The Company Hillary Keeps

File this under “The Company She Keeps: HRC.”

We all know that Sidney Blumenthal has long been an important advisor to both Clintons. We know that Sidney Blumenthal was advising then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about conditions in Libya. We know that the Clintons have praised Sid Blumenthal and hold his counsel dear.

It is less well known that Blumenthal has a son named Max who is an anti-Israeli activist. Presumably Jewish, Max Blumenthal has praised Hamas terrorism and has called for Israeli Jews either to become like the Arabs or to go back to Europe.

It isn’t too much of stretch to call this anti-Semitism.

So said Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in the Observer:

Max Blumenthal, who was revealed by the Hillary Clinton forced email dump as one of her secret sources and advisers on Israel and Middle East affairs, is one of the great Israel haters in America today.

A writer should avoid hyperbole. But when it comes to Max Blumenthal, son of longtime Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal, it’s hard to avoid superlatives. Max is quite simply one of the most biased, anti-Semitic, terrorist-defending, Israel-has-no-right-to-exist haters out there.

Max, who spends most of his professional life being ignored because of his extreme, hate-filled drivel, recently became the focus of scrutiny when it was revealed that his father, Sid Blumenthal, promoted Max’s anti-Semitic writings to Ms. Clinton when she was Secretary of State of the United States. More explosive are Ms. Clinton’s emails praising Max’s work.

Boteach also outlined his case in The Huffington Post and was naturally threatened with lawsuits.

The London Telegraph just published an account of a recent speech given by Max Blumenthal. I report; you decide:

Another meeting, in the London School of Economics on March 5, was addressed by Max Blumenthal, a writer who is also the son of Sidney Blumenthal, a past adviser to former President Bill Clinton and now likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Describing the Palestinian enclave of Gaza as a penitentiary, Mr Blumenthal said: “There’s often prison revolts which take place everywhere, because people are normal. People are normal in the Gaza Strip, and so they take up arms.” 

He praised a 2014 massacre carried out by “commandos” of Hamas’s armed wing, the al-Qassam Brigades, against Nahal Oz, a kibbutz and army base near the Gaza border, saying it was a way for Palestinians to “recover their dignity” and “pop Israel’s security bubble”. 

“With GoPro cameras attached to their helmets, [they] burst into the Israeli base and kill every soldier they encounter in hand-to-hand combat,” said Mr Blumenthal.

“The message it sent to young Palestinians in the West Bank, in Jerusalem and abroad, was incredible … You see your people in commando uniforms, bursting into a military base and showing up the occupier.” In fact Nahal Oz is within Israel proper and is not occupied territory.

He also claimed that the creation of the Palestinian Authority was “the greatest achievement of the Israeli occupation”, since it had created an “apartheid fantasy” of a subjugated Palestinian state that even the South African government could never achieve.

And, of course, after the Benghazi attack that killed the American ambassador to Libya and three others, Max Blumenthal took to the pages of the Guardian to denounce the filmmaker who contributed to the attack. While the Obama administration was blaming it all on the video, Max Blumenthal was more subtle:

Did an inflammatory anti-Muslim film trailer that appeared spontaneously on YouTube prompt the attack that left four US diplomats dead, including US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens? American officials have suggested that the assault was pre-planned, allegedly by of one of the Jihadist groups that emerged since the Nato-led overthrow of Libya's Gaddafi regime. So even though the deadly scene in Benghazi may not have resulted directly from the angry reaction to the Islamophobic video, the violence has helped realize the apocalyptic visions of the film's backers.

Produced and promoted by a strange collection of rightwing Christian evangelicals and exiled Egyptian Copts, the trailer was created with the intention of both destabilizing post-Mubarak Egypt and roiling the US presidential election. As a consultant for the film named Steve Klein said: "We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen."

He continues:

With another US election approaching, and the Egyptian government suddenly under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood, Klein and Sadek joined Nakoula in preparing what would be their greatest propaganda stunt to date: the Innocence of Muslims. As soon as the film appeared on YouTube, Sadek promoted it on his website, transforming the obscure clip into a viral source of outrage in the Middle East. And like clockwork, on September 11, crowds of Muslim protesters stormed the walls of the US embassy in Cairo, demanding retribution for the insult to the prophet Muhammad. The demonstrations ricocheted into Libya, where the deadly attack that may have been only peripherally related to the film occurred.

In an email to Clinton, Sidney Blumenthal heaped inordinate praise on his son. He labeled Mitt Romney "contemptible" and his son "fearless." To which Hillary Clinton responded that Max was a “mitzvah.”

Considering that Hillary Clinton is joined at the hip with a daughter of the Muslim Brotherhood, one Huma Abedin, one has reason to doubt her support for Israel and her willingness to fight Islamist terrorism. One remarks, yet again, that when Muslim Brotherhood chief Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt, the first foreign leader to show up to legitimate his election was Hilary Clinton.

As shown by her actions and the company she keeps Hillary was fully on board with the Obama administration Middle East policy.