PM’s son posts cartoon with alleged anti-Semitic origin to slam parents’ critics
Yair Netanyahu takes to Facebook to suggest George Soros involved in corruption allegations against his mother and father
The son of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been in the headlines over the summer for a slew of controversial social media posts, posted a cartoon this weekend that appears to have anti-Semitic origins and has circulated on anti-Semitic websites.
The cartoon, posted Friday on Yair Netanyahu’s private Facebook profile, features references to Jewish billionaire and philanthropist George Soros, the Illuminati and some sort of lizard creature. It takes aim at his parents’ critics, including former prime minister Ehud Barak, lawyer and Labor party activist Eldad Yaniv, and Menny Naftali, a former caretaker at the Prime Minister’s Residence who is at the heart of allegations of wrongdoing over which Sara Netanyahu, Yair’s mother, is facing indictment.
Yair Netanyahu posted the graphic with the caption: “Food chain.”
On Saturday evening he published another post saying he had copied the cartoon from an anti-left Facebook page that features a graphic of his father drinking “leftist tears” from a cartoon jug as the profile picture and Pinochet and Pepe the Frog as its cover photo.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10215367995819419&set=a.2154599830850.2136376.1422076580&type=3&permPage=1
Yaniv tweeted the cartoon, along with what he described as its “source of inspiration” lifted from anti-Semitic sites, on Saturday.
“On the right, a post by the son of the prime minister of the Jewish people,” wrote Yaniv, displaying the cartoon posted by Yair Netanyahu which appears to suggest that Soros, via the lizard — a possible reference to the anti-Semitic concept of “reptilian Jews” — working through some sort of Illuminati schemer, is behind a series of allegations against his parents.
Alongside the cartoon in Yaniv’s tweet is a similar one, said to be the original, portraying a Jewish character — often seen in anti-Semitic memes and other propaganda — as the mastermind behind what appears to be American obesity and/or love of hamburgers.
בתמונה מימין: פוסט של בנו של ראש ממשלת העם היהודי.
בתמונה משמאל: מקור ההשראה האנטישמי. pic.twitter.com/SnJA6Pkpi0
— Eldad Yaniv ???????? אלדד יניב (@EldadYaniv) September 9, 2017
Barak tweeted hours later, suggesting taxpayers fund a psychiatrist to examine Yair Netanyahu.
זה מה שהילד שומע בבית? מה זה, גנטיקה או מחלת רוח עצמונית? לא משנה. בכל מקרה כדאי מאוד שנממן לו פסיכיאטר, ולא אבטחה ונהג צמוד pic.twitter.com/JOc4vCk8rv
— אהוד ברק (@barak_ehud) September 9, 2017
“Is this what the boy hears at home?” asked Barak in his tweet. “We’d better fund a psychiatrist for him…”
Yair Netanyahus post came after Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced that Sara Netanyahu is to be indicted, pending a hearing, for fraud, for allegedly diverting some NIS 360,000 ($102,000) of shekels in public funds for her own use, with the specific intention of avoiding payment of personal expenses over private meals ordered to the Prime Minister’s Residence.
The Netanyahus have blamed the legal entanglement on Naftali, who served as caretaker in the Prime Minister’s Residence for a period of two years. In Yair’s cartoon, a tray of food appears alongside a photo of Naftali.
“Expenditure over food ordered in disposable containers had remarkably inflated during the time when state witness Menny Naftali served as caretaker, and miraculously dropped when he left,” Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in a Facebook post this week.
“Why did expenses grow precisely during these years? Who ate or has taken this huge number of containers and meals, that were enough to feed a soccer team? Certainly not the Netanyahu family,” Netanyahu wrote.
“You should understand, this is what the entire story against the prime minister’s wife is based on. They told us about the garden furniture, the electrician, the bottles, the waiters, the nanny – in the end all that’s left is the bizarre and false story of the [food] containers, most of which were ordered by Menny Naftali. This, too, will evaporate during the hearing,” he wrote.
The prime minister, separately, is being investigating in a number of corruption allegations, for which he has been called on to resign, including most recently by former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon.
Barak recently mocked Netanyahu for claiming that “all politicians speak to publishers,” after the prime minister was forced to reveal following a court ruling that he had spoken with the financial backer and the editor-in-chief of the Israel Hayom daily, Sheldon Adelson and Amos Regev respectively, hundreds of times in a three-year period.
Netanyahu has faced deepening legal trouble in a group of criminal probes, including suspicions that he tried to arrange more favorable coverage from the publisher of a rival publication in exchange for curbing Israel Hayom’s circulation numbers. Both Adelson and Regev have given police testimony in the corruption probes against the prime minister. Netanyahu has denied any wrongdoing.
Yaniv, for his part, may have been targeted in the cartoon for co-initiating a High Court petition in January calling to instruct Mandelblit to be transparent in his probes of Netanyahu, particularly regarding a submarine deal with the German company ThyssenKrupp.
Yair Netanyahu has been in the headlines several times in the past few weeks, after claiming that American left-wing groups are more dangerous than neo-Nazis, following deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, during a far-right march, and US President Donald Trump’s controversial statements that “both sides were to blame” for the violence.
The prime minister’s son also lashed out at a group called Sixty One which criticized his lifestyle in a Facebook post in July. He accused the group of serving a radical left-wing agenda and drawing a threat of a libel lawsuit.
A few days earlier, Yair Netanyahu made the news over an incident in which he reportedly refused to clean up after his dog. A woman said Netanyahu junior flipped her the bird after she asked him to clean up the family dog’s excrement in a Jerusalem park.
