In latest pander to Israel lobby, Clinton smears Max Blumenthal’s criticism of Wiesel as ‘hate

**enhanced_deficit** · 07-06-2016, 11:12 PM

SWC Hillary goes on attack:

In latest pander to Israel lobby, Clinton smears Max Blumenthal’s criticism of Wiesel as ‘hateful’

US Politics Philip Weiss on July 6, 2016

The Clinton campaign has reached a new low: slamming Max Blumenthal because he has dared to criticize Elie Wiesel for Wiesel’s vicious comments about Palestinians and support for the Iraq war.

“Secretary Clinton emphatically rejects these offensive, hateful, and patently absurd statements about Elie Wiesel,” Jake Sullivan, senior policy advisor to Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said in a statement to The Jerusalem Post.

People should be reading Max Blumenthal’s wonderful takedown of Elie Wiesel at Alternet, which begins with what an inspiration Night was to him as a boy (as it was for me too), before retailing Wiesel’s repeated moral failures, including vigorously supporting the Iraq war and opposing the Iran deal, refusing to criticize Israel ever, while promoting religious nationalist settlers’ expansion in Jerusalem. As Blumenthal promotes the piece on twitter, “How Elie Wiesel used his aura to shield militarists like Hillary Clinton, George W. Bush and Netanyahu.”

Blumenthal rightly defines the struggle here as one between neoliberal elites and marginalized supporters of Palestinians.

With Wiesel’s death, the elites who relied on him for moral cover leapt at the opportunity to claim his legacy. Meanwhile, the teachings and testimonies of Holocaust survivors who insisted on applying the lessons of the genocide universally—including to Palestinians—remained confined to the margins.

That is the battle that is playing out in the Democratic Party platform fight where the Bernie Sanders forces have been crushed. It is the battle playing out in Clinton’s aggressive courtship of neoconservative hawks and her repeated hammering of the only nonviolent movement to put pressure on Israel, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It is playing out also in the claim that Trump’s campaign used a Jewish star to brand Clinton as corrupt and thereby issue a dogwhistle to anti-Semites (I agree with the guy who fired me, Jared Kushner, that Trump doesn’t hate Jews).

Alan Dershowitz said on CNN (thx to Jewish Insider) that Trump is appealing to anti-Semites the same way that Bernie Sanders was appealing to “the anti-Israel left:”
- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2016/07/blumen...icism-hateful/

Related