•  The video of Thomas's remarks was made by Rabbi David F. Nesenoff who 'interviewed' Helen Thomas, on the White House Lawn, on American Jewish Heritage Celebration Day, May 27/10. Imo, it appears to be a hidden camera -- and the interviewer is deceptively relaxed and cordial. Helen is friendly and in good spirits. The story and video appeared on RabbiLIVE.com on June 03/10. The original video is twice as long as the 1 minute clip most of us have seen.

•  How did the video go viral? It first got picked up by the right-wing blogger Jeff Dunetz, who spiked it to the moon. The following account was written, by him, on June 07/10, evidently, prior to Thomas's resignation:
  

Friday morning (June 04/10), I received an email from a friend, Rabbi David Nessenoff which provided me my first look at the video of the now famous explosive interview with Helen Thomas. David had sent the video to a friend at a newspaper who didn't think it was a big story. My response to David was, give me a few hours and the video would become viral, and given some luck the video would have a half of million views before the end of the weekend (there were a million).

I quickly posted it on my site The Lid, wrote it up for Andrew Breitbart's Big Journalism, gave it to Scott Baker who posted it on Breitbart TV , and sent out tweets and emails to most of the large sites [including Drudge]. Before I left on a five hour car ride to my brother's house for the weekend the video was posted on the Big sites on the net. By the end of the day it was on radio and TV and the calls Thomas' head were all over the place...

Helen Thomas is merely a symptom of the problem, not the disease. Firing her would be like treating HIV with a band aid...I wonder if there would be the same calls for Thomas' head if she hadn't already been considered something of a joke by the press corps, someone who has stayed on long past her time.

Just examine the facts; Pat Buchanan who is a holocaust revisionist has a daily gig on MSNBC. Helen Thomas has a tiny voice compared to Pat Buchanan, yet it is Thomas' head being called for...firing her while ignoring the "cartel leaders" such as Sharpton, Buchanan, and the other big haters in the public eye is treating the symptom, but not the disease...

I am now only about 98% sure she will be  history at the end of the day.  I was 100% percent sure of that.

That was probably the worst time in my life, and a couple of other kids there too.

There was one severely malnourished red-headed girl whose brother was locked in a closet for his entire life by her abusive parents. She would come to school, day after day, and you'd pass this most forlorn little girl in the world moving though the halls like a ghost. The administrators at Gove blew her off time and again (even though, to look at her it was easy to see something was seriously wrong at home). Finally somebody took her seriously enough to investigate the matter. I remember her crazy parents coming out to scream and yell at her near the buses one afternoon. Awful. Just bloody awful.

I think I remember that she and her brother were being either adopted or had a non-adopting benefactor after the news broke... I hope she and her brother made out okay. What a tough-from-the-core little girl she was. Much tougher than those of us who were making a show of, "back off, or else!"