It's been a rough summer for Arab-American journalists. Female Arab-American journalists, actually. For seemingly no sooner had the dust settled around the Helen Thomas foofaraw that word came from CNN that twenty-year veteran Octavia Nasr was being relieved of her duties after tweeting some thoughts on the passing of a notable Shiite cleric. In either case, vengeance was swift. Too swift, I would put forth.
What's that you say? Didn't know Helen Thomas was Arab-American? While she was born in Kentucky, both parents hailed from Syria (Tripoli, to be exact, now part of Lebanon) and the family name was anglicized at Ellis Island from Antonious to Thomas. While Thomas has never drawn exceeding amounts of attention to this fact (actually distancing herself from any attempt at hyphenating her ethnicity), she has spoken frankly of incidents during school in which she came home in tears after being taunted as a "foreigner" and a "garlic-eater". I'm willing to respect Thomas' desire to avoid applying needless focus on her ethnicity, so why not simply examine her accomplishments? That would be covering all presidential administrations between Eisenhower and Obama; being named the first female officer of the National Press Club; the first female member and eventual president of the White House Correspondents' Association; and the first female member of the Gridiron Club.
Thomas perhaps became best known through her combination of sheer longevity in the journalism business, and her rather overt decision to embrace a more controversial and accusatory line of questioning in the spring of 2000. This decision, she has since made clear, had everything to do with her abrupt resignation from United Press International (UPI) and her move to Hearst Newspapers. Her UPI resignation came after an announcement that the news organization was about to be purchased by News World Communications, the side project and property of Unification Church leader and celebrity-courting fraud Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Freed from the constraints of UPI reportage, Thomas let her feelings fly. These feelings notably found a wide target in the George W. Bush administration, and while I suspect Thomas wouldn't have wasted her time much playing favorites with either political party, there was a sense of mutual contempt between questioner and questioned.
That is, when Thomas was actually getting called on. From the start, Thomas' insistence that Israel be held to the same exacting standards applied by the United States to other countries did not sit well with the administration or, indeed, much of the Washington press corps or Georgetown elite. Ari Fleischer notably claimed Thomas held "strong views on the Middle East" - as if every other Washington insider has only vaguely heard of the place and couldn't commit to offering an opinion for the public record. And while an autograph-seeker and moonlighting sports columnist for The Daily Breeze managed to get Thomas uttering some disdainful commentary about George W. Bush ("worst president in American history") and Dick Cheney ("a liar") which he quickly published, Thomas did apologize to the president and rarely let her emotions get the better of her. Having said this, I'm sure she was a royal pain in the ass for Ari Fleischer and other Bush press corps minions. Her bias only added to her mystique.
All this is lots of fun for wonks and Washington observers, but I would note a darker edge to the typical back-and-forths between reporters and know-nothing press handlers. On July 18, 2006, Thomas sharply questioned now-deceased Press Secretary Tony Snow on the ongoing Lebanon War, then at its peak and eventually to lay claim to the deaths of 1,500 Lebanese civilians and the displacement of one million Lebanese and 500,000 Israelis. In her questioning, Thomas noted that the United States could have applied greater pressure on Israel in an effort to slow or ease the bombardment of Lebanon. "Thank you for the Hezbollah view," Snow quickly responded. Consider this glib remark for a moment - a seasoned reporter of Arab heritage asking about appropriate levels of diplomatic pressure being applied in order to ease civilian deaths is accused of being a mouthpiece for a Shi'a Islamist paramilitary organization identified by the United States as a terrorist organization. Even during the darkest years of the Bush administration, contempt for the press rarely reached such lows.
Clearly, Helen Thomas had some issues with the current actions of the State of Israel. In this she is hardly alone, although her position of power as a noted journalist did distinguish her. However, to accuse her of anti-Semitism or even anti-Israel rhetoric on the basis of such remarks seems rather dubious, reeking of the same mentality that paints anybody questioning the need to go to war as a traitor (while, oddly enough, often elevates tax evaders to the status of genuine patriots). Even the most reactionary media watchdog group couldn't hope to turn a few tough questions into grounds for dismissal. They would have to bide their time, and hope that in the age of Twitter and 24-hour news, the smoking gun would surface eventually.
