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US-based journalist Andy Ngô on social media platform X showed a video clip of Kurush Mistry and his wife Shailja Gupta covering up photos of Israeli civilians kidnapped by the Hamas terror group. In the video, they can also be purportedly seen telling a Jewish man to “return to his country."
The clip further shows Shailja allegedly calling the man an “uneducated prick” after he said that he does not know of Palestine. She also reportedly stated that Jewish people were “r*pists.” The two-minute-long video has since gone viral, attracting more than two million views on microblogging site X.
Kurush Mistry is an alumnus of India’s top business management institution IIM Ahmedabad. He graduated in 2003. He also holds a certificate from The Institute of Chartered Accountants in India. He has a bachelor’s degree in commerce from the University of Madras. He reportedly worked as an Oil Analyst at Freepoint Commodities before he got fired from the company. Without specifying the name of the employee, Freepoint Commodities, in a LinkedIn post said that the individual involved in a recent antisemitic incident is no longer with them.
Shailja Gupta’s official LinkedIn account states that she has been working as a visual artist, film-maker and emerging tech strategic consultant for the past 29 years. She is also the founder of Pocket Box Office, a company which specializes in “merchandising memorabilia,” “vinyl toy manufacturing” and “ai avatars based storytelling.” She has also worked as the head of marketing for various Bollywood films including Ra. One, Chennai Express, and Singham Returns amongst others.
WIKI
Thomas retired from Hearst Newspapers on June 7, 2010, following controversial remarks she made about Israel, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and potentially Israeli Jews in an impromptu, unstructured amateur short interview when solicited for “any comments on Israel,” she replied that “tell them to get the hell out of Palestine”
In a later interview on CNN, on The Joy Behar Show, Thomas defended her comments. In response to Behar’s question of whether she was an antisemite, Thomas replied: “Hell no! I’m a Semite, of Arab background.” She then said of Israelis: “They’re not Semites.”
On June 4, Thomas posted the following response on her website: “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.”
In an October 2010 radio interview with Scott Spears of WMRN, Thomas said she realized soon after making the comments that she would be fired, stating, “I hit the third rail. You cannot criticize Israel in this country and survive.” She added that she issued an apology because people were upset, but that ultimately, she still “had the same feelings about Israel’s aggression and brutality.”
Born in Winchester, Kentucky, Thomas was the seventh of the nine children of George and Mary (Rowady) Thomas, immigrants from Tripoli, Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman Empire). Thomas said her father’s surname, “Antonious”, was anglicized to “Thomas” when he entered the U.S. at Ellis Island,and that her parents could neither read nor write. Thomas was raised mainly in Detroit, Michigan, where her family moved when she was four years old, and where her father ran a grocery store. Of her experience growing up, Thomas said:
We were never hyphenated as Arab-Americans. We were American, and I have always rejected the hyphen and I believe all assimilated immigrants should not be designated ethnically. Or separated, of course, by race, or creed either. These are trends that ever try to divide us as a people.
“In a 2008 article, The Christian Science Monitor wrote: “Thomas, a fixture in American politics, is outspoken, blunt, demanding, forceful and unrelenting. Not only does she command respect by the highest powers in the US, her reputation is known worldwide.” When Cuban leader Fidel Castro was asked in the early 2000s what was the difference between democracy in Cuba and democracy in the United States, Castro reportedly replied, “I don’t have to answer questions from Helen Thomas.” Thomas considered Castro’s reply to be “the height of flattery.”
During President George W. Bush’s first term, Thomas reacted to Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s statements about arms shipments to the terrorists by asking: “Where do the Israelis get their arms?”
He responded: “There’s a difference, Helen, and that is—”
“What is the difference?” she asked.
He responded: “The targeting of innocents through the use of terror, which is a common enemy for Yasser Arafat and for the people of Israel, as well as—”
She interrupted him, saying: “Palestinian people are fighting for their land.”
He responded: “I think that the killing of innocents is a category entirely different. Justifying killing of innocents for land is an argument in support of terrorism.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Thomas