These Blumenthal guys are bad news

And they have Hillionaire's ear.

Sidney Blumenthal’s influence on Hillary Clinton is once again revealed in the latest batch of Clinton emails, released yesterday. As The Times of Israel reports, the emails from Blumenthal include correspondence about Israel, in which he advises the secretary of State to consider the writings on the subject by Max Blumenthal.

By now it is well known that Max Blumenthal is no fan of Israel. His book Goliath is a one-sided screed in which the Jews of Israel are regarded essentially as the new Nazis. “Never before,” Nation columnist Eric Alterman wrote, “has anyone defended the analogizing of the behavior of Israeli Jews to that of the war criminals who led Nazi Germany.” Alterman went on to write that “nothing this fellow writes can be taken at face value” and referred to the book as “The ‘I-Hate Israel’ Handbook.”

In these latest e-mails, we learn that in March of 2010, Sidney Blumenthal sent Secrertary Clinton “an article by Max, telling her that his son is spending his time on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and plans to move to Israel for about 6-8 months to write a book.” He added that Max “tracks a lot of things that do not appear in the mainstream press.” He also enclosed an article by the leftist Israeli Uri Avnery, who had written his own attack on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  Evidently Sidney Blumenthal shares his son’s animus towards Bibi and Israel and, in passing on these materials, thought he was gaining some traction.  Perhaps he was.  Responding to this email, Secretary Clinton asked him how she should use the material in a speech she was scheduled to give to AIPAC.

In 2012, a released email reveals, Sidney Blumenthal sent Max’s January 2012 article in the Arab newspaper al-Akhbar (“The Bibi Connection”) to Clinton. In the article, Max chastises Netanyahu for his ties to U.S. Republicans, and in particular, Sheldon Addison. “Bibi’s war against Obama,” he wrote, “is unprecedented.” He had not one criticism, of course, of Obama’s policies towards Israel. Max also wrote that “Netanyahu’s campaign excites right-wing Jews and evangelical Christians, who overwhelmingly accept the biblical claims of the Jewish state’s historical right to Greater Israel, Judea and Samaria. Bibi’s deepest attack line against Obama merges theology with ideology.” No longer, Max argued, was the U.S.-Israeli alliance depicted as “a marriage of two vibrant democracies united by shared liberal values," but rather as a “united front of besieged bastions of Western civilization against an incipient Islamic onslaught.” “Rapture ready evangelicals,” he wrote, “right-wing ultra-nationalists, and Republican Jews are far more likely to be attracted to this sort of alliance than cosmopolitan liberals.”  Clinton passed on these comments to others.

The post-America - Israel alliance is already in tatters. Do we want folks with this mindset to pick up the baton and continue the sour tone?