Yair Netanyahu temporarily banned from Facebook after anti-Muslim posts
PM’s son calls social media giant ‘thought police’ for removing posts criticizing its decision to block his calls for revenge against Palestinians
Days after posting that he would prefer all Muslims to leave Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s eldest son, Yair, said on Sunday that Facebook had blocked his account for 24 hours.
It was not clear which post Facebook had reacted to. Netanyahu claimed the social media site was responding to a new post criticizing it as “thought police.”
He said he had been barred over a post in which he called Facebook out for preventing “free speech” by removing several of his previous messages in which he called for revenge against Palestinians for a terror attack last week.
“Unbelievable. Facebook blocks me for 24 hours for simply criticizing it! Thought police,” he wrote on Twitter.
Facebook had no immediate comment on the decision.
The tweet included a screen shot to his most recently removed post, which attacked the social media site for removing calls to “avenge the deaths” of Staff Sgt. Yovel Mor Yosef, 20, and Sgt. Yosef Cohen, 19 who were killed at the Givat Assaf Junction shooting on Thursday.
“There will never be peace with those monsters in the form of men that have called themselves ‘Palestinians’ since 1964,'” he wrote following the attack.
After that post was removed, he wrote that Facebook was “trying to shut our mouths in the only place where we have the right to express our opinions,” and, in violation of the site’s community rules, included a screenshot of the original post.
“The thought police of the radical progressives at Facebook have reached me as well! Hamas, Hezbollah and the Iranian regime have official pages on Facebook. There are also endless pages calling for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. Thousands of violent and extreme left-wing posts against me and my family, including threats of physical violence and immoral murder threats.” Netanyahu Junior charged.
“All of these do not violate Facebook’s community rules,” he complained.
In another pair of Thursday posts removed from the site, Netanyahu wrote:
“There will not be peace here until:
1. All the Jews leave the land of Israel.
2. All the Muslims leave the land of Israel.
I prefer the second option.”
In a subsequent post he added: “Do you know where there are no terror attacks? In Iceland and Japan. Coincidentally there’s also no Muslim population there.”
Last Monday, he posted on Facebook that the press, as well as left-wing NGOs and politicians, are “traitors.” His father disavowed the comment.
Yair Netanyahu has previously drawn media criticism for crude social media posts and a life of excess at public expense.
Last year, he posted and then deleted an apparently anti-Semitic caricature of liberal Jewish financier George Soros.
