Helen Thomas. She’s the hyper-liberal White House reporter who used to harangue and hector Ronald Reagan before she did the same to George H.W. Bush which was before she spent eight years pecking at Bill Clinton from his left flank which was before the eight years of harpy-like shrieking at George W. Bush.

Of course, all of this occurred many decades before she, as a young reporter fresh out of college, grilled newly elected President William Henry Harrison about the Whig Party’s position on the Indian Problem and the tarriff.

For some time now, Thomas has been sort of the village idiot of the White House press room. She would have long ago become an embarrassment to the liberal journalistic establishment if such were capable of embarrassment. But lacking the capacity for shame, it has continued to give Thomas a coveted seat at presidential press briefings simply because she’s playing for their team.

If Thomas were a conservative she would have become a byword and in in-joke among journalists decades ago.

But yesterday Thomas may have gone too far. She did what lefty journalists are never supposed to do, that is, say plainly and clearly what she thinks about Israel.

After this video virally propagated around the interwebs, she snapped back into a journalistic pose of detached objectivity and wrote this on her blog:

I deeply regret my comments I made last week regarding the Israelis and the Palestinians. They do not reflect my heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon.

So her comments, which the interviewer asked her to confirm twice, don’t reflect her “heart-felt belief?” Then what do they reflect?

For what it’s worth, I don’t think anti-Semitism animates and informs Helen Thomas’ views. I think she is expressing “anti-Zionism” which in turn springs from a general hatred of Western Civilization.

The American Left has turned against Israel for the same reasons it views the United States as the guilty party and bad guy in every interaction with the wider world.

Israel is an island of Western culture in a sea of medieval islamist decay. As I have said in this space before, Helen Thomas, her fellow travelers rooting for the phony flotilla, and the seething masses of islamists around the world, do not hate the West because of it’s support of Israel. They hate Israel because it is part of the West.

This is clearly our current President’s posture, too and explains his flagrant hostility to Israel.