Hillary tries to deal with her (Max) Blumenthal problem

Hillary tries to deal with her (Max) Blumenthal problem

Long ago, I foresaw that Hillary Clinton eventually would have to come to grips with her Max Blumenthal problem. That problem was that Max’s toxic anti-Israel politics would become a political liability Hillary could not ignore despite her affection for and affliction with Max’s father, Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal.

On May 19, 2015, I wrote that Hillary has a Blumenthal Problem – Two of Them:

I knew that Hillary was going to have a Blumenthal problem for her 2016 campaign.

But I expected that the problem would be Max Blumenthal, son of close Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal.

Max, the virulently anti-Israel activist, has been the subject of much controversy because of his penchant for vituperative and outlandish attacks on Israel, not the least of which was his call for Israeli Jews to be indigenized after the end of the Jewish state. See our Max Blumenthal Tag for some background.

The issue with Max was whether Hillary could have Sidney as an advisor given Sidney’s seeming support for Max’s antics, if not his anti-Israel agenda. Buzzfeed reported on the problem back in November 2013, Clinton Adviser Sid Blumenthal’s New Cause: His Son’s Anti-Israel Book….

[Max and Sidney Blumenthal]

Max Blumenthal is toxic to any mainstream political candidate. Indeed, he’d be  too toxic even to most left-wing candidates, his anti-Israel venom is so notorious.

Max’s anti-Israel conspiracy theories were a big hit with the Overland Park shooter. Liberal professor and author Eric Alterman termed Max’s book, Goliath, The Israel Haters Handbook.

Recently, Max and a friend chased a German lawmaker into a bathroom because the lawmaker called them anti-Semites…

Things just got a whole lot more interesting.

…the latest batch of Sidney’s emails shows that contrary to Hillary’s claim that she just received unsolicited advice, Sidney served a Svengali-like (or is it Rasputin-like) role in Hillary’s foreign policy thinking. Obama told Hillary to stay away from Sidney when it came to foreign policy, but Hillary seemed to be addicted to the long-time Clinton confidant.

Hillary has managed to ignore Max’s politics despite Max regularly pushing the comparison between Zionism and Nazism, including favoring this cartoon showing the founder of modern Zionism giving birth to Hitler:

Max has been pushing lately the false claim that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, which has been thoroughly debunked:

Hillary’s Max Blumenthal problem now is even worse, after Max unleashed a torrent of tweets attacking Elie Wiesel shortly after his death.

The tweets — soon joined by sidekicks of Blumenthal — demanded that in death Wiesel should not be honored based on alleged misdeeds by Wiesel.

Israelly Cool was the first to call attention to the attack, Israel Haters Trample On Elie Wiesel:

Elie Wiesel went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them. He did more harm than good and should not be honored.

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 2, 2016

For a good take-down of these attacks, see Anshel Pfeffer’s column at Haaretz, On Palestinians, Elie Wiesel Had Nothing to Apologize For, and the hundreds if not thousands of people who worked with him over the decades.

The attacks were classic Blumenthal — get personal, distort someone’s record and life, and most of all, guilt by association. Here is the classic Blumenthal guilt by association attack paradigm:

Target meets/greets/was seen with/knows Mr. X.
Mr. X did abc bad things
Therefore, Target is imputed with abc bad things.

Blumenthal was then joined in by other Israel haters and BDS movement leaders, who repeated Blumenthal’s attacks. They also claimed that Wiesel supported “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians based on Wiesel’s support for Israel and the right of Jews to live in places beyond the 1949 Armistice Line, like the Jewish Quarter of the Old City (which actually was ethnically cleansed of Jews by the Jordanians).

This fit a pattern of Blumenthal’s life, so aptly summed up by Andrew Breitbart (You NEED to watch the whole video from the beginning, the embed below is marked to start where Breitbart confronts him:

You are ridiculous
You are a joke
You are a despicable human being
You’re the lowest life form that I’ve ever seen
You’re entire job is trying to destroy people with Alinsky tactics…
You have been programmed by some ungodly creature to be this character of hatred…
This is guilt by association, because you’re a punk, you destroy people
Because you try to destroy people’s lives through innuendo, in-u-endo, in-u-endo
in order to destroy people’s lives

https://youtu.be/y5TOJt6YmQg?t=5m24s

The attack on Wiesel over Israel made Max more politically toxic than ever in a country which overwhelmingly and at near historical highs supports Israel.

It was too much politically for Hillary to ignore. As reported in The Tower, which also refuted Blumenthal’s claims, Clinton Campaign Condemns Anti-Zionist Journalist, Son of Close Advisor

The Hillary Clinton presidential campaign publicly condemned a son of one her close advisers after he denounced the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel after Wiesel’s death….

“Secretary Clinton emphatically rejects these offensive, hateful, and patently absurd statements about Elie Wiesel,” Jake Sullivan, senior policy aide to the Clinton campaign, said in a statement to The Jerusalem Post.

She believes they are wrong in all senses of the term. She believes that Max Blumenthal and others should cease and desist in making them. Elie Wiesel was a hero to her as he was to so many, and she will keep doing everything she can to honor his memory and to carry his message forward.

Hillary finally is recognizing her Max Blumenthal problem. But I’m not sure she has dealt with it.

Hillary is addicted to Max’s father, Sidney, so expect Max to be kept at a safe distance only for now. If Hillary takes over the White House, Sidney likely will be whispering in her ear again, and passing along more of Max’s anti-Israel propaganda.

[Featured Image: Max Blumenthal with Rasmea Odeh, convicted supermarket bomber and murderer of two Israeli university students.]

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