RUTHFULLY YOURS

“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 thatregistered 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 TrutherAbby 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 hasworked 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’scommercial 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 thealleged 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 likeZafir 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 extensivelyanalyzed 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 Gazascreening.

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.”