Max Blumenthal has another Youtube hit. This time in addition to the drunks of his previous video, he gets some young Israelis — whose command of English is not all that great, and who live in a country where the taboos of political correctness are not so entrenched — to say unattractive things, which he gleefully splices together.
He asked a few apparently inebriated young men about the ‘Iranian people’, getting one to say “I hate them.” It’s obvious that the victim was thinking about the Iranian regime, but when you are drunk and speak English on a 5-year-old level it’s hard to be precise. Blumenthal also falsely implied that a so-called “nakba law … [makes] it a crime to talk about destroyed Arab villages”.
Then he found some Israeli Arab students (with better English) who talked about how they are discriminated against, having their ID’s checked just because they were Arab.
The thing is, this is so easy — imagine what he could do in any American college town, or among the Palestinians. The reporter sometimes even puts words in people’s mouths, as if it’s necessary.
What has Blumenthal done? He’s put together bits and pieces of video showing Jews in as ugly a light as possible. Imagine if he’d done the same for African Americans or Muslims! There is a word for this — antisemitism — and it is not a defense to claim that you are Jewish.
There are other words, too, like cheap shots, lack of context, yellow journalism, propaganda and just plain dishonesty.
Blumenthal would undoubtedly say that is is only anti-Zionist. But his video speaks for itself.
Max Blumenthal, the son of former President Clinton’s aide Sidney Blumenthal, was born in 1977. I’m sure that he went to an excellent university here in the US, unlike my own son who was born in the same year and who spent the same part of his youth in the dust and flies of South Lebanon trying to avoid Hezbollah’s mortar shells.
Unlike the Israelis that he made fools of, Blumenthal lives in a big country which does not have 60,000 [update 2014: 170,000] missiles aimed at it (from Hamas, Lebanon and Syria), which can hit any part of it. He does not live a few miles from a seething nest of violent hatred which from time to time randomly vomits rockets into his town, as many Israelis do. He does not live in range of a country ruled by a fanatical despot that will soon have nuclear bombs and has threatened repeatedly to annihilate his nation.
Blumenthal exemplifies the uninformed, privileged American Jews who hate Israel. Maybe it will take the shit hitting the fan for Jews in the US — after all, history shows that at some point it happens in every diaspora culture — for them to understand.
Technorati Tags: Max Blumenthal, Israel
“Maybe it will take the shit hitting the fan for Jews in the US………for them to understand”
Vic, ××—×™, methinks you are too optimistic here. If American Jews are willing to look past Pastor Wright, Rashid Khalidi, and numerous other signs of Obama’s proclivites with regards to our neck of the woods, there is no hope. The only example that is applicable, in my opinion, are the German Jews of the 1930’s.
They, like Jews in America, felt safe and totally assimilated as Germans first, Jews second. When the “shit hit the fan”, it was already too late.
In other Diaspora’s, Jews for the most part understood well enough the precarious nature of the existence within their host countries.
Keep well and stay safe
Shimon