I Suppose that I Must Comment on This

Helen Thomas has resigned as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers.

In an interview, she said:

Thomas remarked in video posted to RabbiLive.com that Jews in Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go back home to Poland, Germany, America and everywhere else."

Thomas has never made a secret of her Lebanese-American background, and I think that anyone with a bit of skin in this game, myself included, can be a bit nuts, but the statement here is wrong on a number of levels:

• It appears to be a call for ethnic cleansing.
• About 60% of the Jews in Israel came from the Arab world, Iran, India, Etc.^*

Needless to say, while I respect Thomas' contributions to journalism, I do not appreciate when anyone sounds like Meir Kahane.^†

I'll miss her at press conferences

The tragedy is that Pat Buchanan still has a job.

(on edit)
I think that a refreshing bit of perspective comes from [url=http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/06/helen-thomas-affair]Kevin Drum[/url]:

Helen Thomas is retiring. Thank God. On a substantive level, this is a good thing. Her remarks about Israel were obviously odious and she's doing everyone a favor by stepping down. Equally important, though, maybe this means we don't have to spend the next week listening to every windbag in the country rant on about Thomas's remarks, using them as an excuse to grind every axe ever invented and suck media attention away from actually important stories. Of which, you might have noticed, we have quite a few these days.

Say what you will about Thomas, she really was never a part of the pundit class.

^* They are generally referred to as Sephardic, but this is a misnomer, as Sephardic Jews trace their origins back to the Iberian peninsula. Jews from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, India, etc. are more accurately referred to as "oriental" Jews.
^†Let me google that for you.