Max Blumenthal’s Progression from Israel-Hater to Putin Shill

Max Blumenthal, the son of the Clinton family confidant Sidney, began his career as a fairly run-of-the-mill—if not particularly discerning—left-wing journalist, with his first book being an assault on social conservatives. But sometime thereafter he turned his attentions to Israel, in 2013 producing a book so viciously anti-Semitic that even the leftist columnist Eric Alterman of the Nation couldn’t approve of it. Then, as Bruce Bawer recounts, he took another turn for the worse:

Much of the journalism [Blumenthal] produced during the [early years of the Syrian civil war] conveyed a strongly anti-Assad message. In 2013, he reported for the Nation from a refugee camp in Jordan, where, he wrote, every single Syrian he interviewed supported a U.S. military strike on their homeland.

But then something happened. We don’t know exactly what it was. All we know for certain is that in December 2015, Blumenthal traveled to Moscow—all expenses paid by the Kremlin—to attend a gala dinner, hosted by Vladimir Putin himself, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of RT, the international TV network owned by the Russian government. When he returned to the U.S., his position on Bashar al-Assad—and on U.S. intervention in Syria—had turned around completely.

Only a month after the RT bash, Blumenthal founded something called “The Grayzone Project,” which describes itself as “a news and politics website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on war and empire.” Basically, however, Grayzone is a one-stop propaganda shop, devoted largely to pushing a pro-Assad line on Syria, a pro-regime line on Venezuela, a pro-Putin line on Russia, and a pro-Hamas line on Israel.

Implicit in pretty much every item at the website is that it’s impossible to be an opponent of Putin or Assad or Nicolás Maduro without having nefarious motives—either you’re working for the CIA or Mossad, or you’re tied up with some terrorist group, or you’ve taken dirty money under the table. . . . In a 2016 article, he denied the incontrovertible fact that anti-gay prejudice is intrinsic to Islam, calling the idea a product of “talking points . . . first honed by the Israeli government and its international network of supporters.” . . . Blumenthal has also denied that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Max Blumenthal, Syrian civil war, Vladimir Putin

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society