Max Blumenthal

For the past three days the Israeli Army has sealed off parts of the Old City to prevent radical Jewish settlers from breaking into the Al-Aqsa Mosque to act out their messianic fantasies. The settlers intend to “redeem” the Temple Mount and construct the Third Temple, inciting a religious war in the process.

Incidentally, spent an hour tonight watching Talkline with Zev Brenner on Jewish Life TV, or JLTV. It is channel 120 on New York City’s Time Warner. This show is created by fanatical settlers for the national religious camp’s supporters in the US. It features a guest roster of far-right figures, including a few I’ve seen around Jerusalem and the West Bank. The show is devoted to promoting a Jewish takeover of Al-Aqsa to bring about the “Third Temple” . A look at JLTV’s programming shows a non-stop parade of pro-settler TV. Arutz Sheva, the official news network of the settlement movement, is among the sponsors of a show called, “Tuesday Night Live.”

“We need to invest all of our efforts into the Temple Mount and rebuilding the Third Temple,” Zev Brenner proclaims during his show.

Another speaker appears beside Brenner and declares, “Israel is divided into two camps: the whiners and the heroes.” The heroes, he explains, are the people “who lace up their boots, put on their uniforms, and go out and fight for the Israeli Army…They don’t whine about the politicians, they go out and do what’s asked of them.”

He goes on: “God brings a war because he needs to bring the best out of us. When we shine a light, it’s brightest when we come together [in war].”

Jason Alexander promotes JLTV at the 2009 Friends of the IDF Fundraising Gala

The program goes straight into footage of the IDF tanks going into Gaza during the early 2009 assault. An IDF officer assures the “residents of the South” that he will protect them. Then soldiers are seen praying with tefilin before entering Gaza. Shimon Peres enters the prayer tent to pump up the soldiers and prays with them. The footage highlights the role religious fervor played in elevating the soldiers’ morale as they prepared to attack Gaza.

“The leader of Iran says he has two sons: Hezbollah and Hamas,” Peres declares. “Now he will have two crippled sons!” The soldiers break into song: “Am Yisrael Chai! Am Yisrael Chai!”

Footage of destroyed Palestinian homes and civilian buildings is shown. “Massive force was used immediately upon entry in order to protect the lives of the Israeli soldiers,” a narrator says. Then Israeli soldiers appear at leisure in Palestinian homes they have seized from their owners.

The role of religious Zionist soldiers from the settlements is highlighted throughout the segment. Tviki Bar-Chai, the father of soldier Dvir, recalled how his family was evacuated from the radical Jewish settlement Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip in 2005. He reveals his son’s intention to place an orange flag on the ruins of the former settlement after the Gazans were sufficiently pacified by the assault. “He wanted to make a statement that way, to say, we made a mistake [by evacuating Gush Katif],” the father says of his son’s plan.

A cellphone video is shown depicting dozens of Israeli soldiers just before entering the Gaza Strip. This video was given to Dvir Bar-Chai to cheer him up after being injured and hospitalized. The soldiers are seen dancing together and singing a religious Zionist song about getting revenge “just this once” against “the Philistines.”

Finally, Jason Alexander of TV’s Seinfeld appears in a plug for JLTV. JDate is identified as a main sponsor of Talkline with Zev Brenner.

As the anti-Goldstone, human rights-bashing Lawfare Project’s opening event on March 11 wrapped up, I asked its chairman, Columbia University Law School Dean David Schizer, for an interview. Schizer, who had just attacked the Goldstone Report from the podium, pointedly refused to speak to me and looked for the exit. As Schizer was leaving, he was politely confronted by Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke, who heads the school’s Program in Gender and Sexuality Law.

“Why didn’t you invite any speakers with an alternative perspective?” Franke asked Schizer.

His reply was curt. “We invited one or two but they couldn’t make it,” Schizer claimed before hurrying away.

Schizer was understandably nervous about his exposure. After all, he had just presided over a day-long conference during which Israeli human rights workers were labeled as traitors while Judge Richard Goldstone and human rights groups were compared to “anti-Semitic street gangs.” After several speakers had harshly condemned legal efforts against the construction of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Schizer appeared beside them to lend his credibility to their views.

Schizer attacks Goldstone

Held in the ornate NY County Lawyers Association meeting room in downtown Manhattan, where the walls were adorned with portraits of the pioneers of international jurisprudence, the Lawfare Project’s conference had the look of a non-partisan academic conference. However, the event was organized by a network of American Zionist groups and conservative operatives with apparent encouragement from the Israeli government.

