Photo Credit:
Max Blumenthal

On July 5, when the rest of the Jewish and gentile world (with the exception of Islamist Jihadis) were still mourning the demise of Holocaust author and Nobel Prize Peace Laureate Eli Wiesel, Max Blumenthal, son of the senior member of the Hillary Clinton campaign Sidney Blumenthal, published a piece titled “In the face of increasingly unspeakable crimes against Palestinians, Wiesel counseled silence.” This was MB’s take—while the body was still at room temperature—on Wiesel’s statement, “I must identify with whatever Israel does—even with her errors.”

“Wiesel’s unwavering commitment to Israel undoubtedly influenced his vocal support for President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq,” MB wrote. “He went on to demand American-orchestrated regime change in Syria, Libya, and Iran. ‘To be Jewish in this world is to always be concerned,’ he told an audience on Capitol Hill, endorsing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s push for a US attack on Iran. Wiesel’s support for successive assaults on Middle Eastern countries—always on the grounds of defeating ‘evil’—made him a key asset of neoconservatives and liberal interventionists alike.”

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MB also wrote that in July 2014, when “Israel embarked on its most lethal operation to date against residents of the besieged Gaza Strip, destroying or damaging some 100,000 homes and killing over 2,200 people, including 551 children” — apparently for no reason, “At the height of the assault, a shockingly Islamophobic full-page ad appeared in the New York Times under the banner of [Rabbi Shmuli] Boteach’s World Values Network non-profit, which has received substantial funding from [Sheldon] Adelson.”

The ad declared: “Jews rejected child sacrifice 3,500 years ago. Now it’s Hamas’s turn,” or, as MB’s Palestinians-can-do-no-wrong version went, the ad was “Hammering on the common pro-Israel myth that Palestinians do not value their children’s lives as much as Israelis do, the ad denigrated the besieged residents of Gaza as ‘worshippers of death cults indistinguishable from that of the Molochites.'” Never mind the fact that this theme of “we love death while the Jews love life” was practically a Hamas slogan that year.

It turns out that the “offensive” ad “concluded with the signature of its author, Elie Wiesel, the man who would be eulogized by fellow Nobel Prize-winner Barack Obama as ‘one of the great moral voices of our time.'”

“With Wiesel’s death,” MB noted, “the elites who relied on him for moral cover leapt at the opportunity to claim his legacy.”

Jake Sullivan, senior policy advisor to the Hillary Clinton campaign, slammed Max Blumenthal’s article, which marked a new low in demonizing Israeli and Jewish values by the American left in general and the father and son team of Sidney and Max Blumenthal in particular: “Secretary Clinton emphatically rejects these offensive, hateful, and patently absurd statements about Elie Wiesel,” Sullivan said in a statement. Referring to Clinton’s views on the anti-Israel activists who attempted to vilify Wiesel after his death, Sullivan said, “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.”

Well, if this means Sidney Blumenthal’s clout in the Clinton camp has lost some of its shine, too, then the entire scandal was well worth it. As Rabbi Shmuli Boteach wrote in January, “What is truly concerning is that Sidney Blumenthal has not only failed to ever condemn his son’s anti-Israel writings, but has actively advocated for and defended the warped, outrageous ideas conveyed therein.” And as Ron Kampeas wrote back in October, “Clinton takes Blumenthal seriously and likes his anti-Israel son’s work.”

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David writes news at JewishPress.com.