1. Max Blumenthal was born on December 18,1977 and is an American journalist, author, blogger, and filmmaker.
60 Facts About Max Blumenthal
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Max Blumenthal was a writer for The Nation, AlterNet, The Daily Beast, Al Akhbar, Mondoweiss, and Media Matters for America, and has contributed to Al Jazeera English, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.
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Max Blumenthal has been a writing fellow of the Nation Institute.
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Max Blumenthal is a regular contributor to Sputnik and RT.
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Max Blumenthal has written extensively about Israel, and is sharply critical of the conduct of its government.
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Max Blumenthal was awarded the 2014 Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book for Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, which was published in 2013.
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Max Blumenthal was born on December 18,1977, in Boston, Massachusetts, to Jacqueline and Sidney Max Blumenthal.
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Max Blumenthal's father is a journalist and writer who served as an aide to President Bill Clinton.
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Max Blumenthal attended Georgetown Day School in Washington, DC He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.
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In December 2015, during a visit to Moscow presumed by multiple sources to have been paid for by the Kremlin, Max Blumenthal was a guest at RT's 10 Years On Air anniversary party attended by President Vladimir Putin, then-Lieutenant General Michael Flynn of the United States and English politician Ken Livingstone.
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Max Blumenthal has contributed on multiple occasions to Russia's state owned Sputnik radio, as well as to Iran's state owned Press TV and China's state-run CGTN.
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Max Blumenthal founded The Grayzone website within a month after his visit to Moscow.
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Max Blumenthal won the Online News Association's Independent Feature Award for his 2002 Salon article, "Day of the Dead".
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In 2010, Max Blumenthal covered the federal immigration enforcement program known as Operation Streamline for Truthdig.
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In 2014, Max Blumenthal covered hunger strikes by undocumented migrants held in the privatized Northwest Detention Center for The Nation.
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Max Blumenthal said that conference organizers were angered by the video, and refused to air it.
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Max Blumenthal's book, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, was a bestseller on both the Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestsellers lists.
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In early June 2009, Max Blumenthal posted a 3-minute video on YouTube, titled Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem on the Eve of Obama's Cairo Address.
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Max Blumenthal's video gained 400,000 views before YouTube removed it for unspecified terms-of-use violations.
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Max Blumenthal saw his interviewees as part of the "indoctrination" of Taglit-Birthright tours intended for diaspora Jews, in which he had himself participated in 2002.
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In 2011, Blumenthal reported that Israeli occupation forces and Bahraini monarchy guards trained American police departments in anti-protester techniques, including torture, and quoted Fordham University Law Professor Karen J Greenberg.
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Max Blumenthal has written two books based on the periods of time he spent in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied territories in the West Bank.
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Max Blumenthal documented what he said were Israeli and Palestinian war crimes in two books: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel and The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza.
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Goliath, published by Nation Books, outlines what Max Blumenthal characterizes as Israel's aggressive shift to the far-right, and its crackdown on local activism.
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Max Blumenthal responded by saying the Wiesenthal Center's list associated him with such people as American writer Alice Walker.
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Marquardt-Bigman reported that the cartoon depicted Hier as mad; Max Blumenthal has defended Latuff on Twitter.
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Max Blumenthal thought Blumenthal had "brilliantly though unwittingly managed to produce a pretty impressive journalistic account in support of my criticism of Jewish identity politics and tribal supremacy".
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Max Blumenthal appeared before the Russell Tribunal on Palestine on September 25,2014, in Brussels, Belgium, to testify on allegations of war crimes and genocide by Israel against residents of the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge.
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Max Blumenthal was in Gaza during Protective Edge and, according to Richard Falk in The Nation, provided an analysis of the "political design that appeared to explain the civilian targeting patterns".
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Gysi, followed by the two other parliamentary members, left his office and crossed down a corridor to enter a restroom, where Sheen and Max Blumenthal followed him, but failed to force their entry.
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Max Blumenthal said that the catalyst for the military offensive was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by a Hamas cell.
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Max Blumenthal stated that Israel's West Bank operation was not aimed at rescuing the teens, who were known to be dead, or capturing their killers, but destroying a political agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian National Authority by targeting the Third Hamdallah Government.