As Scott Horton noticed at Harper’s, the Lawfare Project’s rollout event followed a remarkably similar conference in Jerusalem two weeks earlier. Both conferences followed legislation in the Knesset designed to force NGO’s to disclose their foreign donors so they can be more easily branded as a fifth column and to strangle human rights groups in Israel and occupied Palestine.

The presence of high-level Israeli officials like UN Ambassador Gabriela Shalev at the Lawfare Project conference suggested that the Netanyahu administration was the hidden hand behind the event. If so, the Israeli government has deployed its American Jewish allies to take the fight across the Atlantic to groups like Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Both groups were attacked at the event as anti-Israeli and anti-American.

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(Videos recorded by Rachel Tabachnick; more videos coming shortly.)

Vice President Joe Biden was greeted in Jerusalem with the announcement that the Israeli Interior Ministry approved the construction of 1600 new homes in Occupied East Jerusalem contrary to U.S. wishes and complicating Biden’s mission to help jump start the peace process. But Biden should have known that Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu intended to upset his plans by Netanyahu’s appearance with John Hagee.

The day after a series of talks between US Special Envoy for the Middle East George Mitchell and Netanyahu, and a day before Biden’s arrival, Netanyahu appeared onstage with Pastor John Hagee in Jerusalem. The occasion was Hagee’s Night To Honor Israel, an event the far-right Texas-based preacher arranged to tout his ministry’s millions in donations to Israeli organizations and to level bellicose rhetoric against Israel’s perceived enemies.

At the gathering, Hagee called Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “the Hitler of the Middle East” and denounced the Goldstone Report as “character assassination by an unbiased and uninformed committee.”

Netanyahu welcomed the crowd of 1000 American evangelicals to Jerusalem, a city he described as “the undivided, eternal capitol of the Jewish people. Then, he told them, “I salute you! The Jewish people salute you!” He used the rest of his speech to call for “tough, biting sanctions” against Iran that “bite deep into its energy sector.”

Hagee and Netanyahu appear together on stage:

In the audience were top-level members of the Israeli government, from Ambassador Michael Oren to Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. Also present was Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, the chief rabbi of the illegal West Bank settlement of Efrat who gained notoriety for lobbying President Bill Clinton to pardon his friend, fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Ayalon had stirred controversy days before when he refused to meet with a US congressional delegation brought to Israel by the progressive Jewish group J Street.

Part One of Hagee’s speech:

Part Two:

Pastor Hagee in Jerusalem 3/8/10 (Part II) from Max J Blumenthal on Vimeo.

Hagee’s ceremony featured a 15-minute film highlighting the recipients of donations from John Hagee Ministries that totaled $58 million since 2001. The recipients included Jewish settlements from the West Bank like Gush Etzion and Shomron, which was involved in promoting an “Obama Hilltop project” that promoted more settlement building and compared Obama to Pharoah. Hagee also announced funding for a pressure group run by the settlers evacuated from Gush Katif in Gaza in 2005. During Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2009, a group of Gush Katif residents lobbied the Israel government to allow them to resettle the Palestinian coastal region.

Who is Hagee funding in Israel?

Who Is Hagee Funding In Israel? from Max Blumenthal on Vimeo.

The most notable of Hagee’s funding recipients was an organization called Im Tirtzu. A student representative of this group appeared in the film to thank Hagee for “help[ing] us to ensure that students in Israel are on the right path, the path of Zionism, the love of Israel, the path of solidarity.” Another student called for “the second revolution in Israel.”

In February, Im Tirtzu funding a smear campaign against former Knesset member and New Israel Fund Director Naomi Chazan that included posters caricaturing her with a horn on her head. The group misleadingly accused the New Israel Fund of bankrolling 16 human rights organizations that contributed documentation to the Goldstone Report.

The smear campaign led to unsuccessful legislation in the Knesset designed to further cripple already marginalized Israeli human rights groups. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post fired Chazan as a columnist without explanation. Gideon Levy, a columnist for Ha’aretz, called Im Tirtzu “a McCarthyite movement” for its attacks on Chazan.

Although CUFI attempted to distance itself from Im Tirtzu’s campaign, the organization’s appearance during CUFI’s Jerusalem ceremony suggested that Hagee would continue to provide it with funding well into the future.

Republican Senator John McCain repudiated the endorsement of Hagee during his 2008 presidential campaign after Hagee’s statements describing the Holocaust as a fulfillment of divine prophecy came to light. Hagee has also said that he believed the anti-Christ was “partially Jewish, as was Adolph Hitler.” However, none of Hagee’s comments have deterred Israeli government officials from embracing him or accepting his millions in annual charity.

