Israelis

Almost two thirds of Israeli Jews believe their brothers in America should attack President Obama's Israel policy.

Readers of my commentaries know that I usually send one a week. Last week, however, I sent two because the Helen Thomas incident occurred after I had finished my regular weekly article, and I thought the Thomas affair required a response from me. I called for her to step down, which she did.

Your concept of "Israeli security" is probably wrong. If you're a part of the hoards of people protesting Israel's interception of the flotilla, you just don't get it: Israel will risk everything if it thinks its security is the least bit in jeopardy. If you're Israeli and believe in the need for overwhelming violence, your grasp of "security" is outdated, outmoded and unsustainable.

The fact that writing about Helen Thomas just a few days after she resigned feels like old news, tells you something about what's wrong with the media and our country today.

After a journalism career spanning almost seventy years, Thomas was taken down in less than two minutes. Which is the running time of the video where she made the remarks that forced her to resign her job, lose her book collaborator, her lecture agent and have a high school cancel a graduation speech she was scheduled to deliver.

In trying to change direction and find "a better approach" to dealing with the long running crisis facing Gaza, the Obama Administration is confronting several deeply entrenched obstacles.

A New York rabbi who interviewed Helen Thomas, exposing her views on Israelis, has received hate mail and death threats.

Media coverage of two events -- both related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- demonstrated why Israel's image has suffered so grievously in recent years.

The international crisis over the Israeli raid on the on the Gaza "Peace Flotilla" was not yet over, but the usual suspects were already sending me emails with horrific pictures of the Armenian Genocide - and it was a Genocide - by the Turkish army in 1915 as well as other Turkey-bashing stuff providing details about the Turkish illegal occupation and colonization (150,000 settlers) of (northern) Cyprus and the government's brut

A few years ago, Helen Thomas spoke at Brigham Young University, the Mormon school in Provo, Utah, where she was being honored for her long career. In her speech to the student body, her liberal views caused a big controversy on this mostly conservative campus.

Cross posted with the Center on Public Diplomacy

Israel's 2009 war on Gaza has been exhaustively documented: some 1,400 Palestinian deaths (compared to 13 for Israel), a vast, rubble-strewn landscape, international condemnation culminating in the hard-hitting and controversial "Goldstone Report" from the UN, and a blockade, tacitly approved by the U.S. and EU, that led to a humanitarian crisis, and ultimately to the high-seas catastrophe this week on the Free Gaza flotilla.