Max Blumenthal

As of 2019, Blumenthal has published four books. His first, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (2009), made The New York Times bestsellers list that year. He contributes regularly to the Russian propaganda outlets Sputnik and RT.

Eric Alterman, writing for The Nation wrote that its author "proves a profoundly unreliable narrator" and his book will "do nothing to advance the interests of the occupation’s victims." His article and an extract from Blumenthal's book in the same issue led to many letters being sent to The Nation, several of which were published in the next issue rebuking The Nation for publishing Alterman's article. Abdeen Jabara, Past president of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, wrote saying he was troubled by The Nation presenting "two sides" by allowing Alterman to do a "hatchet job" on Blumenthal's work, because "there is no equivalency between whatever Palestinians have done or are doing and what Israel and Zionism have done to the Palestinians." Charles H. Manekin, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland and former Director of the Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies and others wrote a letters challenging the accuracy of Alterman's article. Alterman's assertion in his original piece about the book being "technically accurate" was queried and he explained it was an issue of context, as Blumenthal "tells us only the facts he wishes us to know and withholds crucial ones that undermine his relentlessly anti-Israel narrative."

Blumenthal testified at the Russell Tribunal that he arrived in Gaza "at the onset of a five-day humanitarian ceasefire on August 14." According to Petra Marquardt Bigman, however, his interviews at the end of July indicate he was in Washington DC which suggests he was probably elsewhere, rather than "on the ground", for the first few weeks of the war. A tweet on August 22, she said, indicated Blumenthal had by then left the area. His book The 51 Day War was marketed as an "explosive work of reportage", but the author only spent a fraction of the period there. Marquardt Bigman wrote that certain of his tweets show an "uncritical acceptance of the terror group’s propaganda", a reference to Hamas. He did return to Gaza just prior or shortly after Hamas accepted an indeterminate ceasefire to cover the "victory rallies."

In September 2019, Blumenthal visited Damascus as part of an American delegation to take part in an Assad-backed trade union convention which announced it stood "against the economic blockade, imperialist interventions and terrorism." Assad's government does not allow independent labor unions and strikes are illegal. Americans in general were otherwise not receiving travel visas to Syria at this time. Also part of the same delegation, were individuals Idrees Ahmad described for Al Jazeera as "other pro-Assad conspiracy theorists", including Rania Khalek, Paul Larudee of the Syrian Solidarity Movement, Ajamu Baraka and former RT producer Anya Parampil. The delegation visited government-held areas and, according to Idrees Ahmad, were accompanied by a minder from the Assad government.

In 2019, Bellingcat reported that Blumenthal, along with other reporters, had received a financial award for "uncompromised integrity in journalism" from a non-profit group that supports the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Blumenthal denied the allegation. Blumenthal challenged some of the assertions from his critics when he was interviewed by Rolling Stone in November 2019.

For Blumenthal's writing on Ukraine, Sławomir Sierakowski, the head of the Polish liberal, pro-European group Krytyka Polityczna, included Blumenthal in an article entitled "Putin’s Useful Idiots" in 2014. He said in a New York Times article that Blumenthal "distorts" the events of Euromaidan in his reporting. The Ukrainian fact-checking organization StopFake describes Blumenthal as a "pro-Russia American journalist" who is used by Russia to "spread its propaganda message".

Lydia Wilson, in a Times Literary Supplement review, was critical of Blumenthal's The Management of Savagery (2019). In her review, Wilson wrote that the author overstates his case "with misleading or one-sided examples" in an account of the United States involvement in wars during the previous two decades which "tips sufficiently and with enough regularity into full-scale conspiracy to allow any careful reader to dismiss it." Wilson commented that Blumenthal "uses long-debunked myths", originating from Russian and Syrian sources, to explain the Ghouta chemical attack in 2013.

On 24 February 2019, Blumenthal posted an article to The Grayzone website about clashes on 23 February on the Colombia–Venezuela border during the 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis and the shipping of humanitarian aid to Venezuela. In the article, Blumenthal dismissed the assertion that Venezuelan security forces loyal to Nicolás Maduro had used tear gas to set fire to humanitarian aid trucks that were attempting to enter Venezuela from Colombia. He said footage from Bloomberg News showed that opposition protesters on the Francisco de Paula Santander bridge in the border were preparing Molotov cocktails, "which could easily set a truck cabin or its cargo alight". He referred to having seen similar situations during his reporting on the West Bank.

On October 25, 2019, Blumenthal was arrested and charged with assault in a case related to a May 7 incident at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC. Blumenthal said his arrest was "clearly part of a campaign of political persecution designed to silence me and The Grayzone for our factual journalism exposing the deceptions, corruption and violence of the far-right Venezuelan opposition". The US Department of Justice dropped the case against Blumenthal on 6 December 2019.

