Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal (born December 18, 1977) is an American journalist, author and blogger who is the editor of The Grayzone website. He is a contributor to Russian, Chinese and Iranian state-owned media. Earlier in his career he wrote for AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, and Media Matters for America.

Max Blumenthal appearing on RT (2011)

Quotes

• In the end, Assad will be remembered as an authoritarian tyrant whose regime represented little more than the interests of a rich neoliberal business class and a fascistic security apparatus. Those who have thrown their intellectual weight behind his campaign of brutality have cast the sincerity of their commitment to popular struggle and anti-imperial resistance into serious doubt.
• Besides exploiting the Palestinian cause, the Assad apologists have eagerly played the Al Qaeda card to stoke fears of an Islamic takeover of Syria.
  • "The right to resist is universal: A farewell to Al Akhbar and Assad’s apologists" MaxBlumenthal.com (June 20, 2012)

• 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.
  • Interviewed on Tucker Carlson Tonight (November 10, 2017), as cited in "A Leftist Crank on Fox News" Commentary (November 15, 2022).

• We have to look at the bigger picture here, and realize this is the culmination of a long-standing, neoconservative attempt to reignite the Cold War for a variety of reasons. They want a massive arms buildup. The neoconservative movement really emerged from anti-Russian sentiment in the 1970s... They despise Vladimir Putin... because he is the main leader in the world who is challenging US hegemony... It has to do with NATO expansion, as you mentioned, it has to do with Ukraine. The failure of the US to put a NATO ally on Russia’s borders. All sorts of reasons. The failure of the US to enact regime change in Syria because of Russian intervention.... Through H. R. McMaster, they implanted Fiona Hill, who is known simply for being at the Brookings Institute and writing a book-length attack on Vladimir Putin. She’s now kind of the in-house Russia expert. ...the US has rejected Russian proposals to sign treaties against meddling in cyber attacks. So, the Cold War continues with total liberal consent.
  • From a transcript of an appearance on Real News, as cited in "Can Trump's Neocons Exploit Russiagate?" The Grayzone (February 20, 2018)

• For raising questions about the efficacy and environmental cost of renewable projects like these, and proposing an explicitly anti-capitalist solution to the corporate destruction of the planet, the makers of Planet of the Humans were steamrolled by a network of professional climate activists, billionaire investors and industry insiders.
  • "'Green' billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of 'Planet of the Humans' documentary" The Grayzone (September 7, 2020)

• I used to think 'Zionist Occupied Government' was an antisemitic term. Now I'm forced to see it as a pretty accurate description of the reality we live in [...] One nation, under zog.
  • From a podcast, as cited by Mira Fox in "Are neo-Nazi terms really the only way to criticize U.S. support for Israel?", Forward (August 12, 2024)

About Blumenthal

• Max is a writer and self-declared "anti-Zionist," known for his active support of the BDS movement and his calls for the dismantling of the State of Israel. He trolls pro-Israel writers, as I can personally attest.
  • Shmuley Boteach "No Holds Barred: Hillary's Clinton's troubling relationship with Israel-hating adviser", The Jerusalem Post (11 January 2016)
  • Hillary Clinton had thanked family friend and advisor Sidney Blumenthal for forwarding writings about Israel by his son for her consideration.

• Blumenthal went to Moscow on a junket to celebrate RT’s tenth anniversary [in 2015]. We don't know what happened during that visit, but afterward, Blumenthal's views completely flipped. He has attacked not only the White Helmets but also Bana al-Abed, a nine-year-old girl who lived in rebel-held Aleppo and ran a Twitter account with her mother. The man who once wrote an essay called "The Right to Resist is Universal," and attacked [Sharmine] Narwani as an "Assad apologist," now accuses anti-Assad Syrians of belonging to al-Qaeda and has claimed that the White Helmets were affiliated with the Islamist group.
  • Janine di Giovanni "Why Assad and Russia Target the White Helmets" The New York Review of Books (October 16, 2018)

• The White Helmets are not the only humanitarian group targeted by Russia and its cronies. Blumenthal has also vented his disgust at a charity raising money to "fortify medical facilities" in rebel held areas.
  Why do medical facilities need fortification? Because clinics run by Medicins Sans Frontieres and the Syrian American Medical Society Foundation are being bombed deliberately by the Assad regime and Blumenthal’s deployers in the Russian government.
  Again, the Geneva Convention is very clear. Every medic must be protected, regardless of whatever insinuated and baseless claim of to whom they swear allegiance.
  • Oz Katerji "Why Assad's Western Apologists Think the White Helmets Should Choose Death Rather Than Rescue via Israel", Haaretz (9 August 2018)

• Give "pro-peace" activists a microphone for long enough, and their pro-Russia slant comes out. It's not a coincidence that Max Blumenthal, a co-founder of Grayzone, a blog that follows the dictum that the United States is bad and anti-U.S. dictators are good, didn't heckle any Russian officials in Washington on the day Zelensky arrived, demanding that they do what they could to stop the war. Instead, Blumenthal and his comrades focus their efforts on denigrating Zelensky personally, while either denying or downplaying Russian atrocities.
  • Alexey Kovalev "For 'Peace Activists,' War Is About America, Never Russia", Foreign Policy (December 22, 2022)