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MEDIA AFFAIRS: MintPress News, The Grayzone, and Red are examples of far-left websites that can't be trusted when it comes to foreign policy, especially regarding Israel, Syria, Russia, or Iran.
By NICHOLAS POTTER DECEMBER 12, 2024 18:37
‘DISINFORMATION, CONSPIRACY theories, and antisemitic narratives.’ Israel has faced media outlets distorting the truth about the region for years.
(photo credit: Screenshots/Canva)
‘Revealed: The Israel Lobbyists Writing America’s News,” read the headline of the supposed scoop published on November 12. Just a month earlier, a similar story claimed that it was in fact “Israeli spies” who were writing America’s news.
In both cases, the evidence was flimsy at best. In the former, a brief internship at AIPAC during college was all it took to be a part of an ominous conspiracy to control the media. In the latter, a previous stint as a reservist in Unit 8200 of the IDF’s Intelligence Corps was more than sufficient to brand a journalistic security analysis as a clandestine psychological operation.
The articles were published on MintPress News, a far-left, Minneapolis-based website founded in 2012 by Mnar Adley, formerly Muhawesh. And they are just two examples of the website’s steep ideological slant, which has mixed anti-Israeli narratives with pro-Assad and pro-Putin propaganda.
The website’s cartoons routinely feature Stars of David – on bombs, on a shady caricature spying on social media, or on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as he rests his feet on chained presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, playing them off against each other as though he were their puppet master. Kareem Dennis, a British rapper better known as Lowkey and a loyal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement supporter who has repeatedly been accused of antisemitism by Jewish groups, also hosts a podcast on the site. One episode bears the title “Israeli Spies Plant Fake News In The Media.”
Disinformation and antisemitic narratives
This cocktail of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and antisemitic narratives has earned the self-styled news site more than 400,000 followers on Facebook, 240,000 on X, and 200,000 on Instagram, providing it with a substantial reach among progressive social media users. And it is by no means alone.
In October, the US-based website The Grayzone, which bills itself as a platform for “investigative journalism on empire” and caters to a fringe, left-wing readership, published an article claiming that the far-right, anti-Muslim riots that swept the United Kingdom this summer were in fact fueled by the “Israel lobby.”
For decades, this “lobby,” it is claimed, redirected “the rage of the downwardly mobile European working class against Muslim immigrants.” The Jewish state, so the logic goes, is responsible for racism in Europe. The article was authored by David Miller, a former professor at the University of Bristol whose employment was terminated after widespread accusations of antisemitism from Jewish organizations and students.
Following the Hamas-led attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal, who has also contributed to MintPress News and written a book in which he compared Israel with Islamic State, penned an article in which he suggested that Israel was in fact responsible for many if not most of the Israeli victims on that day. The IDF had driven “up the death toll of its own citizens with the indiscriminate use of heavy weapons,” Blumenthal wrote, while cherry-picking sources, misquoting Israeli media, and largely ignoring Hamas’s crimes to support his argument.
It was by no means an isolated incident. In the past, The Grayzone has denied war crimes and human rights violations committed by Russia, China, or the now fallen Assad regime in Syria. But while less successful than MintPress News, it still boasts over 360,000 followers on X, 76,000 on Instagram, and 32,000 on Facebook. And on the crowdfunding platform Patreon, where it sells memberships from $5 to $50 per month, it has over 3,500 supporters.
In Germany, the online platform Red fills a similar niche. The English-language website, which describes itself as a “revolutionary” media organization, published on the first anniversary of the October 7 massacre an “exclusive” series it called “talking with the Axis of Resistance,” including interviews with terrorist organizations Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and Hezbollah.
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Red, founded in early 2023, regularly reports from left-wing, anti-Israel demonstrations in Germany, even interviewing Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at one event on October 7 of this year with the motto “glory to the resistance.” Red’s blend of street reporting and terrorist interviews has netted it over 200,000 followers on Instagram in just 18 months, before its page was taken down by parent company Meta in September. On X, it still has over 100,000 followers.
MintPress News, The Grayzone, and Red are just three of many far-left websites that frame themselves as an alternative to a mainstream press that supposedly cannot be trusted when it comes to foreign policy, especially regarding Israel, Syria, Russia, or Iran.
“Their materials are helpful for authoritarians and pro-regime outlets and sources to point to, and apply plausible deniability,” Roman Osadchuk, a research associate at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Jerusalem Post. Russian news, for example, regularly quotes The Grayzone as a source.
A CLOSER look at their murky funding structures reveals links to various state-funded bodies in autocratic regimes.MintPress was launched in 2012 as a for-profit news organization, initially with generous funding from anonymous investors who founder Mnar Adley has repeatedly declined to name. Two years later, it had closed its office, but continued operating as a website, encouraging regular donations via Patreon alongside occasional crowdfunding campaigns, one netting over $30,000. Founder Adley, who did not respond to a request for comment, has since divulged few further details regarding the outlet’s finances.
