Yair Netanyahu, oldest son of Israeli Prime Minister and a member of the IDF media relations unit, has gone ahead and committed the political crime of candor on his Facebook page.
As it turns out, he hates Muslims and Arabs.
Whodda thunk it?
Earlier this year, Yair Netanyahu posted that Muslims "celebrate hate and death," the Haaretz daily reported. After Palestinian assailants entered a West Bank settlement and stabbed five members of an Israeli family to death, he wrote that "terror has a religion and it is Islam."
According to the Haaretz report, the prime minister's son also ran a Facebook group that called for a boycott of Arab businesses and products, and used obscenities to describe Arabs. He was 17 at the time. The group had a total of 23 members, the paper reported.
In another comment, he wrote that there had never been a Palestinian state and that he hoped "there would never be one."
Let's be clear. The son is merely reflecting the values of his father, the Prime Minister.
Then, as now, he was apologizing for the way his child welfare cuts had hurt large haredi families, while at the same time asking the haredim to look at the bright sides of that policy. "Two positive things happened," he told a conference of haredi government officials in Nir Etzion this week. "Members of the haredi public seriously joined the workforce. And on the national level, the unexpected result was the demographic effect on the non-Jewish public, where there was a dramatic drop in the birth rate." (Quoted in Ynet, Yediot Aharonot's Web site. The speech was also reported in Haaretz.) The once-and-possibly-future prime minister of Israel says publicly that he's sorry his welfare cuts made life harder for Jewish families who are "blessed," as he put it, with many children, but isn't it "positive" that these cuts resulted in fewer Arab children being born? Then Netanyahu went on to suggest a national remedy for the victims of his economic policies - but for Jewish victims only, not Arab victims. "I don't think that the Jewish Agency should refrain from helping part of the Jewish public in the state," he said, "and it is possible that additional non-governmental bodies could have done so."
The family values of ethnic supremacy, overt discrimination, and outright bigotry.
Values endorsed by the entire American political establishment, where the only debate amongst anyone holding elected office is who loves Bibi more and could do more to help him achieve his agenda. Values that received thunderous ovations from Congress. Values that are equally popular amongst Democrats and Republicans.
Just in case anyone wonders why the United States simply has no positive role to play in the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, it is this:
Prime Minister Netanyahu's values are those of P.W. Botha and George Wallace. And those values will ALWAYS enjoy the unconditional diplomatic, economic, and military support United States government, a few pitiful bleats about settlements and negotiations from Foggy Bottom notwithstanding.