The American Commentator Making Excuses for Iran
· The Atlantic
When I saw that the commentator Max Blumenthal was going to speak in Washington, D.C., about his recent trip to Iran, I couldn’t stay away. I have long been fascinated with Americans—especially privileged, well-connected Americans—who, out of alienation from their own country, show an admiration for distant authoritarian lands.
Blumenthal, the son of the Clinton-family adviser and former journalist Sidney Blumenthal, was one of some 400 pro-regime influencers invited by the Iranian government to cover the funeral earlier this month of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed in a joint U.S.-Israeli air strike on February 28. Speaking last week at the flagship location of the progressive bookstore and restaurant chain Busboys and Poets, Blumenthal portrayed the man who’d overseen the mass slaughter of young Iranian protesters in January as “a father, a guide, a religious teacher” and presented the regime that he’d led as not only legitimate but also an inspiration to the world. Khamenei’s assassination, he told the standing-room-only crowd, ought to have generated far more outrage than it did. “Imagine,” he said, “if a rogue foreign state went and assassinated the pope, how so many Catholics would feel.” The analogy feels slightly off: Pontiffs aren’t typically known for brandishing rifles at Mass or calling for the death of entire countries.
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[Graeme Wood: The U.S. is subtly shifting its Iran strategy]
Blumenthal has become part of an ignominious tradition. In the early 1930s, the Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty wrote stories denying the famine that Joseph Stalin’s forced-collectivization policies were causing in Ukraine and mocked journalists who reported the truth. “Russians Hungry, but Not Starving,” read the headline of one Duranty dispatch, which repeated an insouciant justification of revolutionary violence: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”
Blumenthal doesn’t have the prestige of the newspaper of record behind him. But illustrious affiliations are no longer necessary to gain an audience. On X, Blumenthal has nearly 860,000 followers. He appears regularly on Russian, Chinese, Turkish, Iranian, and Venezuelan state-funded media. He founded a website, The Grayzone, whose roster of contributors includes alumni of Kremlin-backed media outlets. (Blumenthal did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
On multiple platforms, Blumenthal has vouched for the world’s worst mass murderers. At Russia’s invitation, Blumenthal addressed the United Nations Security Council, where he denounced Ukraine and described Western support for it as an “international Ponzi scheme.” He denied that deposed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his own people and has implied that Syrian rebels did. He denied Hamas’s systemic sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7. “A Chinese state media darling,” according to Axios, Blumenthal has downplayed evidence that the Chinese government is repressing its Uyghur Muslim minority.
Outside Busboys and Poets before Blumenthal’s talk, two young Iranian women held a banner commemorating the demonstrators who had been killed by forces of the Islamic Republic during two days of protests in January. On his way into the store, Blumenthal paused to berate them. “Zionist cuck,” “Sellouts,” and “Persian gusanas,” he shouted at them. (Gusanas is the feminine form of the Spanish word for “worms”—what Fidel Castro called Cubans who fled his dictatorship.)
When Blumenthal entered the venue, he received rapturous applause. Sitting on a stage beneath portraits of the Dalai Lama, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr., he began with a breakdown of “Operation Epstein Fury,” a nod to the claim that President Trump initiated the war against Iran to distract the American people from his connection to the deceased financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But the actual instigator of the conflict, Blumenthal explained, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, America’s “real president,” who’d visited the White House Situation Room in February and taken “the unprecedented step of sitting at the head of the table, moving Donald Trump to the side.” (The most detailed account of the meeting, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan of The New York Times, placed Netanyahu on a side of the table, opposite Trump). It was at this meeting, according to Blumenthal, that Israel (“the epicenter of evil in the world”) ordered the United States (“the most perfidious force on the planet”) to attack Iran.
Blumenthal presents himself as a courageous truth teller whose work is too daring for the corporate media. But mainstream outlets abound with criticism of every aspect of the war, including Israel’s role in it. Indeed, outside the precincts of Trump-friendly media, the daily coverage of the conflict has been almost uniformly negative. But there’s a market for a darker and more insidious explanation as to how the world works. Blumenthal delivered just that—a conspiratorial account of Jewish power, American malignity, and the Islamic Republic’s righteousness. When he mentioned mourners at Khamenei’s funeral holding signs declaring KILL TRUMP, a smattering of applause broke out.