However, at least some money appears to have come from pro-Assad sources. In 2019, MintPress was listed among the laureates of the “Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism,” named after a Lebanese-American journalist who worked for the Iranian state-owned Press TV and died in a car crash in Turkey. The award “honors nonmainstream journalists who continue to tell challenging truths in difficult times,” according to its website.
The unspecified award amount will “enable these courageous journalists to continue their work in an environment that penalizes them for their clarity of vision and willingness to expose the powerful.” Among the winners were, alongside scores of pro-Putin and pro-Assad influencers, several MintPress authors, as well as both Blumenthal and his website, The Grayzone. Some of the recipients, including Blumenthal, attended a conference in Damascus in 2019, photos posted on social media show, organized by Syria’s national trade union, which has close links to Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’ath Party, and addressed by Assad personally.
The Serena Shim Award awarded to MintPress, Grayzone, and Blumenthal is listed as a project of the Association for Investment in Popular Action Committees on its website, an organization registered as a nonprofit corporation in California that backs various anti-Israel and pro-Assad causes. The association’s treasurer is Paul Larudee, who attended the Damascus conference with Blumenthal in 2019, photos show, and who co-founded the Free Palestine Movement in the United States.
Since 2013, the association has received over $2 million from undisclosed sources, according to its public tax returns at the IRS seen by the Post. And this money has flowed back into projects such as MintPress News. The association’s returns list a total of $87,000 in cash grants to MintPress between 2017 and 2021. A further $75,000 in cash grants went to Behind the Headlines, the filings show – a company registered at the same Minneapolis address as MintPress News, which, according to her bio on Instagram, Mnar Adley also runs. In 2018, a $20,000 cash grant was also given to Blumenthal.
A top editor at Blumenthal’s Grayzone has also received money from the Islamist regime in Tehran. According to hacked emails and other documents from the state-funded Press TV, which the Iranian hacker group Black Release published on Telegram in 2022 and were reported on by The Washington Post this June, thousands of dollars’ worth of payments were made to one of its managing editors, Wyatt Reed.
Both Reed and Blumenthal from Grayzone also have links to Russia. Reed has worked for Sputnik, and Max Blumenthal has been a regular contributor to both Sputnik and RT, formerly Russia Today – both of them state-run propaganda outlets. Several other writers have also previously worked with both organizations.
In 2015, Blumenthal traveled to Moscow to attend a gala dinner celebrating RT’s 10th birthday, reportedly as a paid speaker, which was hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was directly after this trip that Blumenthal, who did not respond to a request for comment, founded The Grayzone. His messaging has been virtually consistent with Russia’s foreign policy positions ever since. And in June last year, he even addressed the UN Security Council, by invitation of Moscow, on aid to Ukraine. At the UN he accused the West of provoking nuclear annihilation.
The money trail at Red, the English-language, Berlin-based website that combines demo coverage with terrorist interviews, also appears to lead back to Moscow. It was founded by Huseyin Dogru, who previously set up the RT-owned Redfish, before sanctions against Russia in the EU curtailed the reach of Russian propaganda in Europe. The social media company Meta cited Red’s connections to RT when banning its accounts in September.
According to German company records seen by The Jerusalem Post, Dogru was tasked with liquidating Redfish’s assets in early 2023, which had an annual six-figure turnover. On Red’s website, he claims that Redfish’s assets went back to its parent company, RT.
At the same time, Red was born. It claims to be funded by private donations, but does not disclose from whom or to what amount. A request for comment was left unanswered. Red took over Redfish’s Telegram channel, simply renaming it. And Redfish contributors joined Dogru’s new venture, which is officially registered to AFA Medya in Istanbul, a company that does not appear to exist. At the listed address is instead a business specializing in “virtual offices” to register what would amount to shell companies.
MintPress News, The Grayzone and Red have carved out an online niche, specializing in content that appeals to a left-leaning audience, while offering a mouthpiece to regimes in Moscow, Tehran and, until recently, Damascus. Their murky financial structure seeks to obscure the fact that they provide a platform for state-sponsored disinformation, conspiracy theories, and antisemitism.
“In recent years, we have observed how threat actors, particularly those linked to the Kremlin, have appropriated fact-checking and investigative tropes to push disinformation and distort the truth, eroding trust in the institutions of investigation and fact-checking,” Eto Buziashvili, who also works at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Lab, said.But since the fall of Assad, MintPress News has attempted to pivot its messaging, adopting a more critical tone.
Assad “refused to open a front against Israel in the Golan Heights,” after Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had allegedly proposed a new front after the Hamas-led attack on October 7, the website accused in a Facebook post on Monday. And “Israel has now used the fall of the government to launch a war against the country, occupying territory in the south and destroying Syria’s military capabilities,” it continued. MintPress News was also quick to note that Hamas had become the first “Palestinian party” to congratulate Syria on “achieving their aspirations for freedom and justice.”
After rebel groups seized power in Syria on Sunday, MintPress News may be left with one backer fewer. But other regimes continue to have both the funds and the vested interest in sponsoring and amplifying disinformation outlets that suit their agendas.
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