It’s a troubling reflection of the times when Helen Thomas can tell Israeli Jews to go back to the countries ravaged by the Holocaust (Germany and Poland), and only conservative media outlets seem to care. Greg Sargent reports that her employer, Hearst Newspapers, isn’t saying whether she’ll be fired. And he acknowledges that liberals don’t seem to care:

Conservative Web sites have been banging away at Thomas ever since video surfaced of her urging Jews to “get the hell out of Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland. Beyond these comments, Thomas has aggressively questioned the Obama administration’s support for Israel in the wake of the flotilla raid, angering the right, and some Republicans are now seizing on her latest comments to call for her firing.

So why don’t liberals care — has defense or at least toleration of anti-Semitism become a tenet of the Left? Really, had Thomas told blacks to go back to Africa or Palestinians to go back to Jordan, she’d already be gone. (A reader e-mails, “Imagine if this had been a Fox reporter!”) The bar is evidently so low these days that no one much cares. Oh, she’s a cranky has-been, you might say? Not important. Once the standard is set, the unacceptable gains respectability, and the sentiments are no longer out of bounds.

We’ll see which, if any, Jewish organizations speak up. And by the way, she’s credentialed through the White House press office. What does the Obama administration think of this, and why should they continue to permit her to masquerade as a legitimate media figure when she is no more than a propagandist for a Judenfrei Israel? The White House press operatives tried to throw Fox out of the press pool, so why don’t they throw Thomas out of the briefing room?