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Max Blumenthal Channels Leni Riefenstahl: The Triumph of Hamas

Jun 20, 2018 5:59 am By Andrew Harrod

“Can any parallels be made then to Nazism and Judaism?” asked a questioner in a conference room packed with about 100 people at the June 9 screening of Killing Gaza at Washington, DC’s rabidly anti-Israel Jerusalem Fund. This shockingly absurd query typified the atmosphere surrounding the latest screed against Israel produced by “gonzo journalist” Max Blumenthal and his equally deranged colleague Dan Cohen.

“Judeo-Nazi” analogies are nothing new for the Jerusalem Fund presenters Blumenthal and Cohen. Cohen has previously described how their film about Israel’s 2014 Operation Protective Edge military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza “was inspired by” a past “bracing portrait of the Nazi death camps.” Blumenthal has similarly written that the film chronicles “Israel’s wholesale criminality” and “sadistic Israeli violence.”

Blumenthal and Cohen have discussed Killing Gaza on Christopher Hedges’ On Contact talk show on RT, the Russian state-funded television channel that registered in 2017 under America’s Foreign Agent Registration Act. Like many other American leftists, he has found a home at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda mouthpiece, where RT newscasters like the 9/11 Truther Abby Martin go to extreme lengths to vilify Israel and its use of “Hitler’s methods.” RT’s Israel-hatred befits Hedges, who wrote in a review of Killing Gaza that “toxic racism and militarism infect Israeli society.”

Cohen told host Hedges that Gaza is a “man-made intentional hell for what Israel considers non-humans” and made false allegations about Israel depriving Gaza of water. In contrast, Israel has over the years almost doubled the amount of water supplied to the Palestinian territories under the 1993 Oslo Accords and has worked to improve Gaza’s desalinization and water treatment capabilities. Hedges concurred that the film supposedly documented common canards about “one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters,” notwithstanding Gaza’s commercial development and obesity public health problems.

Blumenthal denounced “Western empire” in creating Gaza’s “ethnic prison” and propagated the myth that Gaza’s population resulted largely from Israeli ethnic cleansing of Arabs during Israel’s 1948 independence war. “Israel’s policy of demographic engineering means that it must, to retain its Jewish identity, segregate or ethnically cleanse Palestinians,” Hedges explained. At the Jerusalem Fund, Blumenthal correspondingly reiterated previously comments that the “Gaza Strip is a human warehouse for people who don’t fit into the Jewish state.”

Blumenthal fantasized to Hedges that Killing Gaza “is a document of Israeli war crimes and this film needs to be entered into the record of the International Criminal Court.” To support this imaginary claim Blumenthal cited retired Irish army colonel Desmond Travers, a Blumenthal collaborator in the 2014 Russell Tribunal on Palestine, an anti-Israel kangaroo court. Travers’ outrageous anti-Israel bias helped to create the 2009 Goldstone Report’s calumny of egregious Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip.

To Hedges Blumenthal also mentioned his cooperation with Joe Catron, an anti-Israel activist who has tweeted that “Zionists are racist scum.” He filmed the alleged killing of a Palestinian man in a Gaza neighborhood by an Israeli sniper, footage that appears in Killing Gaza. Yet no corroborating evidence of the incident has emerged, and various factors indicate that the video is another Pallywood fake, such as the shooting “victim’s” lack of visible injuries and bleeding.

Killing Gaza similarly shows Israeli airstrikes on Gazan residential towers like Zafir 4 and the “Italian” Tower, while ignoring how Hamas used these buildings as command centers. Blumenthal has written that these buildings “had been blasted to pieces by Israeli jets in the final days of the war for no other purpose than to teach Gaza’s educated middle class a lesson.” Contradicting such images of brutality, Amnesty International itself recognized that Israeli warning methods kept residents of these high-rise buildings from suffering injuries.

Killing Gaza’s moral inversion presents as true defenders not Israel, but terrorists from Hamas’ Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades. In one film segment they train in Gaza before Blumenthal and Cohen. Contrary to a “myth” of “bloodthirsty terrorists,” Cohen has stated that Hamas members have “legitimate reasons for joining the armed resistance,” such as Israel’s “occupation” of Gaza, which actually ended in 2005.