During Hagee’s speech, he made no secret of his support for the illegal settlement enterprise that has been the source of difficulties between the US and Israel. “The settlements are not the problem,” he boomed from the podium. “The problem is the refusal of Arab leaders to respect the right of Jewish people to live anywhere in the Middle East.”

Hagee received a rousing ovation from the crowd and the Israeli government officials seated beside the podium when he proclaimed, “World leaders do not have the authority to tell Israel and the Jewish people what they can and cannot do in the city of Jerusalem. They don’t have the authority to tell them what they can and cannot build, who can and and cannot live there.”

The following day, on March 9, Vice President Joseph Biden arrived in Israel to meet with Netanyahu and officials from the Palestinian Authority. He told reporters after touching down that he saw “a moment of real opportunity.”

A complete list of Israeli organizations funded by John Hagee Ministries is below the fold: (more…)

In the days leading up to Israeli Apartheid Week’s opening event at Columbia University, leading anti-Muslim blogger Pam Geller posted an image of an SS officer with the name of one of the event’s speakers, Ben White, emblazoned on his uniform. (The image recalled placards held by far-right settlers depicting Yitzhak Rabin in an SS uniform just days before he was assassinated.) Geller was among the crowd at the Columbia event, making sure to catch White’s eye as he walked to the podium to speak. He told me that she mouthed to him, “You’re a Nazi.” The day after the event, Geller posted another characteristically juvenile screed describing White as “Nazi boy.”

There is little reason to engage a figure like Geller on the merits of her deranged characterizations. And it would be unfair to ascribe crude views like hers to the established pro-Israel groups working to discredit Israeli Apartheid Week. Their tactics are slightly more sophisticated, even if they have also demonstrated a reluctance to engage White and other participants on the facts about Israel’s systematic dispossession of the Palestinians. (Canadian pro-Israel students have united around a vaguely pornographic counter-campaign called “Size Doesn’t Matter” that invokes insecurities about penis length and equates traveling to Israel with the pleasure of oral sex.)

Pam Geller: "How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League"

Geller’s attacks on White are worth discussing only in light of their irony. She is, after all, a fervent supporter of a British fascist group comprised of soccer hooligans and skinhead thugs who have delivered sig heil salutes en masse at their rallies while also displaying Israeli flags — a most bizarre melange. Geller’s endorsement of the shadowy fascist group, called the English Defense League, highlights the reorganization of the British far-right around an anti-Muslim, pro-Zionist platform designed to cultivate alliances with influential online fanatics like her.

On the same day Geller posted her smear of White, she promoted a rally in defense of the Dutch anti-Muslim extremist Geert Wilders by the English Defense League (EDL) (Wilders has called for a “head rag tax” on Muslim women who wear hijab).

“How I wish I could be there to stand with the English Defense League,” Geller pined.

The Pam Geller-approved EDL burns an anti-Nazi flag

So what happens at a typical EDL rally? According to a report by Wales Online, at an October 2009 rally in Swansea by the EDL’s Wales-based affiliate, the Welsh Defense League, “onlookers were confronted with scenes of jeering men giving Nazi salutes.” At another rally in Stoke on Trent in January, intoxicated EDL activists in black masks attempted to break through police lines to assault anti-racist protesters around the block, injuring several police officers in the process.

Who belongs to the EDL? The group’s muscle is provided by thugs affiliated with the right-wing football hooligan club, Casuals United. The Casuals are led by an infamous thug who goes by the name “Tommy Robinson” and who will only appear in public in a balaclava. The Casuals are themselves a front for the another violent football hooligan gang called Soul Crew. Soul Crew’s former leader, Jeff Marsh, is now the head of the Welsh Defense League and a recruiter for the Casuals.

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While I was filming for a forthcoming project at CPAC, I was confronted by Hannah Giles, Andrew Breitbart and a mob of crazed teabaggers. They were enraged by an article I wrote for Salon.com about James O’Keefe’s attendance of and assistance with a white nationalist event featuring open racialists Jared Taylor and John Derbyshire as well as Kevin Martin of the right-wing front group Project 21. Project 21, by the way, is a black front group created and is operated by white conservative operatives to provide cover to figures like Taylor.

Did O’Keefe plan the event with his friend, the white nationalist Marcus Epstein? O’Keefe’s role in helping out with and freely attending the event, along with his palling around with characters like Epstein and Taylor highlighted a career filled with racist pranks, from his ACORN pimp costume minstrel show (see Bradblog on the deceptive means Breitbart used to push the pimp costume myth) to his “affirmative action bake sale,” in which he and his friends charged white students extra for baked goods while minorities ate for little or nothing. Then there are his diaries about the hell of living in a multicultural university environment. James O’Keefe, the apparent hero of the conservative movement’s youth wing, is what racism looks like today.

