President Donald Trump retweeted a tweet from Max Blumenthal, a well-known activist for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, on June 17 that criticized Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton.
Haaretz first reported on the Trump retweet. Blumenthal’s tweet stated, “John Bolton, a notoriously mendacious enemy of all living beings on the planet, is discovering what every other great Republican hope of the Resistance has: liberals will eagerly lap up any piece of hysterical Cold War propaganda if they think it can be leveraged against Trump.”
John Bolton, a notoriously mendacious enemy of all living beings on the planet, is discovering what every other great Republican hope of the Resistance has: liberals will eagerly lap up any piece of hysterical Cold War propaganda if they think it can be leveraged against Trump.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 18, 2020
Tablet senior writer Yair Rosenberg tweeted that the Trump retweet “was always the inevitable endgame for Max Blumenthal, pseudo-progressive apologist for war criminals and fascists. At this point, if you’re falling for his grift, it’s because you want to.”
https://twitter.com/Yair_Rosenberg/status/1273637246650941440?s=20
Jerusalem Post senior contributing editor Lahav Harkov tweeted that calling Blumenthal a BDS supporter is “an understatement. Max Blumenthal is an anti-Semite who supports [Syrian President Bashar] Assad.”
BDS supporter is an understatement. Max Blumenthal is an antisemite who supports Assad. https://t.co/cHJkKYwdbk
— Lahav Harkov (@LahavHarkov) June 18, 2020
Blumenthal, the son of former President Bill Clinton associate Sidney Blumenthal, has previously come under fire for tweeting in 2016 shortly after renowned Holocaust survivor and author Elie Wiesel died, “Elie Wiesel is dead. He spent his last years inciting hatred, defending apartheid & palling around with fascists.” Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign rebuked Blumenthal’s remarks at the time, calling his tweets “hateful.”
Additionally, Blumenthal’s 2013 book, “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Israel,” came under fire from The Nation’s Eric Alterman, who wrote at the time that Blumenthal’s “book could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).”
Blumenthal, who is Jewish, has defended himself from accusations of anti-Semitism, stating at a 2016 speaking event in Toronto, “What certain groups — which are very partisan, right-wing groups affiliated with the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Conservative Party here — decided to do is to declare me an anti-Semite, that I actually hate Jews. However I decide to observe Judaism is irrelevant, because in their view, you can disagree all you want with Moses, but you can’t disagree with King Bibi [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu].”
He later said at the event, “What we’re seeing is an organized campaign by the pro-Israel lobby, which represents the greatest threat to free speech in the West. It’s time to stand up to it.”
Trump has tweeted and retweeted various criticisms of Bolton over the past 24 hours in response Bolton’s upcoming book, “The Room Where It Happened.” Among the reported allegations in the book include that Trump wanted help from Chinese President Xi Jinping and praised the Chinese government’s internment of millions of Uighur Muslims into camps. The Department of Justice has attempted to block publication of Bolton’s book, arguing that “it contains instances of information that, if disclosed, reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage, or exceptionally grave damage, to the national security of the United States.”
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