Imagine the pride of a father who – having made a career as an unscrupulous world-class professional creep – lives to see his son, at a still relatively tender age, surpass his own monumental record for moral iniquity.
Max and Sid
Whom else could we be talking about here but the execrable Sidney Blumenthal and his evil spawn, Max?
We’ve already looked in on Max a couple of times in the last year or so, noting the breathtaking rapidity with which he rose to the very top of the list of American Jews who make a career out of vilifying Israel (and, as a corollary, defending and justifying Islamic terror). His 2013 book Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel was so repulsive that even Eric Alterman, hardly an apologist for Israel, wrote that it “could have been published by the Hamas Book-of-the-Month Club (if it existed).” Max supports the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement; he’s repeatedly accused Israel of apartheid and equated it with Nazi Germany; he’s even gone so far as to cheer, in a talk at the London School of Economics, a massacre of IDF soldiers in 2014 by members of Hamas.
Elie Wiesel
No one should have been surprised, then, by Max’s disgusting response to the death, on July 2, at age 87, of Elie Wiesel – the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner who provided, in his 1960 memoir Night, an indelible account of the experience of Auschwitz, and who over the decades became an internationally respected prophet of decency and humanity, an eloquent critic of anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of prejudice who, at one moment of crisis after another, reminded the world where its moral duty lay.
All that mattered to Max, however, was that Wiesel recognized the very real difference between Israel (which Max has referred to as JSIL – the Jewish State in the Levant) and its terrorist enemies. And so, on July 2, Max tweeted out the following:
Blumenthal and one of his most vocal critics, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach
Elie Wiesel is dead. He spent his last years inciting hatred, defending apartheid & palling around with fascists.
And:
Elie Wiesel went from a victim of war crimes to a supporter of those who commit them. He did more harm than good and should not be honored.
In a follow-up article, Max smearedWiesel as a careerist who’d “secured his brand as the high priest of Holocaust theology, the quasi-religion he introduced.”
Joel Pollak had the perfect comment on all this: “Blumenthal’s bile,” he wrote, “is a perfect tribute to Wiesel, who was the living retort to such nonsense.”
Sid with Bill, back in the White House days
As it happens, Max’s dad, Sid, is a longtime Clinton functionary – confidante, adviser, fixer, bagman, snoop, go-between. Several of Hillary’s famous e-mails to Sid reference Max, praising his articles: “He’s so good.” “A very smart piece.” “[P]owerful and touching.” “Max strikes again!” Over the year, both Clintons have kept mum about Max’s vicious savaging of Israel. But his Wiesel tweets made headlines, and Hillary is running for president, and so she apparently felt compelled – finally – to distance herself from him, releasing a statement through her campaign rejecting his “offensive, hateful and patently absurd statements” about Wiesel, whom she described as a “hero.”
Better late than never. But it will take far more than this one incident, one suspects, for the Clintons to cut loose Max’s dad, whose utter lack of the kind of conscience that Wiesel embodied has made him the most useful of factotums.
When KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin (1922-2004) moved to the U.K. in 1992, he took with him 25,000 pages crammed with information about Soviet espionage activities going back to the 1930s. This trove, known as the Mitrokhin Archive, has provided the material for several books, beginning with The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1999) by Mitrokhin and historian Christopher Andrew.
In several countries, the information contained in the archive made sensational headlines and led to official investigations and trials. The Danish government, for example, funded a Centre for Cold War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, which spent years exploring the Mitrokhin Archive and other records. The result: a 1500-page report that detailed the extent of Soviet infiltration into Danish institutions (but redacted all names). In Denmark, these revelations received extensive media coverage.
In at least one country, however, the authorities showed no interested whatsoever in exploring or publicizing the contents of the Mitrokhin Archives. We’re talking about a country that was a founding member of NATO and that is one of the most prosperous on the planet – but whose cultural elite consists disproportionately of longtime (or supposedly former) Communists.
In a word: Norway.
Arne Treholt
As new-media journalist Hans Rustad pointed out in a recent article on his widely read alternative website, document.no, the Norwegian press has been more preoccupied with trying to whitewash Arne Treholt – a Labor Party politician and diplomat convicted in the 1980s for high treason and espionage – than with uncovering the names of other Norwegians who worked for the KGB.
