The Clinton campaign has disavowed recent comments that anti-Israeli activist Max Blumenthal made about Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate who died at the age of 87 last week.
Blumenthal, whose father Sidney is a close Hillary Clinton adviser, smeared Wiesel as a supporter of war crimes who “did more harm than good.”
Elie Wiesel is dead. He spent his last years inciting hatred, defending apartheid & palling around with fascists. pic.twitter.com/3bRTq4QDye
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 2, 2016
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.
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 2, 2016
“Secretary Clinton emphatically rejects these offensive, hateful, and patently absurd statements about Elie Wiesel,” Jake Sullivan, a Clinton campaign senior policy advisor, told The Jerusalem Post.
“She believes they are wrong in all senses of the term. She believes that Max Blumenthal and others should cease and desist in making them,” added Sullivan, who worked for Clinton at the State Department.
“Elie Wiesel was a hero to her as he was to so many, and she will keep doing everything she can to honor his memory and to carry his message forward.”
The Clinton campaign had come under increased pressure to address Blumenthal’s comments, largely because of her close relationship with Sidney Blumenthal.
Known to many as “Vicious Sid,” the former Bill Clinton White House aide is featured prominently in Clinton’s State Department emails. He often sent intelligence reports and political gossip to Clinton. Some of the emails contained classified information. Blumenthal also pushed Clinton to support civil war in Libya. It later came to light that he was working on behalf of a defense contractor that sought business in a post-Gaddafi Libya.
The Clinton confidante also frequently praised his son in emails to the then-secretary of state. And she often responded in kind, lauding the younger Blumenthal’s articles and books about topics ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Tea Party, and the YouTube video that the Obama administration falsely blamed for the Benghazi attacks.
“Your Max is a mitzvah!” Clinton wrote to Blumenthal on Sept. 13, 2012, two days after the Benghazi attacks.
She was responding to an article Max Blumenthal published in The Guardian in which he profiled the makers of the YouTube video, “Innocence of Muslims.”
Clinton also praised Blumenthal’s book, “Republican Gomorrah,” about the “dysfunctional” Republican party, as “so good.”
Blumenthal has become increasingly critical of Israel over the years. The author of the 2013 book “Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel,” Blumenthal coined the Twitter hashtag #JSIL, which stands for Jewish State of Israel in the Levant and is a play off of the acronym for the terrorist group ISIL.