The infamous far-left blogger, Max Blumenthal, perhaps best known for his harassment of Michelle Malkin at the 2007 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has persevered in his online posting of pseudo-documentaries. Once again, Blumenthal has chosen the Christian Right as his target, seeking to expose what he describes as the “politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre” events of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) 2007 Washington-Israeli Summit.
This reporter was also there and can fill in the part of the story that Blumenthal leaves out. In true Michael Moore fashion, Blumenthal deletes, edits, and massages his sound-bites down to a 10-minute documentary covering a 3-day conference, providing just enough footage to convince viewers that evangelical fundamentalists are manic, bloodthirsty activists bent on destroying the world in order to artificially induce the rapture. In other words, CUFI founder Pastor John Hagee and his followers are no better than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself.
Containing embarassingly blatant factual errors, his ‘documentary’ “Rapture Ready: The Unauthorized Christians United for Israel Tour” describes CUFI as “founded by Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee, Christians United for Israel lobbies Congress for an expansion of Israeli territory and unilateral military attack on Iran.” According to the preparatory talking points that CUFI issued to attendees, they should “urge [their] Senators and Congressman to. . . apply the maximum economic and diplomatic pressure on Iran. . .”
Rather than endorsing unilateral, military strikes on Iran, the talking points also notes “Iran needs to understand that Congress is open to military action if our continued economic and diplomatic pressure fails to get them to reverse course.” Rather than pushing to expand Israeli territory, CUFI favors the restoration of Israel to its UN-sanctioned 1947 borders. It also opposes ceding more Israeli land to the Palestinians.
A Jew himself, it seems ironic that Blumenthal would so transparently attack supporters of Israel, but it seems that his preconceived notions about premillenialists took precedence over Jewish-Christian relations. Intent on discovering what Blumenthal describes as “an ulterior end-times agenda” perpetrated by “Pastor Hagee and his minions,” he claims that the alleged “members of [CUFI’s] own organization” he interviewed had directly contradicted Hagee’s assertion that the summit had “nothing to do with the End Times.”
Of course, Blumenthal interviewed largely non-leadership fundamentalists, encouraging them to proselytize and pray for him during the conference. In other words, he encouraged the attendees to break the rules under which they were attending, fomenting dissent between the Jewish and Christian participants. One can clearly see that Blumenthal spoke to few CUFI leaders, because most of the attendees making outrageous statements lacked colored ribbons on the bottom of their identification tags, which would have indicated their stature within the organization.
Yet despite his continued harassment of CUFI attendees, many of whom he portrayed as ignorant fools, Blumenthal characterizes the CUFI staff as evil censorship personnel, claiming he was “hounded” by public relations staff and that “Pastor Hagee and his minions” were obscuring the truth, if not lying. He also characterizes his forcible removal from the summit as strong-arm, arbitrary tactics on the part of an angered despot. “But I was forbidden from asking Hagee about statements he made in his book, ‘Jerusalem Countdown,’ that appeared to blame Jews for their own persecution,” writes Blumenthal. “After doing just that during a press conference, I was removed from the conference by off-duty DC cops summoned by members of Hagee’s family.” Pastor Hagee responded to Blumenthal’s question at the press conference, claiming “I’m not blaming—That is an absolute stretch. I never wrote that in the book.” Perhaps Blumenthal was upset that press conference administrators only allowed him one question.
Blumenthal’s comments insinuate a causal relationship between his press conference comments and his removal. More likely, his removal was the culmination of defying summit rules, querying attendees about divisive topics tangential to the conference, consistently harping on eschatological doctrine against all evidence to the contrary, and making a general nuisance of himself.
Blumenthal’s forced removal appears to have been his desired end goal, a lucky break for a journalist intent on making the CUFI leadership look bad. With a self-congratulatory tone, Blumenthal tells his colleague “Good—Good Stuff. We get kicked out of everywhere.” In the next scene of his documentary, Blumenthal can be found innocently asking his escort “What, what did we do?” as he is removed from the premises. Having executed the perfect public relations stunt, he and his colleague can now claim victim status at the hands of the far right censorship police.
A self-declared reporter on the Christian Right, Blumenthal argues that he has “covered the Christian right intensely for over four years. . .attended dozens of Christian right conferences, regularly monitored movement publications and radio shows, and interviewed scores of its key leaders.” Out of this chamber of horrors, Blumenthal claims that he has “never witnessed any spectacle as politically extreme, outrageous, or bizarre as the one Christians United for Israel produced last week in Washington.”
Blumenthal’s extensive reporting of the Christian Right hasn’t increased his tolerance towards other perspectives, however, nor has it softened his political prejudices. In an egregious show of malice, Blumenthal posts “R-Has Been” under a shot of former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who had also attended the CUFI donor banquet. One must ask whether he treated his other “monitored” Christian Right leaders, their publications, conferences, and radio shows with such supercilious courtesy.
Bethany Stotts is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.
