What the hell is going on?
The Daily Stormer, an American white supremacist and neo-Nazi website dedicated its homepage banner on Tuesday to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair.
The banner shows a photo of a joint-smoking Yair Netanyahu photoshopped on top of the West Bank separation wall, along with a sniper rifle pointed directly at a racist caricature of a Jewish man.
The banner was posted just days after the prime minister’s son published an anti-Semitic cartoon on his personal Facebook page Saturday, which he took down a day later following widespread criticism.
The cartoon showed Manny Naftali, the former superintendent of the Prime Minister’s Residence, who is at the forefront of the struggle to put pressure on the police to indict Netanyahu for corruption, being baited by Israeli politico Eldad Yaniv, who is seen baited by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Barak is seen tempted by the money of the Illuminati, who according to the cartoon are being tempted by a Reptilian — a common anti-Semitic codeword for Jews. The Reptilian, for his part, is portrayed as controlling the world in the service of the Grand Jew: George Soros.
In the America-Israel 2017 landscape, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, is tweeting his support for Netanyahu’s son and the most prominent neo-Nazi website is making him their poster boy.
Here is some context I wrote recently on why the Israeli Prime Minister is dabbling in anti-Semitism.
Our team has been devastated by the horrific events of this latest war – the atrocities committed by Hamas in Israel and the massive retaliatory Israeli attacks on Gaza. Our hearts are with all the people and communities facing violence.
We are in an extraordinarily dangerous era in Israel-Palestine. The bloodshed unleashed by these events has reached extreme levels of brutality and threatens to engulf the entire region. Hamas’ murderous assault in southern Israel has devastated and shocked the country to its core. Israel’s retaliatory bombing of Gaza is wreaking destruction on the already besieged strip and killing a ballooning number of civilians. Emboldened settlers in the West Bank, backed by the army, are seizing the opportunity to escalate their attacks on Palestinians.
This escalation has a very clear context, one that +972 has spent the past 13 years covering: Israeli society’s growing racism and militarism, the entrenched occupation, and an increasingly normalized siege on Gaza.
We are well positioned to cover this perilous moment – but we need your help to do it. This terrible period will challenge the humanity of all of those working for a better future in this land. Palestinians and Israelis are already organizing and strategizing to put up the fight of their lives.
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