Mohamed Hadid, a real estate mogul in Los Angeles County, took down an apology for sharing a cartoon insinuating that Israel is to blame for police brutality in the United States.
The Algemeiner reported that Hadid, 71, had posted a cartoon to Instagram depicting a U.S. police officer and an Israeli soldier with their arms around each other as they’re kneeling the necks of a black man and Palestinian man, respectively. Hadid wrote in a caption for the post, “Two sides of the same coin.”
On May 31, Hadid issued an apology on Instagram for sharing the cartoon, explaining that the post stemmed from anger over the shooting of an unarmed, autistic Palestinian man in East Jerusalem on May 30.
“If my remark came off with anti-Semitism toward the Jewish people I do apologize,” Hadid wrote. “I think it was a wrong time for me to be angry about what happened in Jerusalem yesterday … you are right to be upset .. love and peace and coexistence is the answer.”
Hadid, who is of Palestinian heritage, explained that Arabs and Jews are cousins and that’s important to set differences aside and work toward ending the perpetual cycle of violence in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
“I am confident that the life of [the] Palestinians and the Israelis will improve in the near future,” Hadid said. “I want to live to see the day.”
Hadid accompanied his apology with a picture of an Israeli soldier helping an elderly Arab man walk.
Israellycool blogger David Lange noted in a June 1 post that Hadid’s apology has since been taken down. Lange pointed out that there had been a growing backlash to Hadid’s apology on social media.
“In a strange twist of irony, by giving in to the haters and removing his conciliatory message to Jews, Hadid has effectively shown why peace and coexistence is so far off,” Lange wrote.
Hadid is the father of models Gigi and Bella Hadid; his son, Anwar, is dating British singer Dua Lipa, who shared a since-deleted Instagram post calling the Israeli government “fake Jews” and accusing Israel and the United States of creating Hamas.
Various pro-boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) groups, such as the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] BDS and Palestine Solidarity, recently have argued that Israeli soldiers have been training U.S. police officers to be racist. Bryan Leib, former national director of the Americans Against Anti-Semitism watchdog, said in a statement to the Journal that such allegations “are disgusting and completely false. It’s true that special operations teams in local and state law enforcement like SWAT do train with Israel but the average police officer has never received training from Israel! Will Twitter and Jack Dorsey be ‘fact checking’ these modern day blood libels being spread about Jews?”
