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Thursday, April 17, 2014

Why did Haaretz take down its article on Kansas killer's admiration for Max Blumenthal?

Haaretz, picking up on a piece in the Washington Free Beacon, briefly posted this article yesterday:


According to the Washington Free Beacon, an online news source that describes itself as being "dedicated to uncovering the stories that the professional left hopes will never see the light of day, Frazier Glenn Cross, the Hitler admirer and Klansman who is accused of the murders, often praised Blumenthal's work.

According to the report, a search of the VNN Forum – a prominent white supremacist website run by Cross – finds over 300 references praising Blumenthal's criticism of the State of Israel and American-Jewish support of Israeli policy.
There is no doubt that leftist Israel-haters like Blumenthal give lots of material - and inspiration - for right wing antisemites like Frazier Glenn Cross. Both groups claim, disingenuously, that their criticisms of Israel are meant to defend human rights when it is the other way around - they use the language of human rights to attack the Jewish state, a nation whose record on human rights would be the envy of any other nation at war in history.

Some antisemites see no contradiction between the extreme right and extreme left manifestations of Jew-hatred. Someone named "Rehmat1", for example, has hundreds of comments both on Cross' VNN forum and on Mondoweiss, both linking back to his own blog.

The only difference is that the right-wing antisemites are more willing to admit that they hate Jews. The leftist antisemites prefer to use Israel as a proxy for Jews and are, too often, Jews themselves, which all stripes of Jew-haters love to quote to give their hate an air of authenticity.

Haaretz took down this article very quickly after it was posted online. Why?

Perhaps the reason is that Haaretz has provides at least as much comfort and aid to the VNN antisemites as Blumenthal does!

While Haaretz doesn't seem to be as explicitly praised as Blumenthal was by Cross, according to Mondoweiss, Haaretz itself is mentioned on the VNN site over 11,000 times and Cross mentions Haaretz himself scores of times in his antisemitic rants! (I did not check either the Free Beacon's  or Mondoweiss' claims about the number of citations of Blumenthal/Haaretz.)

Haaretz provides at least as much of aid and comfort to antisemites as Blumenthal does, and perhaps that is what prompted it to silently pull this story.