Israeli Military’s Twitter Warrior Forced to Retreat After ‘Obama Style’ Blackface Joke

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"The young Israeli officer who leads the campaign to cast his nation’s military in a positive light on social networks restricted access to his own Facebook account on Sunday, after a Lebanese blogger discovered that the soldier had uploaded an image of himself with mud or dark paint on his face captioned, “Obama style.”

The officer, Lt. Sacha Dratwa, a 26-year-old who emigrated to Israel from Belgium eight years ago, was identified last week by Tablet and Gawker as the man marshaling Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Pinterest to support and celebrate the actions of the Israel Defense Forces.

After Lieutenant Dratwa blocked access to the photograph on Sunday, he defended himself on Twitter, writing, “I’m not racist.” In a statement posted on Facebook he insisted that he had “nothing to hide,” but was merely trying to stop what he called the “cynical use” of “private photos from my Facebook profile in order to publicly misrepresent my opinions.” The photographs of himself posted on the social network, he added, “do not reflect my beliefs and have no bearing whatsoever on my position in the IDF.”

Another copy of the photograph, with the same caption, remained in a public gallery of Lieutenant Dratwa’s Instagram photographs on Monday.

In a comment to an Israeli news site, the officer’s superiors said that because the image was posted on the soldier’s personal Facebook account, it had no bearing on his official role."

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/26/israeli-militarys-twitter-warrior-posed-obama-style-in-blackface/