Jens Stoltenberg
To be sure, there have been isolated efforts in Norway to make public some of the discoveries made in the Mitrokhin Archive. In 2000, TV journalist Alf R. Jacobsen revealed that back in 1989, the Norwegian police had learned that the KGB had cultivated Jens Stoltenberg, who was then “a young and very ambitious Labor Party politician” and who in 2000 was Prime Minister of Norway. (He is now Secretary-General of NATO.) Jacobsen’s report was condemned not only by Stoltenberg but, as Jacobsen recalled in 2011, by “pretty much all of the press’s leading commentators.” Among those who gave Jacobsen the cold shoulder was his boss, Einar Førde, “who himself had a suspect relationship to the KGB.” Meanwhile the Labor-friendly folks at the nation’s main evening news program did their best to deep-six the story.
Thorbjørn Jagland
In 2001, Norway’s largest newspaper, VG,reported on a forthcoming book that would divulge previously unreported information about Labor Party politicians’ Cold War-era KGB ties; ten years later, in 2011, another major daily, Dagbladet,reported that the book’s publication had been stopped by Labor Party leaders – and that some former KGB spies were still employed in both the Foreign Ministry and Labor Party. The media establishment responded to this revelation, too, by trying to discredit it. The book was reportedly suppressed by Thorbjørn Jagland, a Labor Party pol and former Prime Minister who in 2001 was Minister of Foreign Affairs – and who was, as it happens, one of those named in the book as KGB informants. (Jagland, famous in the U.S. mainly as the man behind Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, is currently Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.)
Over the last couple of days we’ve been surveying some of the biggest Communists on the Swedish literary scene. We’re talking names like Jan Guillou, Stieg Larsson, and Henning Mankel.
One might get the impression that these people all write crime fiction. Not true. Jan Myrdal (b. 1927), who’s been called “Sweden`s most rebellious writer” and who during the 1970s was one of its most influential intellectuals, is famous, rather, for his novels, memoirs, and travel writings.
Gunnar Myrdal
His parents were both immensely famous, especially in their homeland. Gunnar Myrdal, an economist and politician who served as Sweden’s Minister of Trade, taught economics at the University of Stockholm, and wrote a book, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, that influenced the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education. In 1974 he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics with Friedrich Hayek.
Alva Myrdal
Alva Myrdal, a sociologist and politician who played a major role in shaping the Swedish welfare state, served as a Member of Parliament, held a high-ranking position in UNESCO, was Sweden’s Ambassador to India, Burma, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, and, with Mexican diplomat Alfonso Garcia Robles, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. By that point, as Jay Nordlinger wrote in his history of the Nobel Peace Prize, Alva was “the doyenne of Scandinavian social democracy, which is practically to say, of Scandinavian political culture.” Both Myrdals were big on moral equivalency – routinely equating the U.S. and USSR and priding both themselves and their nation on showing no favoritism toward either side in the Cold War.
But social democracy wasn’t good enough for Jan Myrdal. Deciding at age 15 that he was a Communist, he left school, broke off communications with his family, and “became a drifter.” At first a member of the Swedish Communist Party, he later left it and joined a Maoist group.
Robert Faurisson
Throughout his career, his specialty has been standing up for mass violence in the name of totalitarian Marxism. He’s defended the millions of murders committed by Stalin and Mao and gone to bat for a Nazi genocide denier, Robert Faurisson, saying that “much of what Professor Faurisson writes is probably true.” For his own part, he’s vigorously denied the Cambodian holocaust. In 1978 he was part of a group from the Swedish Cambodian Friendship Association that visited Cambodia at Pol Pot’s invitation. They took a two-week Potemkin-village tour and dined with Pol Pot himself. “We met only the well-fed people,” a colleague who was also on that visit later said. “There were no soldiers, no prisons, and certainly no torture on display. There were, however, cities with no people.”
Pol Pot
Myrdal was impressed, though, and returned to Sweden full of acclaim for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Even after it became clear that his host had committed one of the greatest genocides in human history, and other Western intellectuals who’d praised Pol Pot expressed the deepest remorse for having done so, Myrdal refused to back off from his words of praise – or to acknowledge the reality of the Cambodian genocide. Writing in 2006 in Aftonbladet, one of Sweden’s largest papers, he denied the genocide; appearing in 2012 on SVT, the government TV channel, he denied it again.
Enver Hoxha
He was also a great fan of Albania at a time when it was a totalitarian autocracy and more hermetically sealed than any other nation on the planet, excepting North Korea. In 1970, Myrdal and his then wife, Gun Kessle, wrote Albania Defiant, a love letter to the country’s dictator, Enver Hoxha, and his Labor Party. Albania, they wrote, is an “eye-opener about a possible alternative” to Western democracy,” a nation marked by “social revolution, economic progress and general enlightenment.” When an Albanian priest spoke on TV about Hoxka’s execution of his country’s intelligentsia, Myrdal called him a liar and recalled his grandfather’s comment that “we should hang the last priest with the intestines of the last capitalist.”
