Obama’s role model to journalists — Dorothy Thompson — turned against Zionism and was silenced [View all]

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

http://mondoweiss.net/2015/04/journalists-thompson-silenced

[Thompson returned home a national hero, her story on the cover of newspapers and magazines throughout the country. Her fame increased as she became a syndicated national columnist and radio commentator for NBC. By 1936, she was writing a political column for the New York Herald Tribune and was considered the leading voice in the war against fascism. By 1939, she was on the cover of Time magazine. A movie about her life stared Katharine Hepburn and a play stared Lauren Bacall. She was named the second most popular and influential woman in America behind Eleanor Roosevelt. She spoke out about anti-Semitism and the plight of the Jews in Europe, and urged a relaxation of immigration restrictions so the US could be a safe haven for the Jews under threat in Europe.

In the summer of 1941, she went to London to report on the Blitz and met with the Queen and with Prime Minister Winston Churchill. She fought against isolationism and urged the president to declare war on Germany. In 1942, at a Zionist convention at the Biltmore hotel, she was the keynote speaker and gave a rousing pro-Zionist speech advocating unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine. By the end of the war, she was considered one of Zionism’s most effective spokesmen.

All that changed early in 1945 after a fact-finding trip to Palestine. Up until 1945, her anti-Nazi and pro-Zionist credentials were impeccable. What she saw in Palestine totally changed her outlook. She began to write that the proposed establishment of the State of Israel was a formula for disaster, “a recipe for perpetual war” in the Middle East. During her 1945 trip, she discovered that Zionism was not “the liberal crusade that the Zionist leaders envisaged”, and that Israel was to be “not a small state of Jews who chose to live in Israel, but a Zionist state destined to become the leading power in the Middle East.”

Her anti-Zionist statements and reporting began losing her the support of American Zionists. Her boss at the New York Post dropped her “On the Record” column at the beginning of 1947. He was a strong supporter of Zionism and very close to the Irgunists and Menachem Begin, the leader of this Jewish terrorist group. Thompson had told him, after her trip to Palestine, that “…the situation there is not the way it has been presented by many of the Zionists. It is one of the most complicated and difficult problems on the earth today.”