectoring presidents- which are NOT the same things as asking relevant, incisive, to-the-point questions- but where was she during the breaking of the Pentagon Papers? Where was she when Woodward/Bernstein, Dan Rather, and others were opening up the Watergate story? Where was she in the ’60s when so many print and broadcast journalists were covering the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war, and the massive protest movement back home that that war spawned?
More to the point, Helen Thomas, who was always quick to blame Israel for all troubles in the Middle East, and to tell Jews exactly where to go- back to Poland and Germany, in the words of the oh-so-wise, ‘trailblazing’ sage Helen Thomas- began her journalistic career during and toward the end of World War II. Where was Helen Thomas when the enormity of the Holocaust was being exposed by Europe-based journalists? Where was Helen Thomas, so quick and so voluminous in her unceasing and persistent condemnations of Israel, when all Jews of millennias-old communities in Arab nations from Morocco to Iraq and Syria were being expelled from those nations in ‘revenge’ for the establishment and existence of Israel? Where was Helen Thomas, when all the debates about Muslims in Arab and Muslim nations, and about Muslim-Christian conflict in places like Egypt, to mention that there are no Jews in any of those places any more?
Answer: she was invisible. Nowhere to be seen. Unlike the great ‘inquiring’ journalist this ridiculous and one-sided hagiographic article portrayed her as, Helen Thomas had no journalistic curiosity. No, she had certainties, opinions, and ‘convictions,’ all conventional left-liberal ones, and not an ounce of investigative journalistic curiosity or investigative initiative in her long and mediocre career as a wire-service shill. Quick to condemn Israel for its ‘oppression’ of Palestinians (in a nation where 20% of the population is Arab and there are Arab members of
the Knesset) and to tell the Jews exactly where they can go; silent
about Muslim oppression (including of other Muslims) and bigotry.
I’ll leave to others the displays of grief and hagiography over her passing. I know exactly who and what Helen Thomas was. She was blessed with a long life. It is exceedingly difficult for me to mourn her.
Wayne Buscombe