The only time Breitbart and his goon squad get upset about racism is when they think it is somehow being directed against white people like themselves. That’s why a particularly manic mob member who wouldn’t stop using the word “rubric” seemed to argue to me against the existence of the Congressional Black Caucus because it would not allow a hostile conservative congressman to join. And it’s why when CPAC chose as its keynote speaker the race-baiter Glenn Beck, who claimed Obama has “a deep-seated hatred for white people.”

It is also worth noting that CPAC played host to Thomas Woods, a former leader of the white supremacist League of the South and contributor to the neo-secessionist Southern Partisan magazine. And that CPAC held a seminar called “Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe of Liberty?” led by Thomas DiLorenzo, another League of the South figure who insists Lincoln was the very embodiment of evil. The presence at CPAC of Islamophobes Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller (Geller once argued Obama was “involved with a crack whore in his youth”), promoters of the European neo-fascist Geert Wilders, can not be overlooked either. And stay tuned for my interview with Birther leader Philip Berg, who insisted Obama was actually an Indonesian Muslim who should be tried for treason and possibly executed. These people must have left their sheets at the dry cleaners.

Breitbart’s tirade against me was filled with irony. The most glaring projection was that I was using “Alinsky tactics,” referring to left-wing community organizer Saul Alinsky. For the record, I skimmed Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” about 14 years ago and can hardly remember what was in it. However, Breitbart’s boy, James O’Keefe, boasted to the LA Times that Alinsky’s book was the blueprint for his work.

Breitbart went on to say that calling someone a racist was the worst thing anyone could do. Actually, there is something worse than that: promoting and paying a racist. And that’s what Breitbart is doing with O’Keefe. Meanwhile, Breitbart has some interesting views of his own on racial issues. Besides calling the Holocaust Museum shooter James von Brunn a “multiculturalist, just like the black studies and the lesbian studies majors on college campuses,” Breitbart has howled about “black studies intimidation.” As usual, he only sees racism when it is supposedly directed against white people like himself.

According to a recent study by the Pew Center on the States, one out of every 100 adults in the United States is in prison. One of every nine black males between the ages of 20 and 34 has been behind bars, a scandalous statistic owing itself in part to the failed and racially biased drug war, which mandates the warehousing of non-violent drug offenders for long periods of time.

I look forward to working with James O’Keefe on prison reform.

I was mobbed on two occasions at CPAC while shooting a short documentary for the Independent Film Project. I was prepared for some hostility after the crazed Andrew Breitbart declared jihad but I have to admit that by the end, I was pretty drained. The first mob, which consisted of about 40 people, gathered after Hannah Giles confronted me and asked me to apologize to James O’Keefe, who is being hailed at CPAC as the movement’s victim hero. I talked to Giles, who was totally civil, along with a few more crazed members of the mob for about 45 minutes, until they dispersed. Giles refused to say who was funding O’Keefe but conceded that he never appeared in any ACORN offices dressed as a pimp. (That contradicts earlier claims by Breitbart and O’Keefe).

The second mob was inadvertently incited by Breitbart, who ran into me as I was trying to escape from a few parasitic and barely coherent characters who felt unsatisfied by their interactions with me during the second mobbing. Breitbart introduced himself by telling me (weirdly), “You’re the best at what you do,” or something to that effect, then came unhinged and unleashed a tirade of insults, refusing to let me speak. I’m sure some of his right-wing fans will celebrate his uninterrupted temper tantrum. Others will see Breitbart as the unstable and desperate character he is. Meanwhile, most sane people will not care.

Because I was shooting for an IFC show that is scheduled to air in May, I am awaiting authorization from the network to post a little footage online. If I get it, I’ll have some video out by late tomorrow or Monday.

Update: Video should be ready for tomorrow, assuming I get approval. Here’s a classic Breitbart freakout, courtesy of Tommy Christopher (highlights include Breitbart’s refusal to address O’Keefe’s pimp costume, his discussion of Gary Bauer, Dan Savage and mucus; his description of me as “evil, evil, evil;” and his blaming of Wade Rathke for the plight of inner city African-Americans):

When an architect named Norman Pfeiffer designed the Evo DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson, Ariz., he claimed to have been inspired by its natural surroundings. “From afar,” Pfeiffer told Architecture Week, “the desert tells little of what it knows. … But upon closer scrutiny it reveals its true self.”

