I’ve had previous occasion to blog about “morbidly interesting” anti-Israel blogger Philip Weiss, whose posts I come across occasionally. Morbidly interesting because though of Jewish background, he consistently rails against his own Jewish upbringing and is hostile to most things Jewish (the great exception I’ve noticed being Jewish leftism), has at least one overt anti-Semite on his blogroll, and has commenters who in my experience mostly range from the Pat Buchanan “left” to the David Duke “right,” which seems to bother him not in the least. He has nevertheless(?) achieved a certain level of credibility on the anti-Israel left (e.g.), because he tenaciously tracks down every story that makes Israel and its Jewish supporters look bad, providing lots of fodder for Israel’s critics.
So now one of his compatriots went to Jerusalem, took two hours of footage of a bunch of drunk American Jewish teenagers in a bar, edited it down to four minutes of footage ranging from gross stupidity (poli sci major who never heard of Netanyahu) to gross racism about Obama. Weiss then posted it on his blog, as a “Mondoweiss Production.”
For reasons that escape me, the video has been viewed over 200,000 times, and now a story about the video has now been linked by Drudge, guaranteeing many more hits.
So what’s the point? The director, Max Blumenthal, claims the high-minded purpose of showing that the “sense of entitlement that the American Jewish community has when it comes to Israeli policy is on full raw display in the words of these young adults,” as if finding a bunch of drunk teenagers in a bar and displaying the most outrageous 3% of their subsequent comments really tells you anything about anything.
Unfortunately, while commentators have been appropriately skeptical about value the video (and appropriately critical of the idiots in the video and their teachers), I don’t think that most of the commentariate really appreciate where Weiss, et al., are coming from. If so, they’d treat it the same way they’d treat an equivalent video coming from a website run by some of Weiss’s less charming commenters and blogrollers– which is why I’m not going to link to it.
UPDATE: On a tangentially related note, imagine the fun Weiss would have with this quote, if it came from an Israeli, rather than from a Hamas-affiliated Palestinian matchmaker: “If we see a girl that appears to match (a man), but she’s not physically what he wants, I’ll call him and say, ‘Well, she’s pretty, but she’s dark.’ Or ‘she’s short, but she’s white.'” H/T Instapundit.
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