Thank God Mark Twain, who once said that the truth travels more slowly than lies, never experienced Twitter (Photo: Getty Images)
It started as all good broigus: with a one-star rating in telegraph“That was the ugliest moment at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival that I have ever experienced,” complained Dominic Cavendish.
According to the newspaper’s theater critic, two Israeli theatergoers were pushed out of Reginald D. Hunter’s show by an audience gripped by a “mob mentality” for criticizing a joke that compared Israel to an abusive partner.
After the couple left, Hunter made another joke with the punch line “damn Jews.” From then on, things followed a certain pattern.
The House of Representatives issues an apoplectic declaration. The offender apologizes, but is nevertheless deposed. Unhappy with this punishment, Daily Mail The film concludes with an “exclusive interview” with the victims.
Witnesses – including national broadcasters – are coming from all over the place saying the incident was heavily distorted. They have photos and videos to prove it. But by this point it is too late – the damage is done. And that, my friends, is how you create an anti-Semitism scandal.
“Shimon” and “Talia” are not an Israeli couple visiting Britain for a “romantic holiday”, as the Email Nor had they raised “a – polite – objection to a rather lame joke at Israel’s expense.”
They are Mark Lewis and Mandy Blumenthal, two of Britain’s most notorious pro-Israel activists, and they seem determined to make as big a scene as possible.
I spoke to several people who attended Hunter’s performance. All say that when Hunter made the joke, Blumenthal immediately jumped to her feet; she screamed “Shame!” and “Anti-Semite!” at the top of her lungs without pausing for breath; she accused the room of being full of Hamas apologists; and she said that their wives and children were being raped and murdered by terrorists (“That’s pretty strong, considering that this is happening to Palestinian prisoners,” one audience member countered).
They say Hunter begged the couple to leave with a refund, but they refused. At this point, some in the audience began to lose patience – understandably so. Some told the couple to leave or shut up; two young men shouted “Freedom for Palestine.”
In a video posted to social media, Hunter can be heard calming the crowd: “Don’t tell them anything,” he says, “let’s end this peacefully.” Oddly, none of the media outlets that originally reported on the incident have set the record straight. Thank goodness Mark Twain, who famously said that the truth travels more slowly than lies, never lived to see Twitter.
Reginald D. Hunter and the “mysterious peoples”
In the end, it was left to Hunter to check the facts that professional journalists had failed to do. As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time Lewis and Blumenthal had experienced something like this. Although they were apparently too afraid to show themselves to the media, the couple is nothing new when it comes to press attention.
They have a history of courting that power, using their emigration to Israel in 2018 – invoking Israel’s first law, the Jewish right of return, making them about as Israeli as a British expat in Marbella is “Spanish” – as an opportunity to tell the BBC that Jews would not be safe in Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain. Nor are they the “charming and friendly” couple portrayed in the Email.
In 2017, Blumenthal and her brother Alan, then a parliamentary candidate for UKIP, are said to have “sworn abuse” at Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament Haneen Zoabi, calling her a terrorist sympathiser and, according to one report, a “racist bitch”.
Lewis is something of a professional bully: in 2018, the Law Society fined him £2,500 and ordered him to pay £10,000 in legal costs after he called an 18-year-old social media user a “stupid arsehole” and said he hoped his father would “sit shiva (the seven-day Jewish mourning period) for you soon”.
Both Blumenthal and Lewis played a leading role in the 2018 re-establishment of Herut UK, a far-right Zionist party whose Israeli counterpart merged with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in 1988.
Lewis is a former director of UK Lawyers for Israel, the group that had artwork by Palestinian children removed from a London hospital.
The two are also closely linked to the extreme right: Lewis recently represented the “Nazi-curious” Nina Power, while Blumenthal was photographed with Ambrosine Shitrit, a friend of Tommy Robinson.
How two of the country’s most die-hard and well-informed Israel defenders could spend a “romantic holiday” at the concert of a comedian who has expressed his support for the Palestinian cause is a mystery that will surely remain forever unsolved.
In the joke that offended Lewis and Blumenthal, Hunter describes a woman who claims to be a victim of domestic violence when in fact she is the perpetrator. “It’s like being married to Israel,” Hunter quipped. This joke not only has a kernel of truth – it is true.
Despite enjoying the backing of a global superpower, having maintained a stranglehold on Palestinian lives for a century, and having now killed a whopping 40,000 people in Gaza (far fewer than its ministers would like), Israel insists it is David fighting Goliath.
This crazy inversion of reality requires the conjuring of imaginary threats. In Gaza, the Israeli army claims that Hamas members lurk beneath virtually every school, UN building and hospital in the Gaza Strip, providing selective evidence for its claims. Outside Israel, its followers see such threatening mirages everywhere – or at least they pretend to.
In Pennsylvania, a man who attacked a group of Palestinian protesters punched himself in the face and then claimed he was hit by one of their flags.
In Chicago, a woman called the police about the Palestine encampment at DePaul University, claiming she was surrounded by activists who could be heard in the background telling her she could leave. “The looks on the faces of the people in the audience,” Blumenthal told the Email In her interview she revealed everything: “It was as if they wanted to attack us and beat us.”
Lewis and Blumenthal are the perpetrators of Hunter’s joke, two bullies who insist they have been bullied.
The couple embody an Israeli-influenced imaginary in which two related phenomena intersect: the cognitive dissonance that comes from being descended from victims of one genocide while simultaneously approving of another; and a liberal mode of identity formation in which, as Asad Haider writes, following Judith Butler, we “become subjects who participate in politics through our submission to power.”
This distorted identity politics paradoxically demands that, in order to be able to act, we must be victims who invent the suffering of others in order to distract from or justify their own. “The couple look for trouble and find it” would have been my headline.
Who does this remind you of? It reminds me of Gideon Falter, the pro-Israel activist who marched into a London Palestine demonstration in April, claiming he was taking the long way home from synagogue and happened to be accompanied by a full security team and a videographer who was violating Shabbat.
Like Lewis and Blumenthal, Falter was caught lying – although unlike them, he did not get away with it unpunished. Because it is not the truth that decides on the scandal, but the credulity of the media.
The media cherry-picks the story they want to believe based on what sells the papers and fits into a wider narrative they want to push – just think of the infinite shelf life of the Corbyn ‘Wreathgate’ affair – and the story about a black comedian chasing two Jews out of a theatre was just too good to pass up.
A similar anti-Semitism scandal threatened to erupt around Hunter in 2006, but never came. At his Edinburgh show that year, Hunter joked that Austrians did not perceive the Rwandan genocide as a real genocide like the Holocaust. A writer on the Da Ali G Show – one of the most racist and misogynistic programs ever broadcast on prime-time television – complained in the Justbut the story came to nothing.
The reason they caught him this time is because there is a far greater appetite in all corners of the media than there was in 2006 for stories that expose the hostility between Jews and other minorities and portray Israel and its supporters as genocidal. Reginald D. Hunter’s schtick hasn’t changed – the world has. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Rivkah Brown is an editor and reporter for Novara Media
Follow her on X: @rivkahbrown
Do you have any questions or comments? Send us an email at: [email protected]
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The New Arab or its editorial staff or staff.
