To George W. Bush’s former press secretary Ari Fleischer, the comments were tantamount to a call for genocide: “She is advocating religious cleansing,” he told Huffington Post. “How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”

Getting fired for bigoted words? Somehow that fate has not befallen the cabal of right-wing bloviators who have literally built their careers pushing the propaganda war against Latinos, other people of color, gay people, liberals and anyone else they disagree with. They’re not journalists in the formal sense, but their frothing tirades, word-for-word, arguably wield more influence over the corporate news cycle. In contrast to Thomas-gate, though, Limbaugh and friends don’t need to be ambushed and exposed by rogue YouTube muckrakers. They’ve spewed their venom to millions daily on television and radio, backed by advertisers, media executives and an audience that happily blinds itself to political hypocrisy.

At HuffPo, some cooler heads have spoken in Thomas’s defense while criticizing her remarks, noting a double standard in how Americans talk about who should “get the hell out.” On moral relativism, Paul Jay of Real News argues:

The obvious comparison is asking all European Americans to “get the hell out”, and leave the land to its rightful owners, Native Americans. One could argue Mexican Americans might have an argument to stay in certain parts of the country.

The European migration to America isn’t such a stretch if one thinks about it. Colonialism makes use of people fleeing religious persecution to populate their new possession . . .

At any rate, we all know what’s going on here. The hyper-pro-Israel lobby, in both parties, hasn’t much liked the fact that Helen Thomas dares to speak up and question that most sacred of topics, and right from the front row of the White House Press Gallery.

James Zogby of the Arab American Institute puts Thomas’s comments in perspective and calls out the right-wingers, embodied in the character assassination of Ari Fleischer, for its far more virulent rhetoric against people of color, gays, and, oops, yes, Jews:

Where was their indignation when Rush Limbaugh was making disgraceful and insulting comments about African Americans, gays, Muslims, and women and then was hosted and toasted at the White House? And did they speak out when Pat Robertson was making bizarre pronouncements connecting the devastation of Katrina or Ariel Sharon’s stroke with God’s justice? If I thought they understood shame, I would advise them to feel some.

When Dobbs, Beck and company have likened immigration to an illegal invasion of America’s god-given dominion, they’re just brandishing their patriotism, right? As opposed to the misguided journalists who dare question an actual occupation, perpetuated by the U.S., in another part of the world. Granted, it’s hard to tell who’s blaming who for what sometimes, as right-wingers tend to employ the same terminology when debating immigration and America’s Muslim and Arab adversaries: invaders, terrorists, conquerors, and the occasional fascism reference.

Language is a funny thing. With all her experience in the White House press corps, Thomas should have known what words are off limits. There are some lines you just can’t cross in the media… unless you’re the one who gets to write the rules.

…………

This weekend, thirty seconds of video surfaced in which veteran DC reporter Helen Thomas, in a snippet of an informal interview, is asked about her views on Israel. In the uproar that’s followed, the 89-year-old Thomas has announced her retirement, ending a career that spans back to President Eisenhower and opening a literal front-row seat to Fox News.

The Flipcam video in question was shot and posted by Rabbi David Nesenoff, who runs the Geocities-esque fledgling video blog RabbiLive.com. The Helen Thomas video is by far the most visited part of the site, having racked up over a million views since Thursday, with most other videos barely clearing a thousand — and, smartly, it takes up most of the site’s front page, along with a teaser for more forthcoming footage from the same interview.

Nesenoff has stated that he approached Thomas due to her icon status, not due to the common conservative beef with her for her well-known stance on Israel. (That said, the video doesn’t provide context for him asking her about ‘Israel’ in so many words.) But since then, he’s been interviewed on Fox News, and owes much of his sudden web traffic to conservative news curators like Matt Drudge and Andrew Breitbart, the latter of whom is widely credited with bringing down ACORN with a hidden camera and a pimp costume. Never mind that the ACORN ‘pimp’ videos have since been discredited as edit jobs.

Nesenoff’s Thomas video ends with the text “How can Helen possibly report unbiased?” Perhaps a better question is, who polices our press, and for what? We live in an age in which Fox News draws an uneasy distinction between its ‘news’ and ‘opinion’ programming, BP is easily able to limit press access to Gulf beaches, RedState.com’s Erick Erickson is a regular on CNN, and David Gregory shrugs off the idea of factchecking Meet the Press. So who’s in charge of holding our fourth estate to its highest ideals, if not its audience, employers, or advertisers? Well, there’s the Daily Show, and Colbert… and, more and more, there’s random dudes with small cameras and big dreams, and the news brokers who choose to highlight them on an agenda-by-agenda basis. One doesn’t need to justify or condemn the actions of Thomas, or Nesenoff, to question the system that brought us all to Youtube on this day.

Anyway, here’s a video from February of this year in which Rabbi Nesenoff dons a terrible Mexican impression and makes a lot of jokes about being detained by ICE. You’ve got a stronger stomach than me if you can make it past the one about being a dishwasher. What is it with these gotcha-guys and wigs?

Catch us on Twitter @racialjustice; there’s also a handy directory of our staff tweeters. And our Tumblr is just bristling with colorful charts and horrifying screengrabs from around the web, for your sharing pleasure.

