The Blumenthal Pathology

Why would a young Jewish American call for Israeli Jews to choose between “Exodus” from the Middle East, or “indigenization” to fit in with their Arab neighborhood?

Why would a young Jewish American join forces with Islamists to try to discredit the bravest living proponent of reform of Islam?

Is it a case of stupidity of the sort that afflicted the “useful idiots,” who unwittingly helped the cause of Soviet Communism in the 1940s? Or is it pathology?

I first came across Max Blumenthal last year when he was touting his book Goliath on college campuses across the United States. Blumenthal, a virulently anti-Israel polemicist, spoke at Brandeis University last March and was received warmly by members of the campus community, even though his talk was choc-full of malicious blood libels about the Jewish state.

“Israel has attacked everyone of its neighbors, invaded, I think, everyone of its Arab neighbors, occupied most of those neighbors at, some point, and they do so as the Jewish state, speaking on the behalf of the Jewish people,” Blumenthal told the crowd. “That’s very dangerous, it encourages anti-Semitism.” He also hypothesized that there is “this campaign of incitement, of attacking people with what are basically ethnic slurs is being encouraged, it’s a top-down campaign encouraged by [pro-Israel] communal elders.”

Blumenthal has made a name for himself as a Jew whose bête noire is the Jewish state. Offering pure fantasy rather than facts and evidence, Blumenthal paints a fictitious picture of a Nazi-esque, evil incarnate Israel, much to the delight of his fans, who include neo-Nazi and former Ku Klux Klan member David Duke, members of the neo-Nazi Internet forum Stormfront, and the pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar newspaper.

As David Mikics explained in Tablet Magazine, “As a reporter, the best one can say about him [Blumenthal] is that he doesn’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, and he doesn’t have any sources—so it’s hard to fault him for getting things wrong.”

Blumenthal’s book, subtitled Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, explicitly likens Israel to Nazi Germany. Chapter titles such as “The Concentration Camp” and “The Night of Broken Glass” flippantly invoke the memory of the Holocaust. The book is so egregious that even the left-wing writer Eric Alterman wrote in the Nation that it could have been a selection for the “Hamas book-of-the-month-club.” Blumenthal, he wrote, was “a profoundly unreliable narrator.” Alterman concluded that “[l]iterally nothing this fellow writes can be taken at face value. He shames all of us with his presence in our magazine.”

Typically, Blumenthal’s recent op-ed in the New York Times contained glaring factual errors. The Times was forced to publish two corrections after Blumenthal “indicated that the Prawer Plan [for the resettlement of the Negev Bedouin] had been fully implemented and that Lehava [the organization that opposes relationships between Jews and Arabs] had been directly funded by the government.”

“They must have known, if they’ve ever read anything by or about Blumenthal,” Liel Leibowitz noted, “that they’d be in for nothing more than a hysterical, slanted, nonsensical account that obliterates all nuance in an effort to convince that Israel is a singularly awful nation—racist, violent, murderous—and therefore has little or no right to exist.”

Blumenthal has openly mocked Jewish prayer, pretending to worship before a bloodied image of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In a public discussion at the University of Pennsylvania in October 2013, Blumenthal called on Israeli Jews either to “become indigenized,” that is, to “be part of the Arab world,” or to choose “exodus”.

Now, not content with defaming Israel, Blumenthal has moved on to defending Islam against one of its bravest critics in a long and mendacious hit-piece entitled “Exposing Anti-Islam Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Latest Deception.”

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born refugee, overcame a patriarchal upbringing in a Somali Muslim family, during the course of which she was subjected to female genital mutilation (FGM) and a forced marriage. She sought asylum in the Netherlands and later the United States after she critiqued and ultimately left Islam. Today, she devotes her life to campaigning against abuses of women’s rights committed in the name of religion. Having received multiple death threats from groups like Al Qaeda, she lives under round-the-clock protection.

Hirsi Ali’s latest book, Heretic, is an argument for a Muslim Reformation. In it, she “proposes a fundamental five-point modification of Islamic doctrine designed to remove the various incitements embedded in the Koran to engage in intolerance, oppression and violence.” Anyone familiar with Hirsi Ali will immediately recognize a sharp change in tone and newfound optimism in her latest book. Her outlook on the future of Islam and the Muslim majority world has clearly changed, and both her diagnosis of the issues at hand and her solutions have evolved. “I watched four national governments fall—Egypt’s twice—and protests or uprisings occur in fourteen other nations, and I thought simply: I was wrong,” Hirsi Ali reflects on her reaction to the Arab Spring. “Ordinary Muslims are ready for change.”

Hirsi Ali has been on a media drive in an attempt to get across her message, including television appearances on ABC, Fox News, CNN, and the BBC. She also has written in the Wall Street Journal and the Huffington Post and has been interviewed by the New York Times, among other publications. Hirsi Ali’s message has been consistent: “Today too many people, too many women, too many fellow human beings are murdered in the name of Islam,” as she told Megyn Kelly. 

Out of her myriad media appearances, Blumenthal cherry-picks a single misstep that occurred during her appearance on The Daily Show. On air, she mistakenly claimed that Muslims are “responsible” for “70 percent of the violence in the world today.” She meant to say that “70% of all the fatalities in armed conflicts around the world last year were in wars involving Muslims,” as she wrote in the Wall Street Journal—where she also made the point that by far “the most numerous victims of Muslim violence—including executions and lynchings not captured in these statistics—are Muslims themselves.”

“On TV I wrongly said Muslims were ‘responsible’ when I should have said Muslims were ‘involved’,” she told me. “It was nerves and fatigue. My whole point is that we need an Islamic Reformation precisely because most victims of violence committed in the name of Islam are in fact Muslims.”

Hirsi Ali has long admitted that she misrepresented herself when applying for asylum in the Netherlands. “I said my name was Ayaan Hirsi Ali instead of Ayaan Hirsi Magan. I also said I was born in 1967 while I was actually born in 1969,” Blumenthal quotes her as telling the Dutch television program Zembla. He does not explain that her reason for doing so was to avoid being hunted down by family members who believed she had brought dishonor to her clan and religion.

We may wonder what exactly Max Blumenthal has against Hirsi Ali’s call for a Muslim Reformation as a way of freeing Muslim women from the oppression and segregation of sharia law. We may wonder why he directs his fire against her rather than against, say, the murderers of Islamic State and Al Qaeda. Perhaps it is for the same reason that last year he took the Kremlin’s side against the Ukrainian “Maidan” revolution: a strange mixture of idiocy and pathology that in each generation makes a few Jews join the side they have most reason to fear.

The real mystery, however, is why anyone takes the unscrupulous and unbalanced Blumenthal seriously.

Daniel Mael, a senior at Brandeis University, is a fellow at the Salomon Center.