Is the prime minister of Israel a bigot?

Of all the things Benjamin Netanyahu said to get re-elected, his statement in Hebrew on social media was the most cringeworthy.

According to the translation:

“The right wing government is in danger, Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left wing organizations are busing them out.”

Columnist Joe Klein accused him of bigotry and it’s tempting to draw a parallel. As in, what would we think if a candidate for president were to jump on TV on Election Day and declare, “the government is in danger, black voters are coming out in droves to the polls?”

However, CBS’s Dan Raviv, who was a long-time Middle East correspondent, says it may sound like that, “but in the Middle East context, it’s not an offensive thing to say. It’s hard for us to take.”

So we should cut him some slack, and anyway, Netanyahu himself quickly went on MSNBC to say he didn’t say what he seemed to be saying.

“I wasn’t trying to suppress a vote. I was calling on our voters to come out.”

Of course, our politicians do this too. Pretty much every American politician who raises taxes comes into office promising not to and then is forever haunted by his old sound bytes.

But Netanyahu does have one advantage American politicians don’t. He can make his embarrassing statements in one language and retract them in another.

He may be a bigot in Hebrew, but in English it’s as if he’d just had a cup of racial harmony at Starbucks.