A couple days ago Max Blumenthal retweeted a photo of Gaza under fire…from 2012. Throughout the twitter-sation I chimed in that this was indicative of how thorough Maxy’s research tends to be. He was included in the mentions, saw my response and decided to follow me. I prophetically joked to some fellow (what I refer to in my head as ) ‘Israellycoolers’ that I was about to get trolled.
That moment came when I made the following tweet last night:
This was in reference to this story about Arabs celebrating the rockets on the Temple Mount [Editor: note also celebrations in Jaffa]
For some reason, Max chose to ignore the multiple conversations I’d had with various people over twitter, including Muslims both inside and outside of Gaza, that same night about wanting peace and how this will end once they have leaders who actually pursue peace over hatred of Israelis (Jews) or at least valued their own citizens lives more than they valued trying to destroy Israel. One conversation was about how, as long as we let extremists on both sides be the most vocal parties, we all lose. I said, repeatedly, I wanted no loss of life to innocents on either side.
I also spent the week before this escalation loudly condemning about, what feels like, a constantly growing list of murdered young people; Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, Naftali Fraenkel, Muhammad Abu Khdeir, Omaima Jaradat and Shelly Dadon, who was murdered in May but whose nationalist-motivated killer was just recently caught.
I literally swore about how infuriated I was to hear Jews had beaten legal Palestinian workers in Hadera. I condemned the on-going violence against Jews in Arab towns. I was heartbrokenly disappointed to find out the suspects who killed Muhammad Abu Khdeir were Jewish and I stated multiple times they need to be treated the same as Arab terrorists-prosecuted to the full extent of the law and have their homes demolished. I feel like I have spent so much time vocally condemning things lately that I am literally out of words and synonyms to express my condemnations without sounding like I’ve created a template and am copying and pasting the details of each horrific occurrence.
Max Blumenthal didn’t even bother to look at any of this (again, there are those research skills on display!) and retweeted my tweet which was intended to point out the hypocrisy of Muslims frequently claiming Jews have no history and no connection to Jerusalem because it is their holy city and we shouldn’t be allowed to touch it. Then multiple rockets hit and caused damage in Jerusalem and the Arab reaction wasn’t “easy there, my Gazan brothers, could you reign it in a little? You just hit Islam’s 3rd holiest city and 300,000 of your Arab brethren live here.” Instead the reaction was to go celebrate that rockets hit their holy city while shouting Allahu Akbar.
I didn’t think what I said was really that controversial. Sure, some could see my comments regarding their fake claims as controversial but there is a multitude of evidence that Jerusalem only became holy once the Jews gained it back from Jordan in 1967. But I assume people don’t know any of that, just like they don’t know most of the history here. That’s fine, for a long time I didn’t either.
Anyway, for some reason Max decided to retweet this one tweet of mine and my prophetic claim that I was going to get trolled came true. And it came true with gems like this:
https://twitter.com/hafizferoz/statuses/486671195454967808
https://twitter.com/DAJHetherington/statuses/486665041693786112
(Max favorited this one)
https://twitter.com/hanaelazzami/statuses/486664214597992448
https://twitter.com/yothisismicah/statuses/486662016359075840
So many people could not fathom that a Proud Zionist could also be pro-peace. People also could not believe a blonde was capable of not being a moron, and I got added both to a list of “Racist Zionists” and “Apartheid Lovers.”
https://twitter.com/sense_amr/statuses/486660940838879232
This one I actually engaged with for far too long. He almost immediately tried to “dead-baby me” by sending me a picture of a dead child and essentially saying “if you’re not all evil, explain this!” After confirming the picture was recent and indeed from Gaza, I responded that I could do it too and shared a photo of one of the murdered Fogel boys but pointed out that while casualties are heartbreaking and sad, this boy was murdered in cold blood, and was by no means an accident. After accusing me of making a disgusting fake, this person backtracked when they must have actually looked up the photo or story of the Fogel family. However, rather than saying what a horrible crime it was, this person then tried to say Israel’s accidental casualty killing of a child was exponentially morally worse than murderers who brutally killed children while they slept, including an infant, purely because they were Jews. As can be expected with people this morally twisted, they eventually lapsed into anti-semitic comments and I ended the conversation.
So these are the people Max Blumenthal’s work appeals to. Jew-hating, Hitler-loving, anti-intellectuals, who are too lazy to do any research that isn’t fed to them by an outlet they have pre-approved. Not that we really needed to question his research capabilities before this, but it just further proves he’d rather incite than resolve, promote himself rather than promote peace, and will cater to some of the worst people in humanity if they will buy his books.
