New Times- In the wake of a report that an Obama administration official used a barnyard epithet defying Hebrew translation to refer to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a cartoon on the strained relations between Washington and Jerusalem that compared the Israeli leader to the hijackers who attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.
As the image circulated online, readers across the political spectrum in Israel and the United States expressed outrage at the depiction of a smiling Mr. Netanyahu piloting a plane at the World Trade Center. Others, including the Jerusalem-based political analyst Brooklyn Middleton, were left scratching their heads.
The cartoonist who created the image, Amos Biderman, explained on Twitter and in an interview with The Times of Israel that he meant to suggest that Mr. Netanyahu’s “arrogance” and policies on settlement construction in the West Bank had provoked “a disaster in Israel-U.S. relations on the scale of 9/11.”
Source: NY times