In November 2017, Blumenthal discussed the decision of the United States Department of Justice to classify RT as a "foreign agent" in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News. He said to Carlson: "I go on RT fairly regularly, and the reason I do so is because, while the three major cable networks are promoting bombing and sanctioning half the world, at least the non-compliant nations, RT is questioning that." New Politics, stated in 2018 that Blumenthal is "found almost every week defending Russian foreign policy on platforms such as RT and Sputnik", and that Blumenthal has defended Russia's role in the Syrian Civil War.

At the beginning of February 2016, it became known via a release of emails from the State Department, that during her four years as Secretary of State, Sidney Blumenthal had sent Hillary Clinton at least 19 articles by Max concerning Israel which she had distributed among her staff. In August 2010, she emailed the elder Blumenthal to say: "Pls congratulate Max for another impressive piece. He’s so good." Alan Dershowitz, also an associate of the Clintons, warned of the potential for problems over the connection with someone so critical of Israel.

When the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel died in July 2016, Max Blumenthal tweeted that "Wiesel went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them" and "did more harm than good and should not be honored" and made other claims. In a statement to The Jerusalem Post, Jake Sullivan, then senior policy adviser for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, said: "Secretary Clinton emphatically rejects these offensive, hateful, and patently absurd statements about Elie Wiesel."

Blumenthal asserted in October 2016 that the White Helmets were involved in a "false flag conspiracy" to claim an area had been targeted by the Syrian and Russian military. Charles Davis in an article for New Politics stated: "In fact, a White Helmet' s member was among the first civilians to appear on camera at the scene of the attack, declaring in English that 'the regime helicopters targeted this place with four barrel [bombs]'." In an article for Grayzone, Blumenthal defended the assault on Aleppo ("one of the greatest losses for the empire since the fall of Saigon") by Syrian and Russia forces in September 2016, which the United Nations (UN) concluded was a war crime. He called for a "war on terror" by the "deep state" against those forces opposing "Russia and Iran, and Syria as well, countries which have really no intention to attack the United States."

Oz Katerji wrote in Haaretz in July 2017, that "[v]irtually any group that speaks out on the Assad regime’s campaign of systematic slaughter have been targeted by this coterie", consisting of Blumenthal, Gareth Porter, Ben Norton and Rania Khalek "with the express intention of defending a regime guilty of human extermination." Gershom Gorenberg wrote on October 14, 2016 for The American Prospect that "Blumenthal's concern for Arab lives and rights seems to vanish once he locates the Assad regime as an opponent of American hegemony." In January 2017, following claims made by the Syrian government, he blamed the contamination of the water supply for Damascus in the Wadi Barada valley on militants opposed to the government. A subsequent report by the UN found that “Syria’s air force deliberately bombed water sources in December [2016], a war crime that cut off water [to] 5.5 million people in and around the capital Damascus." He tweeted in April 2018 that every time government forces "liberate" a rebel held area those opponents of Assad "allege a chemical attack." Around the same time, he appeared on Sky News Australia to assert that the Syrian rebels were probably responsible for the Douma chemical attack. "I cannot think of one pundit on the national scene, in cable news or in any major newspaper who has questioned the drive for regime change in Syria", he told Al Jazeera in an interview in June 2018. It is "left to a small group of journalists and online activists to really sift through what we believe is disinformation from our own governments aimed at stimulating a war of regime change."

In discussions surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, Blumenthal expressed skepticism of the extent of the operation and remarked that MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's "dots may never connect." He expressed concern that use of such a narrative prevented the Democratic Party in the United States from being able to "do anything progressive". Blumenthal appeared on the Russian Sputnik website in December 2017 to state his opinion that "the Trump transition team colluded with a foreign power to subvert America’s political system", referring not to Russia, but their supposed "collusion" with Israel.

Blumenthal has broadcast on RT, formerly known as Russia Today, on many occasions. In December 2015, during an all-expenses paid trip to Moscow, Blumenthal attended RT's 10 Years On Air anniversary party attended by President Vladimir Putin, then-Lieutenant General Michael Flynn of the United States and English politician Ken Livingstone. In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News in November 2017, Blumenthal defended RT against "the charge that it’s Kremlin propaganda." He has also contributed on multiple occasions to Sputnik. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone website a month after his visit to Moscow. Gilbert Achcar wrote in an October 2019 article for New Politics magazine that along with the World Socialist Web Site, Blumenthal's Grayzone has "the habit of demonizing all left-wing critics of Putin and the likes of Assad by describing them as 'agents of imperialism' or some equivalent."

In The 51 Day War (2015), Blumenthal writes that he was in Gaza during and following Operation Protective Edge, the Israeli military offensive in Gaza during the summer of 2014. Blumenthal believed that the catalyst was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by a Hamas cell. He asserted that the West Bank operation that Israel initiated was not aimed at rescuing the teens, who were known to be dead, or capturing their killers, but destroying a political agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority by targeting the Palestinian Unity Government.