And surface it did, in the unlikely form of a shaky video taken by Rabbi David Nesenoff outside a White House-sponsored Jewish Heritage Celebration Day, in which Thomas was asked for her thoughts on Israel. What followed is a dismaying, somewhat-incoherent, and utter p.r. disaster of a rant - ill-conceived, juvenile, risible. "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she opined, and after being urged on by Nesenoff, she added Israeli Jews should "go home" to "Poland," "Germany," "America" and "everywhere else". She was quickly rushed away into a waiting vehicle while a supposedly astonished Nesenoff posted the footage to his website the following week. I have no reason to suspect Nesenoff of being disingenuous when he claims to have had no inkling of Thomas' views on Israel before approaching her with video camera in hand, but given his own activities as a blogger and "bias consultant" (his term, not mine), dispatched to counsel Mel Gibson after the washed-up actor's drunken anti-Semitic rant made the headlines, I find it hard to believe he didn't suspect he might uncover something juicy when he stopped Thomas on her way from the White House event. The speed with which Nesenoff made the rounds of talk shows and newspapers also suggested at least some amount of media savvy, as he referred to her comments as a "vile paradigm of hate talk" and claimed she "thought the Jews should leave Israel and return to the final solution".....which isn't really all that accurate, but certainly makes for a memorable soundbite.
I'm inclined to agree with Rabbi Nesenoff that telling Jews to go back to Germany represents a rarefied height of insensitivity and historical ignorance, and that any supposedly rational human being who would spew forth such nonsense is worthy of our contempt, if not our attention. I suppose one could make the case over the course of a two-hour symposium or a thirty page research article that there is a supreme irony in one of the most persecuted and suffering cultures in world history contributing to the suffering of others through widescale displacement and the creation of refugees. One might put forth a discussion examining the future of Zionism and how it might manifest itself outside the state of Israel, and indeed how countries such as Germany and Poland could have their Jewish communities restored. It's a discussion requiring prolonged discourse, enormous reserves of compassion and an awareness of the weight of history. It is not something to spit into a video camera in a sixty-second exchange.
So while I can't label the fall of Helen Thomas a witch hunt, I do believe there were many people on the sidelines eager to see her go and willing to fan the flames. Her ridiculous comments may forever overshadow her other accomplishments, and as the White House Correspondents' Association washes their hands of her as an "indefensible," I hear that the Society of Professional Journalists is thinking of renaming their "Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement" for somebody less worthy of contempt.
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I hadn't planned on writing about Thomas' ignoble departure at this or any other length, with a few conversations on the matter with friends and family serving as enough exploration of the matter. But when I read the news of Octavia Nasr being canned, things started getting interesting again. The Senior editor of Middle Eastern Affairs at CNN was abruptly fired yesterday after tweeting that she "respected" recently deceased Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah. The three-day fallout leading to her termination was mercifully brief, but long enough for me to think, "There goes another Arab-American journalist." A Lebanese immigrant, Nasr was born in Beirut, worked twenty years at CNN, and was a recipient of the Edward R. Murrow Award, among others. While my CNN-watching days are long behind me, she always seemed the rare informed individual among the morass of cable news petulance. I suspect that in a desperate attempt to remain relevant in our changing information landscape, various CNN anchors and commentators were urged to spread the word via Facebook and Twitter, get their hands dirty with a little cutting-edge social media, tweet and post and don't ever let 'em forget you're out there. Anchors acquiesced. Nobody paid attention until one of them screwed up.
Yet how, exactly, did Nasr screw up? I'm far from an expert on Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, and much of his track record seems dismayingly familiar to anybody even dimly aware of Hezbollah and Middle Eastern politics - Holocaust deniers are practically par for the course. But we should be willing to agree that Nasr was not praising Fadlallah's views on these or other matters, but on Fadlallah's rather remarkable liberal views on the role of women within Islamic society. These were notable indeed - fatwahs issued against honor killings and female circumcision, and calls for the right of women to defend themselves against any act of violence, be it physical or social violence. Additionally, Fadlallah insisted that women were the equal of men and that female individuals should be seen as role models for both men and women. Such talking points may seem rather quaint in our supposedly enlightened society (or so we like to tell ourselves), but coming from a notable marja', a figure only below that of the Quran, the Prophets and the Imams in regards to authority on religious law, they were somewhat astonishing.
