Jeffrey Blankfort

Jeff Blankfort is a radio host with KZYX in Mendocino in Northern California. He is a journalist and Jewish-American and has been a pro-Palestinian activist since his first trip to the Middle East in1970. He was formerly the editor of the Middle East Labor Bulletin (1988-95) and co-founder of the Labor Committee of the Middle East(1987). He was also a founding member of the Nov. 29 Coalition on Palestine and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. He won a lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in February 2002 for its vast illegal spying against him, as well as hundreds of political groups and trade unions and thousands of individuals (including anti-Apartheid groups/activists).
In the Sixties, as a photojournalist, he was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement and worked with the Black Panther Party.
Blankfort sends out an influential annotated/commented emails of articles appearing mostly in the US press about Israel, Palestine, Middle East, neocons, and the Zionist lobby.
He is also a noted a critic of Noam Chomsky& Stephen Zunes over their refusal to recognize the influence of the Zionist Lobby over US Middle East policy:
the role he pushes today on the international stage is, as far as I am concerned, a reactionary one.

He reproaches Chomsky's views on divestment campaign, 911 attacks & Congress lobby's power on government, such as AIPAC and ADL.

Chomsky came out against divestment at MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he teaches, and where he was able to water down a divestment resolution. Then he came out two weeks later and attacked the whole divestment issue. He is against sanctions against Israel, he is against divestment, he has not revealed any kind of agenda that would change things other than having people “write letters to the editor”. Which James Abourezk answered in a paper entitled : .
Memorable Quotes
:I consider Zionism to be a mental illness which makes otherwise decent folks behave like Nazis or Afrikaners. — 1 January 2006.
:Over the years Congress has been at the ready to give Israel additional funding, even when money has been unavailable for essential domestic programs, as happened in 2002 when the Senate, after defeating a bill that would have provided $150 million for inner-city schools that had been impacted by 9-11, turned around and tucked an additional $200 million for Israel into the Homeland Security Bill as if Israel had been targeted that day and not New York and Washington.— May 2005.
Publications
A long list of Blankfort's articles, interviews, and commentary can be found here.
* Jeffrey Blankfort, Steve Zeltzer, Anne Poirier,The ADL Spying Case Is Over, But The Struggle Continues, CounterPunch, 25 February 2002.
* Jeffrey Blankfort, The pro-Israel lobby as a Fifth Column within the United States, MidEast Realities, 16 February 2003.
* Jeffrey Blankfort, The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions, Left Curve, April 2003.
* Jeffrey Blankfort, A War for Israel, Left Curve, 22 April 2004.
* Jeffrey Blankfort, Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israel-Palestine Conflict, DissidentVoice, 24 May 2005.
* Jeffrey Blankfort: Jewish-American anti-Zionist journalist, IndyMedia-SF, 20 November 2006.
* Jeffrey Blankfort, A Debate on the Israel Lobby, CounterPunch, 24 February 2007.
 
< Prev   Next >