Max Blumenthal is an award-winning Jewish-American journalist who has long spoken out against Israel’s genocidal war crimes in occupied Palestine. And this week, he experienced “a strange and disconcerting questioning session” at Washington Dulles International Airport with someone who “identified himself as an officer with Customs and Border Protection”. This interaction, he insisted:
felt like an act of political harassment, and seemed to signal an escalation against journalists and activists who’ve expressed antiwar, anti-Zionist views.
‘Big brother is watching’ people who vocally oppose war – like Max Blumenthal
On 24 February, as Max Blumenthal returned from a personal trip to Nicaragua, the officer led him and his family “down a long hallway” for an interview with him in “a cavernous secondary screening room”. The agent mentioned catching a recent Blumenthal appearance on a programme with journalist and jurist Andrew Napolitano. Considering that “nearly all of my appearances on Napolitano’s program, Judging Freedom, have focused on Israel’s blood-soaked wars in Gaza, Lebanon and beyond throughout the past 16 months”, he said, it seemed entirely possible that the officer was “darkly signaling to me that Big Brother was watching”.
In the interview room, the agent showed Blumenthal a list of names – mostly Muslim – and asked if he was familiar with them. He said no, but highlighted that “I would not have assisted the officer even if I had a personal connection with one of the names on the list” because:
I’ve learned from activists and journalists who’ve experienced similar probing that federal agents often deploy inane or disingenuous questions to get their subject talking, then attempt to manipulate or entrap them so they can implicate them in a crime. In fact, the US Supreme Court has ruled that police are allowed to lie to elicit confessions from suspects.
Blumenthal was soon free to go, but later discovered that one name on the list was “the birth name of our friend, Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Code Pink and one of the most widely recognized antiwar activists on the planet”.
Escalating harassment, especially in servile ‘vassal states’ like the UK
Max Blumenthal went on to say:
I know of several antiwar activists who have had FBI agents appear at their doors over the past several months asking questions about Iran and individuals with Muslim or Arab names.
And he added that:
in European vassal states without the same free speech protections Americans enjoy, journalists like Ali Abunimah, Asa Winstanley, and Richard Medhurst have been subjected to police raids, imprisonment, and even criminal prosecution for the opinions they’ve expressed on Israel-Palestine.
His Grayzone colleagues have also faced harassment. Kit Klarenberg, for example, has been “detained by British counter-terror cops and grilled for hours about his journalism on London’s machinations in Ukraine and beyond”. And Jeremy Loffredo “spent several days in an Israeli prison and was ordered to self-deport… for his journalism inside the country’s occupied frontiers”.
He also mentioned Canadian activist Yves Engler, who has just spent five days in prison for calling out a pro-Israel activist and refusing to remain silent about the case. A “long-term critic of Canadian foreign policy and its military-industrial complex”, Engler said “I had to go to jail for five days to win the right to (publicly) criticise charges brought against me”. And he asserted that “the targeting of those opposing Israel’s crimes is just one of the innumerable ways that Canada has assisted in Palestinian dispossession”, stressing that:
the battle against genocide and the battle for free speech are quite interconnected
In the struggle for peace, we must defend free speech
It’s not necessary to agree with everything the targets for state harassment say. But we absolutely must defend their right to say it. Because for years, billionaire warmongers, propagandists and lobbyists have been trying to silence critical voices with the help of servile, egocentric politicians. We saw it with the smear campaign against former UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and likeminded voices from 2015 onwards, and we have seen it throughout Israel’s genocidal escalation against the Palestinian people since 2023.
Max Blumenthal highlighted the atrocious hypocrisy of Western states harassing anti-war voices while “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu travels freely from Berlin to Washington DC despite an ICC warrant for his arrest”. And that’s unfortunately the world we live in today. To fight back and build a world of peace, we also need to unite against the suppression of free speech. That starts with spreading the word about the repression and intimidation that’s going on.
Featured image via the Canary
