The retirement of Helen Thomas, the veteran doyenne of the White House press room, was announced by her employer the Hearst corporation after remarks she made at a White House event. Thomas, of Lebanese descent, told a rabbi at this event that Jews should “get the hell out of Israel and go back to Germany and Poland.”
Thomas, nearly 90 (August 4, 1920, time unknown) has been widely admired for her aggressively relentless questioning in the White House press room since 1960 when she covered President Kennedy.
Helen Thomas has the Sun in Leo, which is very much a showman, and it is in a nearly exact square to Mars, the planet of aggression and drive. In addition, her Moon is in Aries, the sign ruled by Mars, suggesting an emotional need (Moon) to assert herself strongly (Mars) in all situations.
With four planets in Leo, a fire sign, with her Sun square Mars, the fire planet, and her Moon in Aries, another fire sign ruled by the fire planet – Helen Thomas is full of fire. This gives her energy, passion and courage, but also brings a potential lack of sensitivity and empathy.
CBS correspondent Mark Knoller said of her “”As a columnist she felt totally unbound from any of the normal policies of objectivity that every other reporter in the room felt compelled to abide by, and sometimes her questions were embarrassing to other reporters.” Personally, I cheered for Helen Thomas when she said openly that George W Bush was the worst president in American history. She was hated for her aggressive ideology, but she was loved and admired for it as well.
My readers know that I am no apologist for Israel, but as someone whose relatives were murdered by the Nazis in Poland I consider these remarks to be the pinnacle of stupidity and ignorance. So what came over Helen Thomas to throw away her exceptional legacy over these thoughtless remarks?
We don’t know the exact degree of Thomas’s Moon, but it is in the very early degrees of Aries and Uranus and Jupiter, both about to enter the sign of Aries on May 27 when the incident occurred, would have been approaching a conjunction to her Moon. Jupiter and Uranus give us a craving for freedom – to say and do exactly what we want. At the same time, transiting Mars was in the later degrees of Leo, having passed over all of Thomas’s Leo planets and landing right on her Jupiter at the time of the incident. Mars transits are fleeting and occur every six months or so but the combination of the Mars transits with the effect of Jupiter and Uranus would have excited Thomas’s natural aggression even more.
I have discovered that one of the beautiful things about aging is that every year you become more yourself, and care less about what others think. I can only imagine that by the time you’re 90 the opinions of others is rather far down on your list of priorities. Still, when you’re in the public eye with a legacy to consider you can’t forget about others entirely.
The planets didn’t cause Helen Thomas to end her career in scandal, but the liberating force of Jupiter and Uranus may have encouraged the loosening of the tongue that dealt the final blow.
Thanks for your comments. I was hoping someone would tackle this issue. I am one of those Americans who loves the Jews as a people and a race (if any other ethnic group has contributed as much to humankind as the Jews, please stand up!) but finds Israel’s actions hard to take. So I had similar thoughts to Helen’s, but they were more on the lines of, hey, we need intelligent people in the U.S., why can’t the Jews leave the violence of the Middle East, we’ll carve out an Israel-shaped piece of land in our desert, and let them come here! I know, I know, I’m just showing my ignorance of world affairs. But on the other hand (and I’m not even a Libra!), no piece of the Earth is more sacred than another. It’s ALL sacred. If those folks in the Middle East can’t share the land, then maybe they should do as my mom told me and my brothers when we would fight: “SEPARATE!”
Thanks for this post, Lynn. It helped me understand how someone of Helen’s journalistic prowess could make such a fumble. She spoke before thinking, and though Helen has every right to speak her mind, I think her comments would not have been as controversial had she’d made them AFTER she retired. At any rate, impulsiveness abruptly ended her long and storied career. It’s a shame actually.
Oh please, ScorpioX3. Take a look at another side of this story. There’s always more to it.
Thomas’s “outrageous” statement
Yet, the rage we see in the U.S. media is directed against none of this. People shot in the head, eyes and brain parts destroyed, the elderly beaten, small children and infants caused to suffer and die, parents to grieve – none of this has caused a hint of anger. In fact, most of it has been considered of too little importance even to report.
Instead, media reports are filled with outrage at “anti-Israel” words spoken by 89-year-old Helen Thomas.
In Thomas’s lifetime Israel has ethnically cleansed over a million people, replaced them with colonists from around the world, committed dozens of massacres, tortured thousands of people, killed and maimed untold numbers of children, mangled limbs, and committed outrages on women, old people, the weak, and the infirm.
It has assassinated people throughout the world, invaded numerous countries, spied on the U.S., killed and injured 200 American servicemen (the anniversary is this week), and tortured and imprisoned Americans. All while receiving more American money than any other country on earth.
For years, long before her recent words, Thomas has been the target of Israel’s vicious American volunteers, the Zionist blogosphere abounding with nasty slurs on her looks and her Lebanese ancestry, this latter also consistently emphasized by the media, despite her Kentucky birth and upbringing.
One of the reasons for the ferocious animosity toward her is the fact that Thomas is one of the very few mainstream reporters to challenge the neocon engendered lies that led the U.S. into wars that have caused massive death, destruction, and tragedy and to continue to expose ongoing policies of violence and cruelty.
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2010/06/11/as-israel-kills-and-maims-outrage-is-directed-at-helen-thomas/