Image by Facebook

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Yair Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister’s 26-year-old son, continues to court controversy with his social media activity.

The young Netanyahu is widely seen in Israel as being groomed by his parents as a future political leader and the Facebook posts have attracted particular public interest.

On Saturday, he posted on Facebook a cartoon mocking some of his father’s critics using what the Anti-Defamation League described as anti-Semitic imagery.

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It included a depiction of U.S. billionaire and left-wing philanthropist George Soros at the top of a food chain, dangling the world in front of both a reptile and former prime minister Ehud Barak, a frequent critic of Netanyahu.

The Israel office of the Anti-Defamation League denounced the cartoon on Twitter, writing: “The caricature posted by Yair Netanyahu includes explicit anti-Semitic elements. One cannot belittle the danger inherent in an anti-Semitic discourse.”

In further Facebook posts following criticism for posting the cartoon, Yair Netanyahu, who is a university student, condemned the Israeli left for being two-faced in trying to silence him.

A family spokesman said Yair Netanyahu would not be making any other comment. The prime minister refused to answer questions from reporters about the post on Sunday morning at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting.

Last month, the son made another headline-grabbing post after a protester was killed during a white nationalist rally in the U.S. state of Virginia. It appeared to suggest that hard-left organizations now pose more of a danger than neo-Nazi groups, which he wrote are a dying breed.

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