Max Blumenthal’s World

Benjamin Kerstein

As anyone who has ever lived in a New York apartment will tell you, when you suddenly turn on a bright light in a dark room, you find out very quickly where the cockroaches are hiding. The Gaza flotilla incident was just such a bright light, giving us an unprecedented glimpse of just how low many politicians, activists, and reporters are willing to sink in order to disparage the State of Israel. Without question, one of those most uncomfortably trapped in this spotlight was liberal pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal. Born into a kind of privilege most of us can only imagine, Blumenthal is the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a former Clinton administration official. Blumenthal the Elder became famous—or notorious, depending on who is doing the retelling—for his role in attempting to discredit those who charged president Clinton with sexual misconduct. Despite the eventual and unsurprising revelation that the accusations were true, the Elder defended this most pathetically duplicitous of presidents to the equally pathetic end. “Carol,” he reportedly told Christopher Hitchens’ wife at the time, “I could go to jail for what I’m doing now.”

The apple has fallen more or less directly on to the tree. With the aid, one imagines, of no small amount of nepotism, Blumenthal the Younger has made a career for himself as a pundit who specializes in attacking any and every one of whom the liberal establishment disapproves. And the Younger seems to be just as willing as the Elder to obfuscate the facts in service of the cause. When this fails, however, he also appears to be willing to engage in outright and deliberate lies.

This tendency made a rather striking appearance in a blog post written by Blumenthal on June 4, entitled “IDF Releases Apparently Doctored Flotilla Audio; Press Reports As Fact,” and its followup the next day, “IDF Admits It Doctored Flotilla Audio Clip. Washington Post’s Kessler Must Retract,” both on the subject of the flotilla incident. The motivation behind these posts was clear enough. Video and audio evidence already released by the IDF had conclusively showed that the violence and death that occurred on the flotilla was entirely the fault of the flotilla participants and not the Israeli military. Faced with this evidence and apparently unwilling to forgo his prejudices, Blumenthal had only two choices. He could try to obfuscate and deny the evidence, as his colleague and kindred soul Glenn Greenwald did; or he could resort to conspiracy theory, and claim that the evidence was forged. Blumenthal chose the latter.
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He was somewhat hampered in doing so because much of the evidence consisted of video footage. Short of charging the IDF with employing Hollywood-quality sets and special effects, Blumenthal could not deny that the videos showed what they showed, i.e., the outnumbered Israeli commandos being assaulted by an armed mob. As a result, Blumenthal’s conspiracy theory concentrated on the audio evidence. In particular, the audio played over two videos posted on YouTube by the IDF. In the first post, Blumenthal asserted that “The IDF’s propaganda is increasingly unbelievable, yet the media is enthusiastically playing along,” and proclaimed,

This audio, which purports to show flotilla passengers telling the IDF to “go back to Auschwitz,” appears to have been doctored by the IDF General Press Office or someone connected to it…. The clip originally released by the IDF on May 31 of its exchange with the Mavi Marmara, which is featured below, shows the IDF warning the ship’s crew…. There was no reference to Auschwitz in the video the IDF released on May 31.

Turning to the second video, in which the Auschwitz exchange occurred, Blumenthal wrote,

On June 4, the IDF released apparently doctored audio of its exchange with the Mavi Marmara. The clip the IDF released featured the same imagery from its previous clip, but the voice of the Israeli Navy dispatcher was dramatically different. And the reply from the Mavi Marmara sounded like an impersonation of an Arab by a mentally challenged pre-adolescent (both videos are still on the IDF’s YouTube channel even though they completely contradict each other).

For all intents and purposes, everything about the statement above is untrue, as readers are welcome to see and listen for themselves. It does not show the same imagery as the previous clip, but rather a still photo taken from it. The non-American accented voice sounds genuine enough, as do the regional American accents heard afterwards. More to the point, Blumenthal’s apparent belief that the IDF has a group of voice actors ever at the ready to record fake (though, according to him, incompetent) recordings for propaganda purposes is, to put it charitably, less than credible.

More important than any of this, however, is the fact that the two videos which Blumenthal claims “completely contradict each other” and present two versions of the same exchange, one or both of them faked, are obviously of two separate conversations. Hence, the use of a still photo rather than live video of the second conversation, of which one presumes there was none. One could conceivably argue that the IDF ought to have made the distinction between the two exchanges more clear. But this would merely have been an occasion for clarification, not a full-blown and wholly implausible conspiracy theory, complete with Blumenthal’s dark intimations that “Either the mayor of Chelm is in charge of the IDF Press Office, or the Israeli military has something very ugly to hide.” What that ugly something might be is never explained by Blumenthal, and it seems likely that he was simply trying to conjure up the atmosphere of paranoia which is an absolute necessity for any tale of conspiracy.

