Wife of Israeli Interior Minister Lands in Hot Water Over Racist Obama Tweet

When your husband serves as Israel’s interior minister and is charged with overseeing the country’s strategic dialogue with its most important ally, the United States, this is what qualifies as an ill-advised tweet:

That tweet from journalist and broadcaster Judy Shalom Nir-Mozes, the wife of Israeli Vice Prime Minister and Interior Minister Silvan Shalom, sparked an online firestorm over the weekend. She quickly deleted the tweet and posted an apology addressed to President Barack Obama.

She later added on Twitter that the “scariest” response she received had been her husband’s: “I hope I will stay married when my husband will land and hear what I did.”

The Twitter dust-up isn’t the first time the television personality has gotten herself in trouble thanks to her posts on social media. She had to step down from her position at UNICEF’s Israeli branch amid a controversy over a Facebook post expressing vociferous support for Israeli military operations in Gaza that left thousands of Palestinians dead, according to the Jerusalem Post. “How is it possible to make peace with people who have it in their DNA to hate us?” she wrote. “I very much hope that Bibi [Netanyahu] will not surrender to the pressures of our enemies and continue the operation until the last terrorist is murdered in Gaza.”

We look forward to Nir-Mozes’s next intervention on social media.