Over the decades, Hillary Clinton and her husband have posed as friends of Israel, and not so incidentally collected a lot of money from Jewish donors. The latest tranche of emails released by the State Department blow apart any pretense that Hillary is friendly to the Jewish state. Her reliance on Sidney Blumenthal as an advisor, despite the fact that she was forbidden by the Obama administration to employ him as a State Department aide, is now revealed to contain a reliance on the even viler son of a vile man. Jonathan Tobin of Commentary explains:

 [W]hat wasn’t clear until today was the extent to which the person whom she has publicly described as a close personal friend was counseling her to distance herself from pro-Israel groups and filling up her email account with anti-Zionist and other left-wing screeds by his son Max that she had printed out for further reading. The Blumenthal-Clinton correspondence is notable for many reasons but principally because it gives us a window into the sorts of conversations that would go on inside a Hillary Clinton White House. (snip)

… he topic about which Blumenthal seemed to have the most passion was his attempt to steer Clinton away from the sort of pro-Israel stands that she had established while in the Senate. Blumenthal urged her to give “tough love” to Israel. That’s a nice way of saying that he wanted her to lecture and threaten it to bow to Obama administration dictates even if they undermined the alliance between the two countries and Israel’s security.

As he said in one email about a speech she was scheduled to give to an AIPAC conference, he wanted her to: “remind it in as subtle but also direct a way as you can that it does not have a monopoly over American Jewish opinion.”

Just as telling is the way he plied her with his son Max’s articles. Max Blumenthal is a radical left wing writer and the author of Goliath, a vicious anti-Zionist polemic that attacks Israel’s right to exist and urges its isolation and ultimate dissolution. As the Daily Caller notes, Sidney sent Clinton some of Max’s pieces supporting the so-called Gaza flotilla and attacking Israel’s attempt to enforce the blockade of the Hamas state in the strip. Other Max Blumenthal pieces passed along by his dad spread libels about Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. Still more sought to highlight “Islamophobia” on the right.

The point here is that Sidney Blumenthal is not just one among many voices whispering in Hillary Clinton’s ears. He is a close friend and, as the emails attest, a valued adviser. Indeed, Clinton kept him close to her despite the fact that the Obama White House wouldn’t let her hire him and sought to keep him away from all policy discussions and decisions.

Hillary is imbibing poison from Blumenthal, and went out of her way to do so. She should be shunned by all who care about the survival of Israel.

Hat tip: Clarice Feldman