Max is a writer and self-declared "anti-Zionist," known for his active support of the BDS movement and his calls for the dismantling of the State of … - Max Blumenthal

Blumenthal went to Moscow on a junket to celebrate RT’s tenth anniversary [in 2015]. We don't know what happened during that visit, but afterward, Blumenthal's views completely flipped. He has attacked not only the White Helmets but also Bana al-Abed, a nine-year-old girl who lived in rebel-held Aleppo and ran a Twitter account with her mother. The man who once wrote an essay called "The Right to Resist is Universal," and attacked [Sharmine] Narwani as an "Assad apologist," now accuses anti-Assad Syrians of belonging to al-Qaeda and has claimed that the White Helmets were affiliated with the Islamist group.

Give "pro-peace" activists a microphone for long enough, and their pro-Russia slant comes out. It's not a coincidence that Max Blumenthal, a co-founder of Grayzone, a blog that follows the dictum that the United States is bad and anti-U.S. dictators are good, didn't heckle any Russian officials in Washington on the day Zelensky arrived, demanding that they do what they could to stop the war. Instead, Blumenthal and his comrades focus their efforts on denigrating Zelensky personally, while either denying or downplaying Russian atrocities.

In the end, Assad will be remembered as an authoritarian tyrant whose regime represented little more than the interests of a rich neoliberal business class and a fascistic security apparatus. Those who have thrown their intellectual weight behind his campaign of brutality have cast the sincerity of their commitment to popular struggle and anti-imperial resistance into serious doubt.