Max Blumenthal’s Jew-hating fans

Max Blumenthal, the proud author of a book that equates Israel with Nazi Germany, keeps complaining that he is being unfairly accused of antisemitism. According to some tweets quoting Blumenthal’s statements at a recent event in Chicago, poor Max Blumenthal doesn’t know “what it means anymore,” though he is quite certain that this is just more evidence for a “symbiosis between Zionism and anti-Semitism.”

 To be sure, Blumenthal isn’t entirely wrong to see a “symbiosis,” but it’s between anti-Zionism and antisemitism – and his own work provides plenty of evidence for this symbiosis.

As I have shown in a detailed documentation [pdf], Blumenthal’s work on Israel has been promoted on all the major sites popular among conspiracy theorists, Jew-haters, racists and neo-Nazis: from Stormfront to David Duke’s site, Rense, and Veterans Today. Given Blumenthal’s own conduct, there is also every reason to assume that he fully agrees with the praise by a Stormfront member who declared that by exposing Israeli evils, “Max Blumenthal has done a great service for all of humanity here, and we WNS [i.e. white nationalists], and the rest of the world, ought to be grateful to him.”

Since the publication of my documentation in February, it has emerged that in addition to the sites I mentioned, Blumenthal’s writings were also posted on the neo-Nazi forum used by the arrested suspect in last month’s fatal Overland Park, Kansas, shootings. The shooter targeted Jewish institutions and reportedly shouted “Heil Hitler” when he was taken into custody.

While the suspect’s interest in one of Blumenthal’s articles certainly doesn’t justify sinking to the level of Blumenthal himself – who tried to present the 2011 massacre in Norway as inspired by writers cited in the perpetrator’s deranged “manifesto” – William Jacobson rightly argues in a related blog post that the shocking attack in Kansas provides yet another illustration of “the intersection between neo-Nazi and anti-Zionist conspiracy theories.” Moreover, given Blumenthal’s popularity on so many reactionary and antisemitic sites, it is utterly disingenuous when he now complains about being “smeared” with such racist associations only on the basis of the Kansas shooter’s interest in his work. With his relentless efforts to demonize Israel, Blumenthal has certainly done his part to show over and over again that supposedly left-wing “pro-Palestinian” activists and far-right reactionaries have no problem finding their lowest common denominator in their shared enthusiasm for antisemitic material.

Indeed, it seems that wherever there are Jew-haters, there will be fans of Max Blumenthal’s work. Among the most recently exposed antisemitic hate sites is a blog that promises its readers “The Ugly Truth” about “Zionism, Jewish extremism, and a few other nasty items making our world uninhabitable today.” It’s unfortunately not at all surprising that the site is popular among some so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists – and it is not at all surprising that the person(s) maintaining the blog have found quite a few of Blumenthal’s articles relevant for their purposes (I stopped looking after I found more than half a dozen).

As the screencap shows, the articles authored by Blumenthal and cross-posted on this site  include his already mentioned attempt to implicate writers he opposes in the Norway massacre, because the perpetrator cited them in his own rambling writings. Another post on the same subject quotes Blumenthal; this piece is entitled “Anders Behring Breivik: a Judeo-Masonic Terrorist” and is authored by somebody who claims to be the founder of a “Center for the Study of Anti-Goyimism” and a “revisionist” historian whose “research” includes material like the one pictured below.

It’s again not surprising that Max Blumenthal has promoted a variation on the theme that terrorism is somehow good for the Jews – or at least for those Jews who are Zionists: after all, cherry-picking a few quotes or scenes that suit his purpose of demonizing the Jewish state is his specialty. Ultimately, Blumenthal’s message is similar to the one outlined in Article 22 of the Hamas Charter, which includes the charge: “They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state.” In short, there is no evil that the Jews/Zionists don’t manage to take advantage of.

As Mark Gardner writes in his excellent post on the odious site where Blumenthal’s writings are appreciated as part of the “ugly truth:”

“The sordid, ugly truth […] is that the Holocaust occurred […] because of the singling out of Jews for unique hatreds, built upon hateful ideas, language and imagery. These old themes resonate throughout The Ugly Truth, used for both Zionism/Zionists and Judaism/Jews. […] They are depicted as controllers of nations, driving war and death; as the master manipulators, perpetrating their false plans; as needing to be cut down; as killing the innocent; perverting decent morals and values; ritualistic monsters, to be derided, hated and feared in equal measure.”

And the sordid, ugly truth about Max Blumenthal’s work on Israel and on American Jews is that it has earned him a well-deserved following wherever there are Jew-haters: from the fringes of the far-left all the way to the fringes of the far-right.

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First published at my JPost blog and The Algemeiner.