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

The ladies from The View this morning took up Arizona’s SB 1070 as a hot topic, and while they were at it, they talked about Senator McCain and the DREAM Act too!

The second piece you should read, if it hasn’t already been forwarded to you, is in Monday’s New York Times, “A Generation Gap Over Immigration.” It concludes, somewhat awkwardly, that it’s an age thing; since Baby Boomers grew up in a world with fewer immigrants, they’re unable to cope, unlike kids these days, who had Sesame Street. This article comes three days after the new SEIU/NCLR data, but seems unaware of it.

This is an important read — because its colorblind, white-as-default, fact-phobic approach typifies the many shortcomings of our dialogue around race, values, and immigration policy. And it’s in the New York Times.

For starters, the article muddies its thesis and conclusions by failing to talk about the race of its ‘American’ statistics or interview subjects. Are we meant to read ‘people’ as ‘white natural-born citizens’ in context?

Fears about immigration are printed as facts. A couple of concerned citizens, one an immigrant herself, recite the old chestnuts about immigrants as dangerous criminals who drain public resources. These people are wrong — immigration grows the economy, and it doesn’t bring crime — but I’m yet to read an mainstream publication article titled “SOME OLD PEOPLE WRONG.” For that matter, why not spend a sentence on the effects of NAFTA, and on immigration policy’s merging with criminal law in the last twenty years, if you’re going to let someone regurgitate an email forward about how immigrants these days are “different”? As with so many issues, conservative-mindset ideas are presented as facts, and facts aren’t presented.

Meanwhile, young people like immigrants because they work hard and like The Parent Trap. Kids ages 18-35 these days, with their skateboards and their absence of data-backed policy initiatives! This is worse than the garden-variety equal time fallacy, in which “The Earth is flat” and “The Earth is round” are both validated. This is “The Earth is flat” against “People should just deal with the fact that the Earth is flat.” As far as the media is concerned, the truth about immigration isn’t worth the space to print it.

There’s also a garbled, specious claim that (white) people didn’t live in cities, where the immigrants are, until recently. Presumably, these white people were living in Real America, not New York City. Sound familiar?

All of this is not to say that people of color aren’t mentioned. They are.

Ms. Patrick, 22, said the gap reflected what each group saw as normal. In her view, current immigration levels — legal and illegal — represent “the natural course of history.”

As children, after all, her generation watched “Sesame Street” with Hispanic characters, many of them sat in classrooms that were a virtual United Nations, and now they marry across ethnic lines in record numbers. Their children are even adopting mixed monikers like “Mexipino,” (Mexican and Filipino) and “Blaxican” (black and Mexican).

That “multiculti” (short for multicultural) United States is not without challenges. Aparna Malladi, 31, a graduate student at Florida International University originally from India, said that when she first entered laboratories in Miami, it took a while for her to learn the customs.

“I didn’t know that when I enter a room, I have to greet everyone and say goodbye when I leave,” Ms. Malladi said. “People thought I was being rude.”

Still, in interviews across the nation, young people emphasized the benefits of immigrants.

So, Ms. Patrick, who’s 22 years old, and who may or may not be white, is fine with ‘illegal’ immigration, and the trials of her statistically inferred mixed-race child (who disconcertingly refers to himself or herself as ‘Mexipino’) are illustrated by an Indian grad student not knowing to say goodbye upon leaving a room. And despite this grad student’s rudeness, young people are OK with immigrants. Truly, this is the Sandra Lee Kwanzaa cake of person-of-color profiles.

And finally, research from the Brookings Institution is referenced, showing that cities across the American Southwest have a lower percentage of white kids vs. kids of color than they do of white old people vs. old people of color. It’s not broken down by race or neighborhood or immigration status; it’s just white and non-white. Your guess about what this chart could show, devoid of context, is as good as mine. People of color don’t often retire in the Southwest? It’s hard for old white people to make old non-white friends?

Hey, maybe that last one is an issue. In terms of differences in attitude toward immigration, it seems more useful to discuss it in terms of exposure and personal experience — to say that non-Latino people who know Latinos, or who have seen Latinos somewhere other than on cable news, are less likely to be afraid of them. And as America’s demographics change, and as its cities and suburbs desegregate, it becomes harder to scare voters with racialized terms like “illegal immigration.”

What the article gets right is that the policy dialogue — and, point in fact, the media dialogue — is for and by the old, white, sheltered people. And it’s not enough to wait for them to die; the economic and legislative disparities that segregate our communities and foster racial resentment are still in effect.

And there’s no guarantee that the current anti-immigration wave will just break and dissipate on its own, or that young people will magically get informed about the issues. The principles that guide our work toward humane policies are gut-level. But the policy work itself is very complicated, and it’s easy to get told lies about.

The “age” angle, the “culture war” angle, is cute, because it moves the conversation away from race and away from accountability. That’s only good for people who don’t have to think about race. Immigration is a race issue. Talking about it in any other way is a waste of time. And everyone who says otherwise needs to be pushed back on.

Winning the fight for a just immigration policy may involve engaging with old people. It will definitely involve engaging with old media, and new media. And it won’t happen at all until we put control of the story back in the hands of its main characters.