Leaked audio catches Netanyahu’s son bragging about gas deal outside Israeli strip club

Yair Netanyahu is the son of the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.  Benjamin tries to put across the image of a man concerned for the fate of the Jewish homeland.  The son, well… not so much.

In addition to this deal, which seems perhaps less than honest or ethical, the PM’s son is also reportedly heard discussing the strippers in the club, and how much money Yair and his friends spent whilst in the club.

“My dad set up 20 billion dollars for you dad, and you’re fighting with me about 400 shekels?” the Haaretz quoted Yair as saying in the 2015 recording of the conversation with his friend and son of gas tycoon Kobi Maimon while leaving the strip club.

The audio recording has not yet been released on the internet.

This is not the first time something like this has happened.  Yair is known for having a reputation for debauchery. One of the other features in the recording is that Yair brags about being able to set a friend up with a woman that he himself had a relationship with, and that he could charge money for “pimping her out.”

When asked about all this, the Netanyahu family maintained that these recordings were part of a witch hunt that is meant to undermine and hopefully remove the Prime Minister from his post, or render him powerless.

While a lot of this sounds like the usual paparazzi surrounding celebrity figures that behave badly, this one deserves a little more consideration.  The issue has to do with the standard perception of Israel itself in the eyes of many, if not most, Americans.

An analogue to this in Christianity would be something like building casinos around the Vatican in Rome, or an entertainment complex around Trinity-St Sergius Lavra in Russia.

Since there is a particular sense of “religious righteousness” involved in the whole matter of Israel’s creation, it strikes many people as a further contradiction of the truth to hear of the leaders making shady or dishonest deals for oil, or to know that the son of the PM is into debauchery.

It is, of course, not fair to judge the Prime Minister or leader of any nation based on the bad behavior of his or her family members.  We all have bad actors in our families, somewhere. While it is not fair, it is nonetheless one of the things that adversarial forces will use to advance their cause that the Israeli existence is the worst sort of farce, in fact, a continuation of the savagery of the Holocaust, but now directed at a different group of people.

But it too often appears that the essence of being Jewish to some of these people simply means they have a “right” to a particular piece of dirt, which was never theirs to begin with.

When we see casual witness to this, like with Yair Netanyahu, it is easy to conclude that the Israelis do not care about following the will of God in large proportion.  This creates problems.

For everyone.