Mondoweiss fraudulent fundraising blamed financial woes on "Israeli attack"

The anti-Zionist blog Mondoweiss has attempted to raise funds by fraudulently claiming that they've been "under Israeli attack". When a sympathetic reader commented to ask specifically what form the Israeli attack took, Mondoweiss co-editor Adam Horowitz was forced to respond with the following:

Yeah, I’ve changed that, it was the wrong choice of words. We are not “under attack”, but we certainly need the support of our readers to keep the site going.

The headline on the donation pitch has since been changed to the innocuous "Help Mondoweiss stay afloat with a voluntary subscription", but the URL preserves the original header: "http://mondoweiss.net/2011/06/help-mondoweiss-stay-afloat-under-israeli-attack.html".

The blogs editors have failed to explain how this fraudulent fundraising pitch came to be posted on their blog.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Readers (those who have been approved by the editors to post comments to the blog) have been  suggesting ways for the blog can raise money other than by falsely claiming that they're victims of an Israeli black op.  A Mondoweiss reader and frequent commenter named Alec Kinnear writes in response to a suggestion that a benefit be staged:

Throwing a Mondoweiss fundraising party would be a great idea (except that the Mossad would probably bomb it via the Dubai 11 and then try to pin it on Hamas) . . . 

That odd fear isn't all that surprising considering that Kinnear has written on his blog that he believes that the Mossad "probably" did 9/11 (read here), and that he believes Rachel Corrie to have died in a murder plotted by the Israeli government as a "test to see how large the reaction to an American death would be" (read here).  Kinnear wrote of the latter post

I have a feeling that the article sharon’s eastern front | next exile of the jews | Q & A will have me tarred as an antisemite. This is not a fair charge. I have many Jewish friends and colleagues. I both have employed Jews and have been employed by Jews.

That's convincing.  In that post, Kinnear goes on to compare Israel to Nazi Germany and to praise the Naturei Karta as the good kind of Jew.  Kinnear also seems to have been rather fond of the Austrian far-right politician Jörg Hader (read here).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The post containing fraudulent, paranoid charges against Israel and the gratuitously bigoted comments posted to it are consistent with the overall tone of Mondoweiss.   Phil Weiss and Adam Horowitz subtitle their blog "The War of Ideas in the Middle East", but it more often seems like an argument among Americans about the best reasons to hate Israel.  The tactics they use in their "war of ideas" now include falsely reporting as true imaginary Israeli attacks on his blog to convince his readers to contribute money, then retreating when asked for specifics about those purported attacks.  The troubled Middle East deserves better ideas than those provided by Mondoweiss.