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Southern Poverty Law Center takes Blumenthal’s side against smear campaign

Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal

The Southern Poverty Law Center has come to Max Blumenthal’s defense against the wretched smear campaign propagated by neoconservatives and Rush Limbaugh that seeks to connect him to the murders outside Kansas City Jewish organizations a week ago. SPLC’s David Neiwert has a “Hatewatch” piece up (that somewhat echoes our excellent piece by Alex Kane and Phan Nguyen) and shows the extent to which the slurs are motivated by Blumenthal’s work on Israel:

[S]everal leading conservatives attempted to blame liberals for the massacre. Specifically, they pinned the blame on a single liberal journalist, Max Blumenthal, because Miller on a handful of occasions praised Blumenthal’s against-the-grain reporting on the right wing in Israel. …

Blumenthal, who is of Jewish descent and has spent years off and on in Israel, does not “despise” Israel. Blumenthal has written a number of articles that criticize Israeli policies, just as Rush Limbaugh regularly criticizes the policies of the United States. Does that mean Limbaugh “despises” America? Of course not.

What’s more, there is no indication whatsoever that anything Blumenthal wrote “inspired” Miller….

Their attacks on Blumenthal spread quickly throughout the right-wing echo chamber, especially at neoconservative websites where Blumenthal is the subject of frequent attacks for his criticism of Israel (particularly his book-length expose of the Israeli right, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel)

Still, the smear continues to echo. Here is neocon Daniel Pipes at the History News Network, in a piece titled– with supposed irony– “Antisemite Max Blumenthal Incites Murder of Three in Kansas.” Pipes claims not to be making such an allegation against Blumenthal even as he dignifies the charge, describing alleged shooter Frazier Glenn Miller’s “many connections to Blumenthal” and calling on “Blumenthal’s fellow leftists to denounce him and shun him. But will they?”

To its credit, HNN has now run Neiwert’s piece, denouncing these bogus conspiracy claims.

In a last ditch desperate effort to stir the pot, pro Israel smear merchant Algemeiner is at it again. Not content to drag Blumenthal through the slime they expanded their target adding a host of new characters as well as a few outlandish fabrications in Kansas Hate Crime Didn’t Emerge From a Vacuum:

Blumenthal has also actively promoted the idea that Judaism itself is a hateful religion, a slander propounded by his Israeli collaborator, Yossi Gurvitz, who has stated that “Rabbinical Judaism is a Judaism that hates humans.” …

Why does any of this matter? Left-wing anti-Zionists are increasingly regarded as acceptable company in the intellectual mainstream. Blumenthal has, for example, recently addressed the New America Foundation, a leading liberal think-tank in Washington, DC, which was apparently unperturbed by his flock of Nazi admirers, or by the fact that he was the subject of a flattering profile on Press TV, the official mouthpiece of the Iranian regime.

How much longer will we buy into the ludicrous idea that Blumenthal carries no responsibility for the way his screeds are interpreted? Similarly, when we read leading political scientist Stephen Walt, co-author of the miserable book “The Israel Lobby,” telling Haaretz that 9/11 was Israel’s fault, why do we continue to view his discourse as more sophisticated then the bigots who parrot him?

People like Frazier Cross don’t emerge from a vacuum.

Ludicrosity indeed!

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In partial defense of Daniel Pipes (I never thought I would use that phrase), he accuses Max of hypocrisy for associating Pipes with the Breivik massacre. Pipes says that if Max was right that Pipes was to blame for inspiring Breivik, then Max is guilty of inspiring Miller. Pipes also suggests that he is against such accusations in general. It seems to me that Pipes, loathsome as he is, has a superficially appealing point regarding hypocrisy. Maybe Max should explain why his Breivik accusation was worthier than those presently leveled against him. There certainly are arguments to be made.

One thing that should be clarified—because I’ve seen the error repeated in a few places outside of the smear-Blumenthal campaign—is that there was not a “handful” of posts by the Kansas shooter approvingly citing Blumenthal.

Out of 12,693 posts to the VNN forum attributed to the shooter, the detractors found a single post mentioning Blumenthal—a success rate of 0.0079 percent.

Not only does that fail to suggest, both quantitatively and qualitatively, a connection between Blumenthal and the shooter—much less the shooter’s actions—it also suggests that the original accuser, Ron Radosh or whoever, had set out looking for something, anything, to tie Blumenthal to the shooter, rather than discovering a reference to Blumenthal while in the process of seeking out the shooter’s real motives and inspiration.

The fact that so many detractors sought to connect Blumenthal to the shooter but could find nothing further—reverting to even more imprecise linkages just to boost the quantity—demonstrates how tenuous and contrived the connection is.

It also demonstrates how more concerned the detractors are about Max Blumenthal than they are about anti-Semitic violence being committed against Jews in the United States.

It also demonstrates how more concerned the detractors are about Max Blumenthal than they are about anti-Semitic violence being committed against Jews in the United States.

exactly

“Blumenthal, who is of Jewish descent and has spent years off and on in Israel, does not “despise” Israel. Blumenthal has written a number of articles that criticize Israeli policies, just as Rush Limbaugh regularly criticizes the policies of the United States. Does that mean Limbaugh “despises” America? Of course not.”

well, this part of their opposition to the smear is weak at best. Rush Limbaugh despises Obama, who received barely 50% of the votes of the American public. Blumenthal despises all parties in Israel to the right of Hadash, those parties represent about 95% of the voters in Israel (more accurately the 95% of the voters who don’t want to change the name of Israel to Palestine).

“demonstrates how tenuous and contrived the connection is.”

It was an ill- contrived smear. Nothing unexpected from the zionutter wing of the planet. Pipes is a PNAC warmonger extraordinaire and Islamophobic creep of the highest order of the lowest on the planet.

Thank you SPLC, Alex, MW and Phan. Bravo to Max and his Herculean efforts, edging all of us toward the truth and justice.