Old age is a shipwreck, said Charles de Gaulle. And if Helen Thomas, 90, has hit the shoals, so has the Society of Professional Journalists, the 101-year-old organization to which she belonged until she resigned in anger and anguish in January.
The stranger, Rabbi David Nesenoff, proprietor of the blog RabbiLive.com, had a second question.
“Where’s home?”
And soon Thomas announced her retirement.
But on December 2, speaking to Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, Thomas said, “We are owned by the propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where their mouth is.”
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There was a second burst of outrage, louder and broader than the first. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Thomas of revealing a “deep-seated and obsessive” prejudice that marked her 60-some years of professional impartiality as a mere “pretense.” Foxman served notice that “professional associations and academic institutions should not want to be associated with an anti-Semite.”
Kevin Smith, now the head of the ethics committee, believed Thomas had—in prepared remarks she was not taking back—violated SPJ’s ethics code. He recently told me, “There are people in the journalism community—and I’m not going to mention them by name, but let’s say on radio talk shows—those people are noted for being clearly bigoted, having prejudices and expressing those prejudices. Nobody in SPJ is going to propose putting those individuals on an award. Now we have a member making bigoted and prejudiced remarks and standing by those remarks, and from my standpoint, an ethical standpoint, that’s a serious concern.”
