Hey, some of my best friends are lizard people

I really do live in a bubble—when I've seen references online to the shape-shifting lizards running the US government, I thought they were snarking, but it seems there is a guy who makes a living hustling this theory for real, and 12 million Americans who believe him. You still wondering why Trump got 63 million votes in November? I'm guessing he's a shape-shifting frog, and folks see him as their only defense against the reptilians.

A funny thing happened to the international Jewish conspiracy led by liberal financier George Soros, the shape-shifting lizards who constitute the world's elite, including the British royal family (who knew?), and the pallid, hook-nosed, grasping members of the Bavarian Illuminati and their Masonic associates: they started focusing their immense and evil power through former Israeli Labor prime minister Ehud Barak and attorney Eldad Yaniv, head of the anti-corruption Eretz Hadasha party,  on....

Image via Mondoweiss; another useful version of the story is at Jerusalem Post.

... current Israeli Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife—you were expecting maybe Horst Wessel?—at least in the eyes of their 26-year-old son Yair, an unsalaried communications aide to his father, who appropriated this image from a rightwing Israeli website to his own (where he uses his mother's surname, "Yair Hun") the other day, then deleted it after it was applauded by former Louisiana Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke and the American neo-Nazi Daily Stormer.

This is presumably involved with the fast-developing corruption cases against the Netanyahus (primer at Times of Israel): Case 1000, the allegation that an Israeli producer of Hollywood movies, Arnon Milchan, and an Australian gambling magnate, James Packer, bribed the prime minister with tens of thousands of dollars worth of champagne, cigars, air tickets and hotel stays in return for help with Milchan's US visa and Packer's Israel residence permit; Case 2000, in which leaked transcripts of taped conversations show Netanyahu negotiation with a newspaper publisher, Yedioth Aronoth's Arnon Mozes, to marginalize certain journalists he doesn't like in return for favorable treatment for the newspaper from the Knesset; and the most recent in a long line of cases against Sara Netanyahu for misusing public funds at the prime minister's official residences, expected to result in an indictment soon:

In a case dubbed “the meals-ordering affair” by the Justice Ministry, Sara Netanyahu with help from an aide allegedly created a false impression between 2010-2013 that no cooks were employed at the prime minister’s official residence, while indeed there were, according to the ministry statement.

This was done, the statement said, to procure state funding for outside catering that would have been covered had there been no chef.

“In this way, hundreds of meals from restaurants and chefs worth 359,000 shekels ($102,399) were received from the state fraudulently,” said the justice ministry statement.

The last figure on the right in Yair's anti-Semitic cartoon is Meni Naftali, a former employee in the prime minister's household who is the source of some of the most spectacular, and apparently true, stories about Sara Netanyahu—

Naftali sued the Netanyahu’s two years ago, claiming he was promised a promotion and tenure but was denied them; the trial became a scandal when Naftali claimed Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife. acted tyrannically against the household workers, to the point of physically assaulting a female worker, who suffered a collapse as a result. Naftali further claimed Mrs. Netanyahu was an habitual alcoholic, who tried to collect even the deposit money for the bottles, which were bought by the government. The Labor Affairs Court found for Naftali, confirming all his allegations.

—and is expected to be the chief witness in the new case.

And indeed there are legal problems for Yair himself, who has been sued for libel by the leftwing think tank Molad, over another Facebook post,

calling the group a “radical, anti-Zionist organization funded by the Fund for Israel’s Destruction” (a reference to the New Israel Fund, a left-wing NGO and bête noire of the Israeli right). Earlier that day, Molad had posted a listicle criticizing Yair Netanyahu’s political views and use of public funds.

So that's basically the story, and it has a halfway familiar ring: rightwing Israeli politicians get in trouble, whether it's for military mischief or personal corruption, and accusations of anti-Semitism begin to fly. What's interesting this time is the way the anti-Semitism is on the politicians' side, bringing out the same crusader vendetta against George Soros and international ("globalist") Jewry as the one we've been watching in the recent work of Dinesh ("Anti-Fascists Are the Real Fascists") D'Souza. The Netanyahu family, denying they've done anything wrong, begin to place themselves as the victims of a conspiracy mounted by a mysterious cosmopolitan elite (Binyamin Netanyahu has so far declined to comment on Yair's Facebook disgrace) pulling the strings, or dangling the bait.

I've long had some issues with Israel, especially under rightwing governments (my own little bit of Israeli family belongs to the sadly diminished peace camp), for its militarism in the service of occupying conquered territory (Lebensraum for ever more settlers!), cult of Strong Men like Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu, government by the bribery of interest groups, pervasive racism against Arabs and the dark-skinned, including the dark-skinned Jew, properties I associate with fascism, and its alliance with the crazy American Christianist right (which maintains friendships with Israel in the hope of living to see the rebuilding of the Temple, Last Battle, and ultimate judgment in which all the faithful Jews will be thrown into the lake of fire). If they are now starting to borrow anti-Semitic rhetoric from the American Christianist right (these attacks on Soros, D'Souza's or Yair Netanyahu's, are straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), that's a sign things are worse than I thought.

Or maybe, why not look on the bright side, a sign of desperation, for the Netanyahus and fascistoid politics in general, the feeling that they're finished as a force and jumping that shark. In Jerusalem and in Washington. Maybe they're all going to jail!