Blumenthal’s film narration from “besieged Gaza” correspondingly gushes about Palestinians who are “undaunted in their struggle to live free.” After Operation Protective Edge, Al-Qassam “guerilla fighters were free to trumpet their gallantry before an admiring population” that dare not act otherwise under Hamas totalitarian rule. Gaza’s “symbols of resistance” include a monument to an M-75 rocket, a Hamas copy of an Iranian rocket that Hedges trivialized as “home-made.” Meanwhile Killing Gaza profiles the painter Malak Mattar and a Gazan hip-hop group, manifestations for Blumenthal and Cohen of “cultural resistance against occupation” that somehow shares an ideological unity with Hamas jihadists.

Nonetheless, Killing Gaza’s break-dancers did not divert the Jerusalem Fund audience from noting the film’s positive portrayal of Hamas terrorism. Shelley Cohen-Fudge, a leader of the Washington, DC, affiliate of the Israel-hating Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), referenced such “armed resistance” in the film, something “a lot of activists here in the U.S. try to avoid.” “I think that we shouldn’t shy away from armed resistance,” Cohen responded; “from depicting it,” Blumenthal dubiously qualified, to audience amusement.

Israeli, not Hamas, violence was Blumenthal’s main concern at the Jerusalem Fund, where he talked about his “Jewish State in Israel in the Levant (JSIL)” slander of Israel’s “ethnocracy” as comparable to Islamic State brutality. He stated that American “Lone Soldier” Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) volunteers “should be treated just as foreign fighters for ISIS are and prosecuted.” He has likewise previously written that venerable Zionist “institutions like the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency have to be outlawed,” given their involvement in Israeli “ethnic cleansing.”

While introducing the Jerusalem Fund screening with a past RT video, Cohen also found Hamas to be as pure as the driven snow in comparison to Israel. He ludicrously claimed that “there is no evidence that Palestinians use each other as human shields,” despite voluminous evidence recognized by the European Parliament and the United States House of Representatives. In contrast, “every Friday there is another massacre in Gaza” committed by Israel, he told the Jerusalem Fund, therefore “become angry and use that anger in a constructive way to fight back.”

Killing Gaza follows the path blazed by Blumenthal’s 2013 book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. The Louis D. Brandeis Center has extensively analyzed that “Goliath presents Israel as an utterly evil state that can only be compared to Nazi Germany,” a “present-day Sodom that deserves to be destroyed.” This past supporter of Hamas attacks has written a book that “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club,” Eric Altermann of the leftist Nation has joked.

Blumenthal’s pro-Hamas alternative reality depends upon his “ugly history of spreading falsehoods and fabricated quotes,” as the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) has documented. As the Israeli-American commentator Daniel Greenfield has observed:

If Max Blumenthal were reporting on WW2, the story would begin with an armada of American bombers flown by demented murderers hopped up on war propaganda bombing the unarmed and innocent National Socialists of Berlin.

As considerable evidence suggests, Blumenthal is “an extremist bigot whose greatest appeal is to antisemites” in the words of the pro-Zionist legal authority Alan Dershowitz. Commentary editor Jonathan S. Tobin has responded similarly to Goliath’s “risible anti-Zionist rant.” Blumenthal “is the moral equivalent of the Ku Klux Klan’s David Duke.”

Blumenthal’s prior discussions of Goliath have shocking implications for Israel’s Jewish state, something Cohen has falsely dismissed as merely a “reaction to European anti-Semitism.” Blumenthal has demanded that Israel’s Jewish “settler-colonial population” should “become indigenized” and “be willing to be a part of the Arab world,” ominously indicated by a veiled Muslim woman in Killing Gaza. Her rantings about Palestinians being willing to suffer a million “martyrs” in order to “free” Jerusalem from Israel indicates that the Arab world has far more in common with sharia than hip-hop.

Worrisomely, Blumenthal’s bigotry has friends in high places, including his father, Sidney, a longtime Hillary Clinton confidante. His quiet presence in the Jerusalem Fund audience recalled that he once hosted at his home a book launch party for his son and Goliath and also targeted the negative reviewer Altermann in an email campaign. Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS) also cosponsored with the Jerusalem Fund the Killing Gaza screening.

Yet the Nazi analogy most appropriate for Blumenthal is between him and Adolf Hitler’s producer of film propaganda, Leni Riefenstahl. Just as she glorified Nuremberg Nazi rallies in Triumph of the Will, Blumenthal’s Killing Gaza Hamas apologia glorifies jihad. As the late Israeli-American Middle East scholar Barry Rubin once noted, “Progressives” at the Jerusalem Fund and elsewhere are allying in Hamas with the “closest thing to a fascist ideology and genocidal program in today’s world.”