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Max Blumenthal writes that, during the operation, Israel targeted Palestinian civilians and media organizations, conducted execution-style killings and attacked refugee shelters.
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Marquardt-Bigman wrote that The 51 Day War was marketed as an "explosive work of reportage" and that Max Blumenthal "went to Gaza only some two weeks before the end of the fighting".
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Max Blumenthal said Blumenthal returned to Gaza to cover the "victory rallies" around the time Hamas accepted an indeterminate ceasefire.
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At the beginning of February 2016, it became known via a release of emails from the State Department that, during Hillary Clinton's four years as Secretary of State, Sidney Blumenthal had sent her at least 19 articles by Max Blumenthal concerning Israel which she had distributed among her staff.
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Max Blumenthal has been sharply critical of Israel's conduct in the Gaza war.
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In November 2023, biology researcher Michal Perach wrote in Haaretz that Max Blumenthal had argued most Israelis were killed by Israeli soldiers during the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel.
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Perach accused Max Blumenthal of manipulating sources by selectively cutting out inconvenient passages, editing, distorting and changing the meaning, and pushing details while obscuring the main facts.
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On January 16,2025, Max Blumenthal interrupted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken's final press conference to ask him why he continued to arm Israel "when we had a deal in May".
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In June 2012, Max Blumenthal resigned from the Lebanese newspaper, Al Akhbar, over what he considered its pro-Assad coverage.
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Max Blumenthal said that "the Assad regime was running an institution of torture in prisons" which made Israel look like "a champion of human rights".
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In September 2013, Max Blumenthal reported for The Nation from the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan on the conditions in which Syrian refugees were living.
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Max Blumenthal wrote of being "staunchly against US strikes, mainly because I believe they could exacerbate an already horrific situation without altering the political reality in any meaningful way".
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In separate articles, Charles Davis and Oz Katerji wrote that, in January 2017, following claims made by the Syrian government, Max Blumenthal blamed the contamination of the water supply for Damascus in the Wadi Barada valley on militants opposed to the government.
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Around the same time, Max Blumenthal told Sky News Australia that it was quite probable the Syrian rebels were responsible for the Douma chemical attack.
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In 2019, Bellingcat wrote that Max Blumenthal was a recipient of the Serena Shim Award, a financial award for "uncompromised integrity in journalism" awarded by the Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees, which Bellingcat said was a non-profit group that supported Assad.
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Max Blumenthal challenged his critics assertions when he was interviewed by Rolling Stone in November 2019.
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In November 2017, Max Blumenthal discussed the decision of the United States Department of Justice to classify RT as a "foreign agent" in an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News.
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Max Blumenthal was skeptical of accounts of President Donald Trump and his administration colluding with Russia in the 2016 presidential election in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
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Max Blumenthal said that establishment Republicans and progressive Democrats were using the Russia story to avoid "do[ing] anything progressive".
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Petra Marquardt-Bigman wrote that, in a December 2017 interview with Sputnik, Max Blumenthal had said "the Trump transition team colluded with a foreign power to subvert America's political system".
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Max Blumenthal said he was referring to collusion with Israel, not Russia.
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The Grayzone and Max Blumenthal have denied the scale of the detention of Uyghurs in mass internment camps in Xinjiang.
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Max Blumenthal has asserted that the exaggeration or manufacture of crimes against humanity in Xinjiang are part of a United States government campaign to discredit China.
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Max Blumenthal said footage from Bloomberg News showed that opposition protesters on the Francisco de Paula Santander bridge in the border were preparing Molotov cocktails, "which could easily set a truck cabin or its cargo alight".
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Max Blumenthal referred to having seen similar situations during his reporting on the West Bank.
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On October 25,2019, Max Blumenthal was arrested and charged with assault of a woman in a case related to a May 7 incident at the embassy of Venezuela, Washington, DC The US Department of Justice dropped the case against Max Blumenthal in December 2019.
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In May 2020, Max Blumenthal said on The Jimmy Dore Show that George Soros is funding anti-government protesters in Venezuela, as well as in Hong Kong.
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In February 2021, tweets concerning a Grayzone article by Max Blumenthal were the first to receive a Twitter warning label stating: "These materials may have been obtained through hacking".