The 413,000-square-foot, $67.3 million monolith that Pfeiffer erected blends easily with the pale desert landscape flanking downtown Tucson. The earth-toned structure appears so bland a casual passer-by might not even take a second glance. Only a few observers have ventured inside to witness the spectacle that takes place on the third floor.

The show begins each day at 1 p.m., when about 75 undocumented immigrants just captured along the U.S.-Mexico border are marched into the room in leg irons and manacles and compelled all at once to plead guilty to entering the country illegally. Although the proceeding has the trappings of a trial, the defendants never challenge the charges against them, and are clearly discouraged from doing so. They know their fate is preordained: deportation to a border town, separation from their families and occasionally a few months in a privatized prison.

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On February 9, Intelligence Squared sponsored a debate on the resolution: “The US should step back from its special relationship with Israel.” Debating in favor of the resolution were Roger Cohen and Rashid Khalidi; against it were former US Ambassador to the European Union Stuart Eizenstat and former Israeli Ambassador to the US and ex Tel Aviv University President Itamar Rabinovich. I was among the overflow crowd of several hundred people that packed New York University’s student union for the event.

The debate was introduced by Robert Rosenkranz, the insurance magnate who launched Intelligence Squared through his foundation. He set the tone by commenting, “Well this could be the year that Iran gets the bomb… And getting back to a nuclear Iran, Israel might well be our best shield. Israel did the U.S., in the region, a favor, I would argue, by bombing the Syrian reactor. Maybe it will do the dirty work again so we don’t have to tolerate a nuclear Iran.”

(Intelligence Squared Executive Producer Dana Wolfe is a former staffer to Benjamin Netanyahu; Rosenkranz’s daughter-in-law, Stephanie Hessler, who helps him direct the foundation, is an outspoken neocon who has defended torture and assailed Obama’s policies on prosecuting accused terrorists).

Eisenstat led the argument against the resolution. He insisted that pulling away from Israel would be “a sign of American weakness” that would send a chill down the spine of our European allies, as though America would pull away from Great Britain next. Then he made a point I’d never heard before: Israel, with its massive arsenal of nuclear weapons, was actually “stopping nuclear proliferation” in the Middle East. A few more of Eisenstat’s arguments:

–Israel “was forming a 21st century culture.”
–Ehud Barak offered Arafat 95 percent of the West Bank and Arafat “walked away;” “There is no reliable Palestinian partner.”
–Countries in the “Moslem” world were not sufficiently “dependent American allies” like Israel has been
–Saudi Arabia is not a reliable ally because it exports “Wahabinism.” Only Israel can be depended on in the Middle East.
–The Palestinian response to “dismantling settlements [in Gaza], dismantling 3000 people” was rocket fire. Again, there is no “Palestinian partner.”

The most baseless of Eisenstat’s points, in my view, was that, “The Palestinians would have a state by now if there was a Palestinian Martin Luther King.” This often repeated canard went unchallenged by Cohen and Khalidi, who had been handed a golden opportunity to inform the audience about Mubarak Awad, Jamal Juma, Mohammad Othman, and the hundreds, if not thousands, of non-violent activists who have been killed, deported, captured, and tortured by Israel. The debaters could have said, “If Martin Luther King were Palestinian, he would have been assassinated or jailed and tortured.” And they could have highlighted Eisenstat’s unintentional, but apt, comparison of Israel to the Jim Crow South. Instead, when Khalidi was asked about Eisenstat’s point during Q&A, he launched into an analysis of the Madrid conference of 1991. This was the biggest missed opportunity of the night, in my opinion.

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Matthew Vadum has taken to David Horowitz’s NewsReal blog to call me a “self-hating Jew.” Actually, Vadum attempted to distance himself from his predictable canard by saying I have been “frequently called a self-hating Jew by [my] critics.” (Marty’s boy once called me a self-hating Jew but Commentary apparently forced him to scrub his post; I don’t know who the other critics are). So is Vadum a Jew himself or is this just a particularly clear case of right-wing goyisherkop? And does David Horowitz, who was raised by Stalinists with no religion and who called his own father an “old Yid” in his memoir, “Radical Son” (then compared him to Mohammed Atta in a subsequent memoir), agree with the nature of Vadum’s attack?

Horowitz has harbored a vendetta against me ever since I pointed out that one of his writers was defending a neo-Nazi professor who called a college basketball team “nigger to the core” and denounced Fairleigh Dickinson University as “a Jewish plutocratic university.” Horowitz went on to embarrass himself in three separate interactions with me and now, he’s defending James O’Keefe’s weird minstrel show as some sort of payback. He is a very fragile and unstable personality. See his histrionics below the fold.

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