History for Helen by David Brog
(This article taken from Christians United for Israel's site is a great history lesson about Israel and it also shows the roots of the current hostility in the region.)
Since this blog was first posted this morning, Helen Thomas has announced that she is retiring from her role as a correspondent for the Hearst newspapers, effective immediately.
Towards the end of last week, a shocking video began circulating on the internet featuring that cranky veteran of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas. Ms. Thomas is known for being a tough questioner of American Presidents. She is also known for being exceptionally critical of Israel. Yet few were prepared for her latest outburst.
The video, originally filmed on May 27th, shows a reporter asking Thomas if she has “any comments about Israel.” She responds by saying, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine.” When asked to elaborate, she says of the Palestinians, “Remember these people are occupied and it’s their land. It’s not German and it’s not Polish.”
Asked what the Jews in Israel should do, Thomas says that they should “go home.” And when asked exactly where their home is, she replies: “Poland. Germany. And America and everywhere else.”
While Thomas’ comments were outrageous in their content and angry in their tone, they were hardly unique. This pernicious idea that Jews are outsiders who have stolen Arab land is widespread. In this version of history, the Western powers decided that after killing six million Jews they should give the survivors a state in Palestine as some sort of consolation prize. Overjoyed, a bunch of ethnic Europeans left their ancestral homes in Berlin and Warsaw and set sail for a strange and exotic new land where Jewish feet had never before tread.
Sadly, President Obama helped to promote this myth in his speech in Cairo back in June, 2009. There Obama noted that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” He then proceeded to discuss the European anti-Semitism “which culminated in the Holocaust.” By completely ignoring the fact that the Jewish right to a homeland in Israel is rooted in a long and deep connection to that land, and by focusing only on the “tragic history” that convinced some Jews to exercise that right, our President seemed to be suggesting that Israel’s right to exist is rooted solely in the Holocaust.
Let me be clear. If the Jewish people had no connection to the Land of Israel, I could not in good conscience support the building of a Jewish state there. If the sole Jewish claim to the land was that Europeans had selected it as compensation for the Holocaust, I could not be a Zionist. If the Jews had as weak a claim to Israel as let’s say the pilgrims did to Massachusetts or the Australians to Australia or the New Zealanders to New Zealand, I would be an anti-Zionist of the first order. (read the whole article)
