Yair Netanyahu, the wayward son of Israeli’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, was temporarily banned from Facebook on Sunday after he shared a post which had been previously banned by the social media giant.
Last Thursday, Yair posted that there would not be peace in Israel until either all Muslims or Jews left the country, adding “I prefer the second option.” Earlier in the week, Yair had posted another comment in which he referred to left-wing NGOs and politicians as “traitors.”
Facebook took the former post down on Sunday, but Yair then wrote another post which branded the platform “thought police” and proceeded to re-upload screenshots, Haaretz reported. This was a violation of Facebook’s community rules, so the platform banned him for 24 hours.
This is not the first time that Yair has gotten into hot water for his social media antics. In May he was forced to delete his Instagram account after posting “F–k Turkey” during a diplomatic row between Ankara and Jerusalem.
More disturbingly, however, is the fact that a large number of his Facebook controversies stem from the sharing of far-right tropes and memes. Last September, for instance, he posted an image that depicted Jewish billionaire George Soros as controlling the world. Soros is a frequent boogeyman in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and was sent a pipe bomb in October. After that story broke, the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, which is arguably the most anti-Semitic site online, posted a trollish homage to Yair Netanyahu, referring to him as a “total bro”.
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
But Yair’s idiocy isn’t confined to the online world. This January, Israeli media released recordings of Yair bragging about about how his father helped arrange a $20 billion deal for Israeli tycoon Kobi Maimon. Yair also talked at length about finding a prostitute for the night, and complained about his friend borrowing money in a strip club.
Benjamin Netanyahu has also begun to form a bizarre alliance with the far-right, but through politics, not Facebook memes. As the Daily Beast has reported, the Israeli Prime Minister has spent a good portion of 2018 coddling up to far-right leaders, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as well as Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz. Both Kurtz and Orban’s political parties have regularly trafficked in anti-Semitism.
In May an Austrian diplomat was recalled from Israel after he posed on social media with a T-shirt that bore the name of a Nazi tank division. Members of the Austrian Freedom Party, which is part of that nation’s governing coalition, were also part of a fraternity which used anti-Semitic songbooks. Meanwhile, in Hungary, Orban has cracked down on the rights of migrants and activists, and recently forced the Soros-funded Central European University to close shop and move to Vienna.