The extent to which Blumenthal was determined to hold on to his conspiracy theory was demonstrated by his frankly embarrassing followup post, in which he gleefully declared victory and vindication on the basis of an IDF press release that, in fact, completely destroyed whatever remained of his credibility. “The IDF,” he wrote, “admitted today in a press release that it doctored audio footage from its exchanges with the Gaza flotilla in order to paint the flotilla passengers as anti-Semites.” In fact, the IDF claimed nothing of the kind, as Blumenthal ought to have been aware, since he posted the clarification itself in the body of his post. “The audio,” the statement claims,

was edited down to cut out periods of silence over the radio as well as incomprehensible comments so as to make it easier for people to listen to the exchange…. This transmission had originally cited the Mavi Marmara ship as being the source of these remarks, however, due to an open channel, the specific ship or ships in the “Freedom Flotilla” responding to the Israeli Navy could not be identified.

In other words, the IDF stated that the audio was edited for time and clarity, but not, as Blumenthal claimed, for content. Nor did the IDF in any way admit to using voice actors or creating a fake recording, as Blumenthal quite prominently accused them of doing. Most importantly, the statement makes it absolutely clear that, contrary to Blumenthal’s claims, the videos depicted two separate conversations. Blumenthal, unsurprisingly, simply chose to ignore all of this.

Having compounded his lie about the videos by lying about the IDF’s clarification, Blumenthal promptly switched, as conspiracy theorists are wont to do, to righteous indignation. “Hours after the IDF’s admission,” he sputtered, “major news outlets which reported on the doctored audio clip as though it was a shocking revelation and not a scandalous forgery have still not corrected themselves.” The reason for this, of course, was that the clip was not a forgery, and thus there was nothing to correct. A fact proven, moreover, by the information Blumenthal himself posted. Unaware of or indifferent to the fact that his declaration of victory was actually an admission of guilt, Blumenthal declared, “The lesson of the debacle is that nothing the IDF says can be trusted by anyone. Not ever.”

One can put the magnificent irony of such a statement aside for a moment, because the problem is deeper than Blumenthal’s overweening narcissism and self-regard. The real issue is this: When faced with someone who engages in systematic mendacity and conspiracism, one must always ask the question of whether or not they actually believe what they are saying. Some conspiracy theorists—Oliver Stone and David Icke spring to mind—almost certainly do, however deranged their beliefs may be. In this case, however, it seems all but certain that Blumenthal was well aware of the fact that he was lying in order to support a story he knew to be false in the first place.

The reason for this is that Blumenthal is something of a specialist in making and manipulating video footage and the audio that goes with it. In fact, his video reports are perhaps his greatest claim to fame. All of them are fiercely partisan, consciously biased, and sometimes simply bizarre, such as his notorious Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem video, which seemed to indicate that Blumenthal thinks cherry-picking interviewees in order to make Israel and the Jews look as evil as humanly possible somehow proves something. Something, that is, other than his own identity crisis, in which, it no doubt pains him to know, none of us are particularly interested. Nonetheless, it is mostly due to these videos that he has garnered whatever degree of success he has achieved thus far.

In other words, when it comes to video and audio materials, Max Blumenthal knows or ought to know exactly what he is looking at and listening to. It seems next to impossible to believe, then, that his claims regarding the video and audio materials above were the result of an honest mistake. He must or should have known that he was listening to two separate conversations and not the same conversation doctored by a secret cartel of IDF voice actors. He must and should have known that his tendentious description of the second conversation was inaccurate. And he must and should have known that his claims of conspiracy were, at best, implausible and lacked corroborating evidence. Moreover, he must have known—indeed, there is no way he could not have known—that the IDF statement did not say what he claimed it said.

It appears, then, that Max Blumenthal, faced with a situation that threatened his political and ideological prejudices, made a choice. He chose to lie. He chose to falsely portray the IDF as a sinister and manipulative cabal (a claim dangerously close to racist myths of which none of us need reminding). And he chose to slander and defame those who honestly reported the evidence at hand.

Blumenthal’s reporting on the flotilla incident, in short, can tell us next to nothing about the incident itself. It tells us a great deal, however, about Max Blumenthal and the not uncommon kind of media personality he represents. He is not a journalist. He is not a pundit. He is not a polemicist. He is not even that far simpler and less onerous of occupations – an honest man. He is, rather, a liar, a fabulist, a conspiracy theorist, and an unprincipled ideologue who will do and say practically anything in order to cover up the racism, violence, and political dementia of those with whom he is ideologically sympathetic. He is, in short, a disgrace to his profession. If there is any good to be found in the flotilla incident, it is in the fact that it motivated such people to, at long last, fully expose themselves for what they are.

Max Blumenthal, however, still has a chance to redeem himself. He can and should issue an immediate retraction, as well as an apology to those he has libeled. If he does not, it will simply provide further confirmation that, as he himself rather clumsily puts it, nothing he says can be trusted by anyone. Not ever.

Benjamin Kerstein is Senior Writer for The New Ledger.