Goldblog thinks my argument about the nature of Helen Thomas' offense doesn't hold up to scrutiny:
Andrew sees a very bright line separating anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism. I see it as substantially less bright. Helen Thomas was fired for saying that the Jews of Israel should move to Europe, where their relatives had been slaughtered in the most devastating act of genocide in history. She believes that once the Jews are evacuated from their ancestral homeland, the world's only Jewish country should be replaced by what would be the world's 23rd Arab country. She believes that Palestinians deserve a country of their own, but that the Jews are undeserving of a nation-state in their homeland, which has had a continuous Jewish presence for 3,000 years, and has been the location of two previous Jewish states. This sounds like a very anti-Jewish position to me, not merely an anti-Zionist position. Compared to the words of Rick Sanchez, Helen Thomas's statements on Jews seem far more serious and offensive.
This unpacking is very useful, I think, and I didn't disagree with much of it in the first place, as you can see from all my posts on Thomas' remarks which seemed to me callous and hateful and insensitive to an extreme degree. I don't think she should have been banished from the profession, as she has been, but if I were her employer, I would have decided to let her go after that.
But on reflection, I see Jeffrey's point with respect to Rick Sanchez's comments.
In so far as Thomas's remarks seemed to endorse removal of Israel from the map, and the mass departure of Jews to countries that helped incinerate millions of them only a couple of generations ago, I think her outburst was decidely more menacing than Rick Sanchez's lazy, factually wrong but still noxious generalization. So let me concede that, having read Jeffrey's post, and thought long and hard about it, I think he's basically right and I didn't fully absorb the implications of Thomas's remarks.