Monday, December 19, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
A few days ago, Max Blumenthal posted a tweet that illustrates
how he routinely produces his fake news about Israel. Retweeting Nadav Pollak’s
praise
for medics in the Israeli army reserve who declared their
willingness to offer medical assistance to wounded Syrian civilians facing
“indiscriminate slaughter,” Blumenthal added
the comment “Israel bombed Damascus exactly ten days ago.”
All too obviously, Blumenthal would like his followers to
believe that while Israeli hypocrites claim they want to help Syrian civilians,
the Israeli army just “bombed Damascus.”
What happened in reality is that the Syrian regime accused
Israel of striking an airbase near Damascus; the target of the strike was reportedly
a Hezbollah weapons depot. Unsurprisingly, a Syrian military source denounced
the strike against the Mazzeh airbase as part of “desperate attempts by the
Israeli enemy to support terrorist groups [i.e. groups fighting against Assad]
and raise their low morale.” Some Syrian sources also claimed “that Hezbollah
sites near the Syrian capital were also targeted Tuesday night by airstrikes
that killed and injured a number of fighters in the Shiite militia.”
Since Blumenthal seems to root for an Assad victory in
Syria, it’s understandable that he would be upset about any kind of damage
inflicted on the blood-drenched tyrant and his ruthless backers.
But few would think that targeting a Hezbollah weapons depot
at an airbase and perhaps even injuring some Hezbollah fighters can be
accurately described as “Israel bombed Damascus.”
Yet, this is exactly how Blumenthal has been operating for
years. It’s worthwhile recalling that in a scathing
review of Blumenthal’s screed “Goliath” that was published three years ago,
Eric Alterman – a leftist who finds much to criticize about Israel – described
Blumenthal as “a profoundly unreliable narrator,” noting that his “accounts are
mostly technically accurate, but often deliberately deceptive.” Predictably,
Blumenthal rejected Alterman’s criticism, claiming that if much of his book was
“technically accurate,” Alterman panned the book just to shield Israel from the
devastating truth. Alterman patiently responded,
attempting (in vain) to explain some very basic concepts to Blumenthal:
“Blumenthal … does not understand
why I would concede that his book is ‘mostly technically accurate’ but remain
so critical. He is, apparently, unfamiliar with the concept of ‘context.’ It
might be technically accurate, for instance, to say that an individual who
fatally shoots a crazed killer while said killer is mowing down schoolchildren
with an assault-weapon is a ‘murderer.’ But it would also be profoundly
misleading, given the context. And this is the problem with Blumenthal’s facts.
He tells us only the facts he wishes us to know and withholds crucial ones that
undermine his relentlessly anti-Israel narrative.”
Three years have passed since then, and as I showed in a recent
post, Blumenthal has in the meantime alienated some of his erstwhile fans
by applying the methods he used to demonize Israel to his “reporting” about
Syria. Needless to say, Blumenthal and other leading anti-Israel activists
still resent being called out for their glaring failure to condemn Assad and
his allies for the carnage in Syria, and they continue
to pose as the innocent victims of some kind of “organized smearing/lying
campaign” that is of course supported, if not orchestrated, by evil Zionists.
It also goes without saying that while anti-Israel activists
like Blumenthal, Abunimah and Khalek find it hard to hide their hopes for an
eventual victory of butcher Assad and his allies, they have only contempt for
Israeli efforts to alleviate the suffering in Syria. So Rania Khalek was only
too happy to retweet Max Blumenthal’s collaborator Dan Cohen, who wants Israelis
to protest the IDF and “Israel’s direct involvement in the war on Syria” – by
which he presumably means incidents like the supposed “bombing” of Damascus;
Cohen also is impatient to see the Golan Heights handed over to Assad and his
henchmen.
But while anti-Israel activists sneer, an Israeli grassroots
campaign has raised
more than $100,000 in just two days for emergency supplies to help families that
have lost everything in the merciless war Assad is waging to stay in power.
To be fair to Assad and his armchair apologists on Twitter
and in the blogosphere: they’d all be much happier if he did what he’s doing to
his fellow Syrians to Israelis. When Assad recently declared
in an interview that he considers Israel as Syria’s worst enemy, Max Blumenthal
and his ilk were surely pleased: no matter how many Syrians Assad and his
brutal backers kill, at least Assad shares their obsessive hatred for the
world’s only Jewish state. And whatever fake news can do to fuel this hatred, Max
Blumenthal &Co will no doubt do their part.
