Wild Thing: Max Blumenthal’s Creepy Anti-Zionist Odyssey

Late last year, Germany was captivated by a mesmerizing, almost absurdist video at the heart of something eventually dubbed Toiletgate. In it, anti-Zionist activists Max Blumenthal and David Sheen chase Gregor Gysi, the chairman of die Linke, Germany’s left-wing opposition party, down his office’s hallway. The two men hound Gysi with accusations that he called them anti-Semites, which Gysi denies. Gysi flees into a toilet stall, and Sheen and Blumenthal try to force their way in, without success.

German newspapers across the political spectrum denounced the obsessive radicals who had tried to prevent Gysi from urinating in peace, and the German media wasn’t shy about calling Blumenthal and Sheen—who are both Jewish by birth—anti-Semites. But the story behind Toiletgate was a little more complex. Two Linke politicians known for their opposition to Israeli “imperialism,” Inge Höger and Annette Groth—who had also sailed on the Mavi Marmara in 2010 when Israeli commandos disastrously raided the ship bound for Gaza—had invited Blumenthal and Sheen to speak at a conference on Israel in the Bundestag on Nov. 10. Tipped off that the two men were ferocious denouncers of Israel, Gysi canceled the invitation.

The reason was simple politics. The Baader Meinhof era still echoes in Germany: Nothing can tarnish a German politician like charges of anti-Semitism. Gysi has for years now been trying to put a stop to the radical antics that have led most Germans to shrug off die Linke as a sideshow. In June 2011, under Gysi’s leadership, die Linke adopted with a large majority statements affirming Israel’s right to exist and in favor of a two-state solution. Gysi also pushed through a measure stating that Linke representatives would not take part in boycott efforts and Gaza flotillas or advocate for a one-state solution. Höger and Groth, boisterous radicals (and not just about Israel), have been chafing under these restrictions. Toiletgate was their failed attempt to push back.

The day before their Bundestag conference, Nov. 9, Blumenthal and Sheen were supposed to appear at Berlin’s Volksbühne to discuss Israel’s “war crimes” in Gaza. That event also got canceled: Nov. 9, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, is a day of solemn commemoration in Germany, not a time for attacks on Israel. An unfazed Blumenthal explained that he had particularly wanted his event to take place on the day of Kristallnacht. “For us,” he said, “it was the perfect time to explain how the legacy of the European genocide had inspired our work, to emphasize that ‘never again’ meant never again to anyone.” Characteristically, Blumenthal cast Israel as a planner of mass murder and on a day consecrated to the memory of the Shoah.

Blumenthal’s version of what happened in Berlin is conspiratorial: “I was censored and branded anti-Semitic by left politicians acting as the puppets of American neocons,” he wrote on his website. The Germans had squelched him “with machine-like efficiency,” he added (Blumenthal loves ethnonational clichés). Blumenthal shot back against the German reporters and politicians who had branded him an anti-Semite by telling an interviewer in Germany, “Germany is the whitest country in the world.” Asked by his interviewer to define “white,” he said, “Whiteness is the supreme embodiment of privilege.” Strangely, he added that “pro-Israel organizations on American college campuses are functioning as White Students Unions that are pandered to instead of properly stigmatized.” (Are African American or Ethiopian Jews “white” if they hang out at Hillel?) Blumenthal has a fraught notion of privilege, perhaps because he is the son of the hotheaded Democratic political operative and Hillary Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, who has recently carried on a vindictive email campaign to smear Eric Alterman for criticizing Max’s journalism. In an interview with Israeli novelist David Grossman in his book Goliath: Fear and Loathing in Greater Israel, Blumenthal said that he had always felt like an “insider” in America because of his prominent father, and hinted bizarrely that high-level Jewish access to American power made a Jewish state superfluous.

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/189172/max-blumenthal-and-anti-zionists