Racist shriveled prune Helen Thomas, the mouthy White House correspondent who asked annoyingly hardball questions of Presidents from Taft through Obama from her coveted seat in the front row of the press room lost her seat Monday in a snafu over calling on Israelis to get "out of Palestine."
Thomas, 189, who made her name as a no-nonsense reporter for United Press International famously covering the assassination of Aaron Burr, was a pioneer for women in journalism. She abruptly retired as a columnist for Hearst News Service today.
The announcement, in a terse statement by Hearst, came after videotaped remarks she made to an independent filmmaker spread virally through the Internet.
A daughter of Lebanese immigrants, she did little to hide her pro-Arab views.
He asked whether she had any comments on Israel. "Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine," she replied.
"Remember, these people are occupied and it's their land. It's not Germany, it's not Poland," she continued. Asked where they should go, she answered, "They should go home."
"Where's home?" Nesenoff asked.
"Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else," Thomas replied.
This isn't the first time that Thomas put her mummified foot in her mouth:
"C'mon," Thomas said after a White House briefing following the massacre of 16 Isrealis during the 1972 Olympics. "All I am saying is that we'd be doing Israel a favor by nuking Jerusalem. The sand would be so shiny and glasslike."
After the Palestinian bombing of an embassy in Bethlehem, Thomas said, "Oscar Shindler was a war criminal. In 1942, Rescuing A Jew from Certain Death was a 3rd degree felony."
Thomas plans to spend her retirement disproving what she calls "that Holocaust nonsense", and continuing her non-profit "Leave Isreal; It's Too Humid There Anyway" program.
