Max Blumenthal, the son of the Clinton family confidant Sidney, began his career as a fairly run-of-the-mill—if not particularly discerning—left-wing journalist, with his first book being an assault on social conservatives. But sometime thereafter he turned his attentions to Israel, in 2013 producing a book so viciously anti-Semitic that even the leftist columnist Eric Alterman of the Nation couldn’t approve of it. Then, as Bruce Bawer recounts, he took another turn for the worse:

Much of the journalism [Blumenthal] produced during the [early years of the Syrian civil war] conveyed a strongly anti-Assad message. In 2013, he reported for the Nation from a refugee camp in Jordan, where, he wrote, every single Syrian he interviewed supported a U.S. military strike on their homeland.

But then something happened. We don’t know exactly what it was. All we know for certain is that in December 2015, Blumenthal traveled to Moscow—all expenses paid by the Kremlin—to attend a gala dinner, hosted by Vladimir Putin himself, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of RT, the international TV network owned by the Russian government. When he returned to the U.S., his position on Bashar al-Assad—and on U.S. intervention in Syria—had turned around completely.

Only a month after the RT bash, Blumenthal founded something called “The Grayzone Project,” which describes itself as “a news and politics website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on war and empire.” Basically, however, Grayzone is a one-stop propaganda shop, devoted largely to pushing a pro-Assad line on Syria, a pro-regime line on Venezuela, a pro-Putin line on Russia, and a pro-Hamas line on Israel.

Implicit in pretty much every item at the website is that it’s impossible to be an opponent of Putin or Assad or Nicolás Maduro without having nefarious motives—either you’re working for the CIA or Mossad, or you’re tied up with some terrorist group, or you’ve taken dirty money under the table. . . . In a 2016 article, he denied the incontrovertible fact that anti-gay prejudice is intrinsic to Islam, calling the idea a product of “talking points . . . first honed by the Israeli government and its international network of supporters.” . . . Blumenthal has also denied that Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.