According to Janine di Giovanni in The New York Review of Books, after his visit to Moscow in December 2015, he began to promote views supportive of Bashar al Assad and the Syrian government's position. Blumenthal, she wrote, was among a group of "Assad apologists." After the December 2015 trip, he claimed the White Helmets were connected to Al-Qaeda and anti-Assad Syrians were members of the group. In his opinion, they were being used as a Trojan horse, an excuse for the United States to propose having "70,000 American servicemen" invade Syria.

Blumenthal formerly contributed weekly articles to the AlterNet website, serving as a senior writer from September 2014. While working for AlterNet, he heavily focused on the Middle East while occasionally covering domestic US issues, such as corporate media consolidation, the influence of the Christian right, and police brutality.

In 2014, Blumenthal covered hunger strikes by undocumented migrants held in the privatized Northwest Detention Center for The Nation.

Blumenthal appeared before the Russell Tribunal on September 25, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium, to testify before a jury examining allegations of war crimes and genocidal intent by the Israeli military against residents of the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge.

Blumenthal and Canadian-Israeli journalist David Sheen were invited by Inge Höger and Annette Groth, members of The Left (Die Linke) party, to speak with them in the German parliament, the Bundestag, with the meeting being scheduled for November 12, 2014. Blumenthal and Steen stated that Höger and Groth's party colleague Gregor Gysi, tried to cancel the meetings on the basis that Blumenthal and Sheen held radical views on Israeli settlements, while Gysi wished to dissociate the Left Party from anti-Israel campaigning.

After this event, Blumenthal and Sheen were banned from setting foot in the Bundestag again. In an e-mail explaining the ban, Bundestag president Norbert Lammert stated: "Every attempt to exert pressure on members of parliament, to physically threaten them and thus endanger the parliamentary process is intolerable and must be prevented". A meeting with the participation of Blumenthal and Sheen at Berlin’s Volksbühne ("People's Theatre") on November 9, 2014 (the anniversary of Kristallnacht) to discuss Israel's "war crimes" in Gaza was also cancelled.

Of the Battle of Shujaiya in July 2014 in 51 Days War, Blumenthal wrote of the Al-Qassam Brigades (the military wing of Hamas) who ambushed IDF soldiers, that although they "had not vanquished the vaunted Israeli Army", "they delivered a bloody nose to its most elite units." Sonali Kolhatkar wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books that "Blumenthal’s casting of the Al-Qassam Brigades as an army of resistance against a brutal aggressor is an essential transgression from the standard narrative of the Middle East conflict." Kirkus Reviews described the book as being "Explosive, pull-no-punches reporting that is certain to stir controversy."

CBS reported that Palin responded to the story in an email to Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign manager Steve Schmidt: "Pls get in front of that ridiculous issue that's cropped up all day today – two reporters, a protestor's sign, and many shout-outs all claiming Todd's involvement in an anti-American political party ... It's bull, and I don't want to have to keep reacting to it ... Pls have statement given on this so it's put to bed." In 2008, he posted video footage of Christian preacher Thomas Muthee praying over Sarah Palin (then a candidate for Governor of Alaska) and asking God to keep her safe from witchcraft.

Blumenthal has written two books based on the period of time which he spent in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank. He documented what he said were Israeli and Palestinian war crimes in two books: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013) and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza (2015).

An event was held at the University of Pennsylvania event on October 17, 2013 featuring Ian Lustick conversing with Blumenthal to discuss Goliath. Blumenthal objected to what he saw as "Israel's attempt to engineer and maintain a Jewish, non-indigenous majority", the Jewish population he alleged having an "attraction to Europe" (The Mizrahi, who constitute about half of Israel's Jewish population, have lived in the Middle East and North Africa since before the arrival of Islam.) Blumenthal said: "there is absolutely no way for Jewish people in Israel/Palestine to become indigenized under the present order. And that's what really has to happen." Consequently they should be "willing to be a part of the Arab world." A "choice needs to be placed to the Israeli Jewish population" (which he also referred to as the "settler-colonial population") "and it can only be placed to them through external pressure." "The maintenance and engineering of a non-indigenous demographic majority is non-negotiable", he said. Philip Weiss of the Mondoweiss website responded to Blumenthal's comments saying that "similar attitudes about indigenous culture have been used in intolerant ways in our society. I see some intolerance in that answer." In the Acknowledgements to Goliath, Blumenthal wrote that websites such as Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss had "provided essential outlets for much of the reporting" contained in the book.

