Max Blumenthal, Stop The War and Jenny Tonge

Max Blumenthal with Tucker Carlson on Fox TV; Stop The War vice president George Galloway; Baroness Jenny Tonge

A couple of minor brouhahas have erupted in the small UK left social media galaxy this week, about topics I've been blogging about here over the years. This post is a quick set of links to stuff in my archive.

Max Blumenthal

New Statesman economics writer, Novara media regular and Oxbridge Lexiteer Grace Blakeley this week endorsed - and then to her enormous credit swiftly withdrew the endorsement when his awfulnesss was pointed out - a new book by Max Blumenthal.

Critics pointed to Blumenthal smearing civilian first responders in Syria, the White Helmets:
Blakeley said she hadn't read this bit before recommending it. The bits of his book smearing the White Helmets are on pp.207-218 of a 400 page book. The footnoted sources include Leith Fadel (mainly known for participating in a far right smear campaign against a Syrian refugee in Hungary, and for employing an Australian Nazi activist) and a bizarre sectarian pro-Assad crank on Twitter called @EHSANI22.

Other critcisms could be made too:


I've blogged about Blumenthal before. In this post and its follow-up I went through a number of claims made about him by anti-fascist researcher Alex Reid Ross. Some of the claims include: making false claims on Russian media, being praised by a far right terrorist who shot at Jews in Kansas, buying into a Duginist geopolitical vision, and becoming a convert to a pro-Putin worldview after attending an event at the Kremlin with Michael Flynn and Jill Stein, as well as smearing the White Helmets.

And in this post I look at Blumenthal's Islamophobic media project The Grayzone. And in this post I look at how his media commentary put a young journalist in prison in Nicaragua, in a smear amplified in the UK by The Canary. And here is the further reading I linked to before:

Stop The War

The soft left Fabians this week invited and then - again to their enormous credit - swiftly disinvited - a speaker to one of their events from the pressure group Stop The War.

Here are some of my blogposts about them:
And here are the external links I posted on them before:
And here's the one you should read if you only read one:

Jenny Tonge

It also emerged this week that a local Fabian group also hosted Jenny Tonge, former Liberal Democrat peer and well-known antisemite, to one on of their meetings. She's someone I've blogged about in passing many times over the last decade.

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