Grayzone magic makes Jew hatred disappear
Blumenthal and Maté show themselves again to be the ultimate champions of sophistry and prejudice.
Since Oct. 7, 2023 and the outbreak of the latest war in Gaza, a main concern of mine voiced on this newsletter has been that radical groups will seek to spread the violence in the Middle East to the United States and other nations around the world. This is what is meant by such slogans as “globalise the Intifada” and “no justice, no peace”. I’ve made several posts and open letters to figures like Glenn Greenwald in the pro-Palestine camp calling for them to recognise the violent element within their movement, and address it even if it isn’t necessarily possible to expunge it from their ranks. When it comes to the pro-Israel side, while it is much rarer for there to be illegal and violent acts committed in its name, I have been consistent in stating the wrongness and futility of them. And in my offline life I have also had occasion to discourage people from acting in violent or otherwise illegal manners in the name of their activism.
I started with that preamble, because today I listened to one of the worst examples of “this is bad, but they still deserved it” commentary from Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté of The Grayzone as they did everything they could to justify the murders of Israeli Embassy employees Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, without explicitly saying so and claiming that “anti-Semitism” (Jew hatred) played no part in the motive of alleged killer Elias Rodríguez. While there were many similar mealy mouthed reactions from the likes of Cenk Uygur about how the killing was bad for the movement, The Grayzone surpassed everyone else in their use of false equivalencies and moral relativism to paint the murder victims in a negative light while excusing or even vindicating the killer. Here are some lowlights.
What’s on the agenda - and what’s with the blood?
(0:14) Blumenthal, who struggled before labeling the act an “assassination”, erroneously called the event where it occurred a ceremony. It was not a ceremony, but rather per the Wall Street Journal a social event for the American Jewish Committee and panel discussion on the humanitarian challenges in the Middle East for ISRAID, an Israeli relief organisation.
You’re ruining it for the rest of us!
(2:34) Blumenthal characterises the shooting as “adventurism”, “not strategic”, and “likely to legitimise more repression against the Palestine solidarity movement without leading to any pressure on the Israelis”. Or to rephrase: “Why did Elias have to ruin our whole movement predicated on glorifying and inciting violence by acting on our message?”
What goes around. . . keeps going around
(3:37) Continuing after panning the thinking behind the attack as unwise (but not wrong), Blumenthal pivoted to citing some of Lischinsky’s tweets exulting in the killings or assassinations of certain figures over the course of the Gaza conflict, saying that assassination was Israel’s policy against “all political opponents [in Gaza] to avoid a diplomatic solution”. He later repeated after listing a number of other examples “and they assassinate of course Hamas leaders to avoid negotiating with them”. Later (7:16) he lists a number of other figures whose killings Lischinsky had celebrated including Yahya Sinwar, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah the secretary general of the Hezbollah movement in Lebanon, and his aspiration that Abdul Malik al-Houthi would meet the same fate.
By using this series of Lischinsky’s tweets, Blumenthal and Maté were portraying this as an act of karma while blurring the distinction between two unarmed clerical workers at a foreign embassy in a third country and terror warlords engaged in an active military conflict within the geographical area of the conflict. In Sinwar’s case it was not even an assassination, the squad of soldiers that killed him happened to come across him accidentally as he was stumbling through the ruins of the town of Rafah. But even if it had been deliberate, is it really The Grayzone’s position that Sinwar who was well known to publicly brandish a silenced Glock 19 handgun in front of crowds, was merely a “political opponent” with whom Israel was reluctant to negotiate a political solution? Nasrallah’s killing had been executed by use of an airstrike on his bunker underneath a massive multifamily civilian apartment complex.
There’s a very easy rule of thumb to use here: whereas Blumenthal said that both Lischinsky and Milgrim were low level and non-strategic targets, the people least surprised that Nasrallah and Sinwar were being assassinated were themselves. Sinwar was not assassinated on his way to a diplomatic meeting with Israel, nor was Nasrallah, or Ismail Haniye, or Salah al-Arouri. Unlike the two embassy workers they had personally ordered others to carry out acts of violence and were in the midst of a war while serving in positions of authority. The killings of Lischinsky and Milgrim were not “assassinations”, because even their haters like The Grayzone would admit they had no strategic value as targets beyond causing fear to others.
OK, he killed them but he didn’t say mean stuff
Blumenthal went on to decry the travel of Israeli military veterans overseas and their conduct at travel hostels and said (9:21) “they should be prepared to face the consequences”, i.e. even though Blumenthal does not endorse the violence, he sees it as being justified. He later says (12:11) “No institution is stepping up [to hold Israel accountable for genocide]. So then . . . you'll have radical people including people with possible mental illnesses lashing out because there's no recourse. And that's dangerous and that but it's the fault of our elites.”
To be clear, unless he meant a different and therefore irrelevant hypothetical situation, Blumenthal was attempting to characterise Rodríguez as having possible mental illness, which no one has alleged as of yet. All reports are that the killer was a fully sane, functioning adult albeit one with long standing known radical views and affiliations.
Did the nose give it away?
(1:30) The most absurd part of the video was where Maté objected to the characterising of it by the New York Times as antisemitic. He reasoned that Lischinsky was actually “a Christian Zio . . . a Christian evangelical fanatic who thinks that this is the way to cosplay as a Jew”. This is actually something on which I will defer to Maté’s expertise: cosplaying as a jew, meaning someone whose entire Jewish experience is predicated on expressing to the world their contempt for the behaviour and beliefs of Jews. If there’s anything he is as good at besides being an as-a-jew it is pretending to care about the people of Syria, but the passion just isn’t quite there
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The status of Lischinsky’s having been Jewish is immaterial to whether the shooting was an act motivated by hatred against Jews. There has been no indication that Rodríguez specifically was targeting Lischinsky and Milgrim (who was Jewish) as opposed to other attendees, nor that he knew who they were or that Lischinsky was religiously a Christian.
Reports indicate there were two others injured in the attack, although it is not disclosed what was their religon. As the event was one held at the Capital Jewish Museum by the American Jewish Committee, it would be reasonable to derive that Rodríguez thought his targets would be either Jewish or affiliated with the Jewish community in some way. The notion that the motive for the shooting changes because he happened to kill someone who was not Jewish is ludicrous. In 2014 former Ku Klux Klansman Frazier Glenn Cross, Jr. murdered three and injured two more while shooting up a Jewish retirement home and Jewish Community Center parking lot in Overland Park outside Kansas City, Kansas. Shockingly none of the victims were Jewish.
The conclusion that should be reached from this tragedy is the exact opposite of what Blumenthal and Maté are arguing. These killings were nothing like those of the people like Nasrallah, who Maté eulogised last October to a Muslim fundamentalist audience in Tower Hamlets, London saying “we can’t sugarcoat it. . . he was a unique, singular figure”. When Israel acted to kill Nasrallah, it was because of his own personal significance and actions, not because he was a Shiite Muslim from Lebanon and they want to kill anyone like that. When their soldiers killed Yahya Sinwar, it wasn’t because he was a Palestinian Sunni Muslim, but because he was armed person in a war zone who posed a threat to them. But Aaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim posed absolutely no threat or value to their murderer. What as-a-jews like Maté and Blumenthal don’t care about is that a Jew hater like Cross or Rodríguez may set out to kill someone based on who they think he is, but they don’t actually bother to find out if they’re right or wrong.