Max Blumenthal, one of our favorite anti-Semitic activist authors, was recently dis-invited from speaking at an event in Germany, the Algemeiner reports:
The leader of the main opposition party in Germany, the far-left Die Linke (“The Left,”) has shut down a forthcoming party seminar at the German parliament featuring Max Blumenthal, an American writer of Jewish origin whose visceral attacks on Israel are widely regarded as anti-Semitic.
Since Blumenthal is well known for, among other things, harassing our students/ colleagues, spewing blatantly false rhetoric, and just generally hating on Israel, we can’t say we’re disappointed (or even surprised).
Max Blumenthal’s books and articles frequently compare Israel to Nazi Germany, an analogy which many experts on anti-Semitism view as anti-Semitic, since it deliberately seeks to wound the Jewish state by portraying it as no different from a regime that systematically murdered six million Jews and millions of others. A State Department briefing paper on anti-Semitism states unequivocally that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is anti-Semitic. The Simon Wiesenthal Center has included Blumenthal in its “top 10″ list of anti-Semitic slurs for 2013, because of chapter headings in “Goliath,” such as “The Concentration Camp” and “How to Kill Goyim and Influence People.”
More recently, Blumenthal is credited with having invented the Twitter hashtag #JSIL, which stands for “Jewish State in the Levant.” Israel is the equivalent, he believes, of the Islamic State terrorist organization currently engaged in a genocidal campaign against the Christian, Yezidi and Kurdish minorities in Syria and Iraq.
Blumenthal is a frequent visitor to college campuses, but this recent dis-invitation shows that, sometimes, reason prevails, and there are people who agree that naked bigotry is not acceptable.
For more on Blumenthal, check out our Combating Blumenthal infographic.