Max Blumenthal -- Oops, no, it's Josef Goebbels. I always mix them up!
Max Blumenthal is a video terrorist. His target is the Jewish state and like many terrorists he is driven by hate — it oozes from his work — and he really doesn’t care what ethical principles (in this case, basic journalistic ones about truth and fairness) he needs to violate in order to kill his enemy. Blumenthal is a ‘journalist’ like Goebbels was a journalist.
He began his career by making fun of the Christian Right in the US, but he became really well-known for his intrepid interview with dangerous drunken American students in a Jerusalem bar. His footage of scheming Zionist racists pronouncing the words “Fuck Obama!” before passing out is classic investigative journalism. In response to complaints that, after all, they were drunk, American, and to a certain extent idiots, he turned to tricking Israelis with poor English skills into saying embarrassingly right-wing things on camera.
His early work was quite amateurish but he apparently has professional help now, because his latest effort — a trailer for a documentary called “Israel’s terror inside” is slicker than snot and just as objective. His point — which I’m sure the full documentary will belabor effectively — is that Israel is not a democracy, it’s ruled by fascists who want only to to commit genocide against innocent indigenous Palestinians.
You know — this really isn’t all that funny. The trailer is 5 minutes 48 seconds of lies, false implications and slander. It is really well put together — he probably had generous funding from the usual suspects — and I presume the documentary is also. I absolutely guarantee that my friends at Peace Fresno will be showing it to everyone they can get to watch it, college teachers will show it to their classes, etc. Despite the fact that it will be unmitigated rubbish, people will be influenced by it.
Meanwhile, I want to address myself to Blumenthal himself:
You probably know that you are producing pure propaganda and claiming that it’s journalism. The slander in your work is compounded by the lie that what you are doing is honest work. Probably you think that’s justified, that the end of helping the oppressed Palestinians makes it OK to bend the truth a little. Maybe you ask, “what is truth, anyway?” or think about it in a postmodern way in which truth is relative to politics.
Or maybe you like the funding that you can get for doing the devil’s work [note: no, I don’t believe in the devil. It’s a figure of speech]. Maybe you like to see your name in print, and like seeing those fat numbers of views on YouTube. Maybe being famous helps you meet interesting women. Whatever.
Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency? — Joseph Welch, to Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, June 9, 1954.
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(Thanks to Dvar Dea for bringing this to my attention).
Technorati Tags: Max Blumenthal, video terrorism, YouTube, Israel, propaganda
If any reader is interested, I suggest they read ‘ The Case For Israel ‘ written by Alan Dershowitz. A fair and balanced analysis.