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| Baby Blumenthal hoodwinks PEN Canada conference |
| 2016-02-24 |
| For those who closely follow events in Israel and the rest of the Middle East, it is hard to imagine that there are people and organizations with no knowledge of the loathsome Max Blumenthal and his twisted obsession with demonizing Israel and lionizing Palestinian Arab terrorists. One might be inclined to give slack to a writer-focused non-profit organization that wanted to hold an event on the difficulties of reporting from a war zone, to assume that Blumenthal, who recently published a book about the 2014 Gaza War, might be a sensible choice. His book, The 51 Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, sounds exactly like what Brendan de Caires, PEN Canada’s programs director, said they were seeking. But it turns out that Blumenthal’s claim to have seen the Gaza war first hand is overblown, while any belief in his objectivity as a reporter is wildly misplaced. Not there for the war, and not an objective reporter — why is this man giving a talk on war reporting? A little digging reveals that PEN could not pull together the topic it preferred and then may not have done its own homework carefully enough. Let’s hope, anyway. |
| Posted by:badanov |