Actor John Cusack deleted a tweet containing an anti-Semitic image Monday, blaming the initial post on a “bot.”
The image Cusack posted depicted a giant hand bearing a Star of David enveloping a group of people, accompanied by the words “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” which it attributed to Voltaire, with Cusack adding, “Follow the money.”
The quote, frequently misattributed to the French satirist, was in fact said by American white nationalist Kevin Alfred Strom.
“A bot got me,” Cusack tweeted after deleting the initial tweet. “I thought I was endorsing a pro Palestinian justice retweet – of an earlier post – it came I think from a different source – Shouldn’t Have retweeted.”
In a later tweet, Cusack wrote that “it’s clear that even if it was Israel’s flag & even if you don’t have antisemitic bone in your body, it is still an antisemitic cartoon. Because it deploys anti jewish stereotypes in its attacks on Israel, even if those critiques about state violence are legit.”