Blumenthal then returned to the country that Iranian leaders call “the Little Satan.” “Do we actually believe that the U.S. would be attacking Iran right now if Israel did not have full control over the Trump administration?” Blumenthal asked. He insinuated that Miriam Adelson, a Jewish Republican donor, had bribed the president to attack Iran, and he accused the Jewish state of trying to “weaponize the assassination attempts to manipulate Trump.” Israel would be “indirectly responsible” for an Iranian attempt on Trump’s life, which would be “blowback for the special relationship with Israel.” In other words, anything that happened to the president would be Israel’s fault.
Assessing the real motives and intentions of the regime in Tehran is difficult. Because Iran is a theocratic dictatorship that routinely arrests and in some cases executes journalists, Western reporters hoping to cover the country must either work clandestinely or submit to government supervision. Blumenthal sneered at his mainstream-media colleagues who disclosed in their stories that they were reporting from Iran with the Iranian government’s permission. “So they’re basically trying to say Iran is this authoritarian country that controls their coverage,” he argued. Blumenthal also defended the regime’s monitoring of foreign journalists due to “the long history of U.S. surveillance and spying and sabotaging.” Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter who was convicted on phony espionage charges and jailed for 544 days, might beg to differ with Blumenthal’s analysis.
In defending the Islamic Republic, Blumenthal made one false or misleading assertion after another. He parroted the regime’s claim that 35 million people had participated in Khamenei’s funeral, “possibly the largest gathering in human history.” He said that women make up a greater percentage of the Iranian Parliament than the U.S. Congress. (In reality, only 5 percent of members of the Majlis are women, compared with more than a quarter of Congress.) He described Israel’s apparently unintentional bombing of a Tehran synagogue as a deliberate act; the presence of a captive Jewish community in Iran “discredits Zionism,” by Blumenthal’s account. The exile-staffed news network Iran International, he said without evidence, is “run by Israeli intelligence,” and “there is so much U.S. air power concentrated in Israel right now that Israel will not allow U.S. planes to be at Ben Gurion International.” In reality, the Tel Aviv airport has bent over backwards to accommodate the U.S. Air Force, at one point reducing its civilian flight capacity to about a third of normal.
Blumenthal was particularly keen to minimize the Iranian regime’s brutality toward its own people. The regime maintains that slightly more than 3,000 people were killed during January’s anti-government protests, which Blumenthal characterized as “riots.” Reporting by human-rights groups and other journalists tells a different story. According to Time, so many people were killed during the two days of protest that “the state’s capacity to dispose of the dead” was “overwhelmed.” Two senior health-ministry officials, speaking anonymously, told the magazine that at least 30,000 dead (and possibly many more) was a likelier figure, and one that was corroborated by a group of first responders who collected data surreptitiously. Blumenthal insisted that a death toll this high isn’t possible. Regime opponents’ estimates of 40,000 or more dead, he said, are “fake numbers.”
Blumenthal was most contemptuous toward Iranians who do not share his rosy view of the late ayatollah and the brutal theocracy that he led for nearly four decades. He described Masih Alinejad, the Iranian exile whom the regime brazenly tried to murder in Brooklyn and who wears a flower in her hair in protest of the forced hijab, as “basically a CIA asset” and “the lady with the hair.” Her flower, he said, “should be drenched in blood.” Blumenthal showed no patience for Iranians he met who blame their government’s economic mismanagement, and not America, for their troubles. “I mean, as ignorant as you think Americans are about sanctions, there are many Iranians who don’t really see the role of sanctions in their economic misery,” he complained.
Presidents of both parties have provided critics of American foreign policy with endless grounds for legitimate criticism. But the work of Blumenthal and others like him reveals a reflexive paranoia, if not hatred, of the United States and its allies, to the point where criticism is insufficient. Far too often, they veer into downplaying or even endorsing the depravities of illiberal governments and movements simply because they adopt an “anti-imperialist” posture.
Sadly, there is a large and growing audience for this reactionary analysis. “One of the reasons why I opened Busboys and Poets is to educate people,” the chain’s owner, Andy Shallal, said before Blumenthal took the stage. Shallal extolled the importance of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, international law, and international norms. These are fine principles, the bedrock of any decent society. What’s jarring is to hear them invoked on behalf of someone doing public relations for a regime that flouts every one of them.