No, Really?

Veteran reporter Helen Thomas is shown in a YouTube clip saying that Jews who live in Israel should get out of Palestine because it's occupied territory. They should, according to Thomas, go back to Poland and Germany. She made the comments May 27th during a Jewish heritage celebration at the White House.

Thomas has since apologized for the comments on her own website, saying she deeply regrets them. Since they're about as smart as Verne Troyer is tall and since she was caught on tape making them, I imagine she does regret them. In fact, I'll take her at her word -- no reason not to -- and accept that as an apology to the Jewish people.

Which doesn't excuse just how dumb a statement she made. Ms. Thomas has lived a lot of years. Almost 90, in fact. So she should know that a very sizable portion of the Jews living in Israel today were born there. They never lived in Poland or Germany, so they couldn't really go "back" to those countries. The only people who could go back to anywhere are pretty much the people who are Ms. Thomas's age, and the blue numbers tattooed on a lot of their arms kind of dampen their enthusiasm for that idea, even if their doctors cleared them for travel.

So even if Ms. Thomas gets a pass on the anti-Semitism of what she said -- and she gets that only if her apology is real -- she shouldn't get one on saying something 10 seconds of basic addition and subtraction would tell you isn't feasible. Maybe someone will give her a calculator for her upcoming August birthday so she could get the math straight. As well as a calendar so she could tell this is 2010, not 1930.