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Filed Under: Featured, Gaza, Hamas, Israel, Leftist/Islamic Alliance, Useful idiots Tagged With: Killing Gaza, Max Blumenthal


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Comments

  1. RichardL says

    Jun 20, 2018 at 6:36 am

    Fascism is the anesthetisation of politics and communism is the politicisation of aesthetics, Walter Benjamin famously said. The supporters of islam, like these two Jew-haters, have merged both.

    Leni Riefenstahl was not an ideological Nazi, condemned the Jew hatred, and was not even a racist as her work on the Nuba shows. She was fascinated by beauty. Those two are purveyors of pure evil.

    • RichardL says

      Jun 20, 2018 at 7:01 am

      I hate autocorrect: it is not “anesthetisation”, but aestheticisation…

  2. gravenimage says

    Jun 20, 2018 at 9:56 pm

    Max Blumenthal Channels Leni Riefenstahl: The Triumph of Hamas
    ………………

    Repulsive false moral equivalency.

  3. Yitz says

    Jun 21, 2018 at 9:53 am

    Selfhating anti semitic jews can be worse than antisemitic nonjews

  4. james c a reid says

    Jun 21, 2018 at 3:14 pm

    Blumenthal should do a film of the ideological similarities of Islam & Nazism! He’ll find more Truth there! After all, it was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem visiting Hitler in the 1930’s -1940’s, offering support. He formed a Muslim Division for the Waffen SS that served in the Balkans. It may actually have been him the put the notion of mass murdering the Jews in Europe. Also, with the war going well for Nazi Germany at the time, he wanted the Germans into the Middle East to wipe them all. out. In early June, 1941 in Bagdad, 1,000 Jews were massacred by the Arabs. It took the British troops a day, or two to establish order but the damage was done. the survivors packed up & moved to Palestine. Of all the quotations I’ve read on Islam, the only European I’ve found to say anything positive about it was Adolf Hitler! So, if he supported it, …… well that says it all really. Personally, I don’t see what Westerners see in it…. unless they’re wanting sex slaves/young girls/boys etc.

  5. TWG says

    Jun 22, 2018 at 10:21 am

    The nazis are child’s play compared to today’s islammunists. In fact, today they’re not even hiding their fascist, idiotic bigotry any more. And just ponder for a moment the millions of eugenicists and others who support the idea of eugenics being churned out by the “education” system today. Along with the climate alarmists who believe there should be ZERO population growth (not including moslems, of course) and the idea of Mao’s one child policy….. the future is quite bleak. The future for today’s youth has been destroyed by the “educators”, with hardly any push back other than the home schooling community.

    When only moslems are making babies to populate the earth, well……..

    As for me, I will continue to treat all of them with the deepest, darkest, most vicious contempt I can muster. Until the day we “take this to the streets” and shove them down where they belong……… I do hope that happens in my life time. If we don’t stop this nightmare soon, there will be nobody left to stop this nightmare.

    I’m so relieved I don’t have children. As a strategist, I’d be a wreck thinking about their future. A Friend of mine has three sons, all in their late 20’s. Two of them are, for the most part, aware. One of them, however, lives in Germany and is incredibly ignorant of the islamic world war. He won’t read anything about islam, won’t discuss it with his Mother or me, and gets mad any time it’s brought up. He told his Mother that he won’t let her talk about it in his presence, because he doesn’t want to taint his friendships with moslems. Apparently, he’s got quite a lot of moslem “friends” there in Germany. He’s in a Christian University there, studying to be a Christian leader. He’s done missionary work and is quite involved in the Church. I guess the Christian “education” system there is bad, too, since they’re teaching him to embrace islam. I was talking with his Mother one day and asked her what she’s going to do about it. She said that he’s happy, and that she has tried everything she can think of, but there is nothing more she can do. She supports him. I told her that I would disown him, stop paying for his Germany escapades, and not speak to him again until he agreed to inform himself about the threat of islam. I know that’s harsh, but being childless myself I have no concept of the bond between Mother and Son. In my eyes, I would have to cut ties just to keep my sanity. I’d be so incredibly worried about him I couldn’t stand it. I told her that for him to refuse her input on the subject, he is either calling her a liar, ignorant or both. He knows she has spent time researching the issue, yet refuses to hear her out. All I can say is that, for that betrayal, I would have to kick him to the proverbial curb until he apologized and changed his ways. Yes, it’s a good thing I’m not a parent. It sometimes seems that I care more about other people’s children than their own parents do. But then, what do I know about parenting? Nothing. Nothing at all. I can’t care any more. It’s none of my business. I’m working hard at not caring about them any more. Which goes against my principles.

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