How Max Blumenthal Lies About Israel
Moments ago, we posted an item about anti-Israel activist David Sheen’s brazen mistranslation of Benjamin Netanyahu, a lie he used to shamefully draw an analogy between the Israeli prime minister and the Nazis.
Not to be outdone, fellow extremist Max Blumenthal is likewise spreading blatant lies on Twitter about Israeli prime ministers:
@damianjread he made those remarks to Molodet activists.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 18, 2014
The comment was made in support of, and in elaboration of, another Twitter user’s claim that Ariel Sharon had said:
It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time.
The first is that there is no Zionism, colonialism, or Jewish state without the eviction of the Arabs or the expropriation of their land.
The classy image Blumenthal approvingly commented on, which appears above, claims the quote was reported by wire service Agence France Press on November 15, 1998. When Blumenthal was asked on Twitter to provide substantiation for the quote, he remained silent. When Twitter users informed him that the quote appeared to be a hoax, he again failed to reply, and did not delete or amend his tweet.
As Anthony Julius reported several years ago pointed out on the (now defunct) Z-Word blog, the quote
is taken from an op-ed column in the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahronot of July 4 1972. At the time, Ariel Sharon was head of the IDF’s southern command. Even given Israel’s relatively open political culture, it would have been surprising to find him publicly calling for the eviction of Arabs from their homes and for the expropriation of their land.
He did not do so (though it is common enough in anti-Zionist discourse falsely to attribute blood-curdling statements to him). Yeshayahu Ben-Porat, a journalist and commentator, in fact wrote the words. In the column from which the quotation has been taken, Ben-Porat called on the government to recognise honestly the implications of occupation.
Nurit Baytch, who had quickly raised doubts about the false quote, noticed that the Twitter user Max Blumenthal supported has previously spread anti-Semitism on Twitter — for example, an image in which Facebook is hilariously described as “Nosebook” and its Jewish founder was depicted as an octopus with a long hook nose.
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