This is clearly the aspect of Fadlallah that Ms. Nasr was referring to when she composed and transmitted the following tweet on July 4th; "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot..." Within hours, several media watchdog groups had seized upon the tweet as evidence of colossal bias and stupendous anti-Semitism on the part of Ms. Nasr (you'll forgive me if I suggest that these watchdog groups may have been some of the few followers of Nasr's Twitter account?) and unsurprisingly, Nasr quickly offered up an apology by way of the now-cliched "error of judgement" statement. The following day, she was canned by CNN. "We believe that her credibility in her position as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward," claimed the network's senior vice president for newsgathering in the typically mind-numbing language currently masquerading as our mother tongue.
Can anybody offer up anything positive coming from such a hasty overreaction to a fairly innocuous tweet? Aren't all tweets fairly innocuous by design? If Helen Thomas' comments were shocking in their unfiltered vehemence, Nasr's seem barely shrug-worthy. How much depth can one plumb, especially regarding an individual life, in the Twitter-mandated format of 140 characters (140 words would barely be enough)? If being audacious enough to express any hint of respect or even non-loathing for a recently deceased individual, in any capacity or for any reason, can easily be seen as offering support for the annihilation of Israel, our culture has succeeded in gagging any possibility of holding adult conversations on any matter involving the Middle East.
Lest anyone doubt my personal beliefs or good politics, let me be unusually frank here and toss ambiguity out the window (sorry, Prof. Dintenfass!). I'll support any effort to combat the scourge and obscenity that is anti-Semitism, from rooting it out of the mainstream media or from under the rock where the lowest blogs fester. The closest I've ever come in my adult life to getting in a fist fight was when a co-worker disdainfully referred to a dishonest customer as "acting Jewish" in my presence. I'll cast any available stones at those who would claim willful ignorance of history or would attempt to paint the original motivations behind Zionism and the founding of the State of Israel as anything other than a necessary action for ethnic and cultural survival. I consider Holocaust deniers, doubters or dismissers to be lower than vomit. But please don't insult my intelligence by parsing every other verb for possible inappropriateness or yanking comments so far out of context they get slammed with decompression sickness. Bias can move in more than one direction, you know.
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A final thought, tangentially related. The great novelist, activist, Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel is not a figure I'd dare accuse of insensitivity. Yet he has courted some degree of controversy recently by taking out full page ads in various mainstream American newspapers. This extended letter/essay spoke at length of his belief that the city of Jerusalem lacks any true Muslim connection, and he urged the current White House administration not to apply "pressure" to Israel regarding giving up settlement expansion in the city. Jerusalem, he says, "is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran". He adds, "For me, the Jew that I am, Jerusalem is above politics".
One understands where Wiesel is coming from. But I wonder if Wiesel had chosen to tweet a comment as absurd, contentious and simplistic as "Jerusalem is above politics" - to make such a claim about a city created in its modern state through politics of the most extraordinary degree - if any watchdog groups might have pounced on the matter? I'm aware of an open letter, signed by over one hundred Jews currently dwelling in Jerusalem, who have attacked Wiesel on this and other various other points in his ad. The full text can be read on their website, Just Jerusalem / Sheikh Jarrah, in which they lay out exactly why they feel bitter when American citizens hold Jerusalem up as an emblem or a symbol while leaving the actual facts of living in the city to others. It's a worthy response - mannered, measured, suitably outraged, informed, concerned. And I hadn't heard a word about the entire affair until the New York Review of Books re-published the open letter in late May. Neither Helen Thomas nor Octavia Nasr could be mistaken for Eli Wiesel. But I'd like to think Nasr deserved something like an open letter of rebuke rather than the three-day media frenzy she got.
LATE EDIT, 07/09/2010: and it keeps going.
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