In 2013, Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that the center ranked Blumenthal as ninth that year for one of the Top Ten 2013 Anti-Semitic, Anti-Israel Slurs. Hier said that "we judge him by what he wrote. He crossed the line into outright anti-Semitism" and that "he quotes approvingly characterizations of Israeli soldiers as 'Judeo-Nazis'". Blumenthal responded by saying the Wiesenthal Center's list associated him with such people as American writer Alice Walker. He commented that he, Richard Falk, and Roger Waters (who also appear on the list) "had stiff competition: Ayatollah Khomeini [sic, Khamenei] was number one."

In September 2013, Blumenthal reported for The Nation from the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan on the conditions in which Syrian refugees were living. In the article, he commented "there was not one person I spoke to in Zaatari who did not demand US military intervention at the earliest possible moment."

Blumenthal joined Lebanon's Al Akhbar newspaper in late 2011, primarily to write about Israel-Palestine issues and foreign-policy debates in Washington, DC. When he left the publication in mid-2012 in protest of its coverage of the Syrian Civil War, he wrote that it "gave me more latitude than any paper in the United States to write about ... Israel and Palestine" and that "In the end, Assad will be remembered as an authoritarian tyrant." He ended his association with Al Akhbar in June 2012, considering the newspaper to have a pro-Assad editorial line led by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb.

In 2011, Blumenthal reported that Israeli occupation forces and Bahraini monarchy guards trained American police departments in anti-protester techniques, including torture, and quoted Fordham University Law Professor Karen J. Greenberg. Contacted by Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic and Adam Serwer of Mother Jones, Greenberg told Goldberg that while she "never made such a statement", Blumenthal "was looking for corroboration but I told him I didn't have any." She told Serwer that "I did not intend to assert these allegations as fact ... the entire sense of the quote is inaccurate." Blumenthal said that he had quoted Greenberg accurately, accused her of denying she had made the statement, and believed that she had since been "intimidated by Goldberg and the pro-Israel forces he represents." Greenberg had made the same comments to Adam Serwer of Mother Jones.

In 2010, he covered the federal immigration enforcement program known as Operation Streamline for Truthdig. "The program represents the entrenchment of a parallel nonproductive economy promoting abuse behind the guise of law enforcement and crime deterrence", he wrote.

Blumenthal said his book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party (2009), was inspired by the earlier work of the psychologist Erich Fromm. The latter asserted that "the fear of freedom propels anxiety-ridden people into authoritarian settings." Blumenthal says that a "culture of personal crisis" has defined the American "radical right".

In early June 2009, Blumenthal posted a 3-minute video on YouTube, titled Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem on the Eve of Obama's Cairo Address. The video was a photo montage of possibly drunk Jewish-American young people in Jerusalem recorded the day before President Barack Obama's Cairo address on June 4. Some youths used obscenities and racist rhetoric about President Obama and Arabs, referring to Obama as a "nigger" and "like a terrorist". According to The Jerusalem Post, the video "garnered massive exposure and caused a firestorm in the media and the Jewish world". A Bradley Burston op-ed in Haaretz described the video as "an overnight Internet sensation".

With journalist David Neiwert, Blumenthal wrote in July 2008 about the links of Sarah Palin, Alaska governor and Republican vice-presidential candidate, to the secessionist Alaska Independence Party. He described how that party "played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward."

Blumenthal made a short video which he titled Generation Chickenhawk (2007). It featured interviews with convention attendees at the July 2007 College Republican National Convention in Washington, D.C. Blumenthal asked why they, as Iraq War supporters, had not enlisted in the United States Armed Forces.

In August 2007, Blumenthal made a short video called Rapture Ready, about American Christian fundamentalists' support for the State of Israel. He attended the June 2007 Take Back America Conference (sponsored by the Campaign for America's Future), where he interviewed both supporters of (then) US Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois) and 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Blumenthal says that conference organizers were angered by the video, and refused to air it.

Blumenthal won the Online News Association's Independent Feature Award for his 2002 article, "Day of the Dead", which was published in Salon. He concluded that the homicides of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico was connected to the policies of corporate interests in the border city. He wrote about the rise of the so-called "Minuteman" movement for Salon in 2003, describing its members as "border vigilantes" who "have harassed and detained hundreds, perhaps thousands, of migrants suspected of entering the country illegally." Blumenthal contributed to The Huffington Post from 2009-11.

Max Blumenthal (born December 18, 1977) is an American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker. He was awarded the 2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Notable Book Award for his book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel (2013). Blumenthal has written for The New York Times, The Nation, and Al Jazeera English, among other publications. He was formerly a writer for AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, and Media Matters for America, and was selected as a Fellow of the Nation Institute. Blumenthal established The Grayzone in December 2015 and continues to edit and write for the website.

Blumenthal was born on December 18, 1977, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Jacqueline (née Jordan) and Sidney Blumenthal. His father is a journalist and writer who later served as an aide to President Bill Clinton. Blumenthal graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a B.A. degree in history.