Helen Thomas Really Gets It!

I would like to talk a little bit about Helen Thomas. Remember her?

She was that 90-year-old journalist who turned out to be a Jew-hater. She had covered the White House for decades. But somebody caught her on camera saying that the Jews should leave “Palestine” and that they should “go home” to “Germany and Poland.” And she didn’t say it in a particularly nice way either.

Naturally, the whole civilized world was shocked, because that’s exactly how our “friend” Mr. Ahmadinejad of Iran talks.

However, here we had a supposedly respectable 90-year-old Washington journalist saying the same things.

But the Rebbe, whose Yahrzeit is approaching, taught us that everything that happens has a positive side to it. And so when it comes to attacks on Israel, we need to find the positive side of the story.

There is an old Jewish folk tale about the rich Jew in the shtetl who lost his property, and thus slipped further and further into poverty. He lost his savings, he lost his stocks and lost his business, and things only kept getting worse. He eventually lost his house and was literally left with nothing.

So one fine day, our friend goes to the mikvah, undresses and goes to dunk himself in the water. When he comes out and goes back to the dressing area, to his surprise, he finds that his clothing is missing! Somebody put on his clothes and left.

So while this poor man is standing there like Adam before the sin of the Forbidden Fruit, he breaks out dancing. Everyone around him thought, “What a pity. This poor Jew, because of all his troubles, just lost his mind.”

So they went and brought him some clothing so that he’d at least be able to leave the mikvah.

A short time after that, the man’s fortune began shining upon him again. He started engaging in small business and slowly got back to himself. As days went by, a close friend of his told him that he had been a witness to his dance in the mikvah, and he asked him what was the meaning of his insane dance?

So the restored rich man answered: “Life is a wheel of fortune, and so as long as I was falling and falling and losing my fortune I was very worried, because I knew that it could get worse, and I tried to stop it.”

“But when I came out of the mikvah and discovered that I had quite literally lost my pants, I then knew that I had hit the rock bottom —and that from that moment onward, the situation would only improve. And so I started dancing for joy, because I knew that my salvation was soon to come.”

And today, my friends, we have the same phenomenon.

The dispute over the Holy Land has been carrying on for decades already. First they said that the Sinai doesn’t belong to us, that it belongs to Egypt—and besides, it’s not even part of Biblical Israel. So in the end, they gave back the Sinai to Egypt.

Then they argued that the Gaza Strip is full of Arab residents and that it’s not right or moral to dominate and control an entire other nation. So they gave back the Gaza Strip too.

Then they complained that they really need to establish a “Palestinian” state in the “occupied territories,” and only then will there exist “peace between the two nations” as they live lovingly side by side.

Then the dispute on Jerusalem began, with the argument that this too belongs to them, that we could perhaps turn Jerusalem into an “international city” and all sorts of other insane ideas.

And throughout this debate, these arguments “seemed” legitimate: “It’s not that we have something against Jews or against Israel—we are simply concerned about an ‘oppressed nation’ and were just saying that we need to give them a chance and that it’s not right to conquer another nation…”

But thanks to people like the reporter mentioned above, Helen Thomas, it’s all become perfectly clear: The argument is really that the Jews have no right to the Holy Land at all. “You don’t belong there and it doesn’t belong to you. You need to go home!” And “home”, is Germany and Poland?!

Now, my friends, we’ve gotten to the lowest level—because when it comes to “Jews go home!”, no “peace activist” could possibly agree.

That’s because here, we discover that the argument is not over the size of the territory that we need to give to the Arabs but, sadly, whether a White House reporter thinks that the Jewish Nation has any right to set foot on the Holy Land.

So now, my friends, in the debate over Israel, it really can’t get worse. And so, G‑d willing, from this moment onward, let a new movement begin in the opposite direction!