"They weren't being persecuted anymore"

On the Joy Behar show, Helen Thomas defended her blatantly anti-Semitic remarks telling Jews to leave Israel and go back to Germany and Poland where six million of their ancestors were systematically murdered based solely on their religious beliefs. Thomas makes the ignorant remarks that Jews were no longer persecuted after World War II and therefore should have simply gone back to Europe instead of founding Israel.

Thomas said:

“They didn’t have to go anywhere really, because they weren’t being persecuted anymore.”

Thomas’ remarks ignore thousands of years of persecution and discrimination against Jews that have not ended until this day. Helen Thomas seems to think that anti-Jewish sentiment is long gone. Quite the contrary. Anti-Jewish sentiment is far from eradicated. The notion that Jews face care free lives throughout the world is merely a farce. The Jews might be safe today in certain parts of the world, but the rising anti-Jewish sentiment cannot guarantee that this century will be the turning point to end thousands of years of persecution and discrimination against Jews. Israel was founded as a safe haven, the one place that Jews have complete assurance that they will be protected from discrimination based on religion so long as the state exists.

Helen Thomas, in case you weren’t paying attention:

• Synagogue in Maryland vandalized last year
• Synagogue attacked in Tunisia this month
• German synagogue attacked last May
• Caracas synagogue attacked in 2009
• The Hamas charter: “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said:  The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim).”
• Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: “After the Second World War, they created a scenario called ‘pogrom against Jews.’ All over Europe and the countries under Western rule, an anti-Jewish movement has been concocted. The climate of propaganda and psychological warfare on the one hand and on the other hand using the issue of ovens burning human beings, they have concocted a myth of deprivation and innocence for the Jews of Europe. They use this pretext of the innocence of Jews and the suffering of some Jews during the Second World War. Riding on the crest of a wave of anti-Jewish sentiments, they have laid the foundations for the Zionist regime.”