Today’s editorial cartoon from the leading liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz is raising a few eyebrows for depicting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an airplane labeled Israel flying into an American skyscraper.
A cartoon depicting the 9/11 attacks would be provocative enough. Depicting your country’s leader as a gleeful terrorist is just as bad. But a common strain of 9/11 Trutherism in the Middle East is that the terrorist attacks was carried out by the Jews.
The cartoon was widely condemned and denounced by U.S. and Israeli outlets alike. Cartoonist Amos Biderman defended the cartoon on Twitter, saying “The message is that Bibi is arrogantly and wantonly destroying Israel’s ties with the U.S. and leading us to a disaster on the scale of 9/11.”
“It was certainly not my intention to insult or upset anyone,” Biderman told his employer. “I wasn’t sufficiently aware of the great sensitivity that 9/11 holds for Americans.”
[h/t Time]