Basically: Anti-Semitism is complicated, but bears are always funny.
Le American Bear is a sunglasses-wearing, morbidly obese cartoon brown bear, dressed in an American flag t-shirt, who loves hamburgers and freedom, cannot speak in complete sentences, and gets around in a mobility scooter because walking is too hard.
He's a blunt parody of American excess, one who might not be out of place on South Park.
Except for one thing. He's the credulous foil to and perpetual victim of pro-Israel, anti-America conspiracies by "Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif" (the internet's favorite anti-Semitic cartoon), and the White Supremacist internet absolutely loves him:
Via Daily Stormer
On dozens of white supremacist and white nationalist news sites, message boards, and chans, Le American Bear comics are shared, where they're used to humorously punctuate arguments about Jews' control over white Americans too stupid and gluttonous to notice. It's among the most popular, if not the most popular, cartoons in this dark basement of the internet.
But it doesn't come from there.
Anti-Semitism makes for unlikely bedfellows, a point you might infer from the strange history of "Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif" (also known as "Le Happy Merchant"), the derogatory Jewish caricature beloved in equal measure by message board white supremacists and just-for-the-lulz trolls, and in fact created by a 90s version of the latter for a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
And now, to that noxious brew, add another ingredient: the Finnish internet.
Yes, Le American Bear can be traced back to Finland's answer to 4chan, a now-defunct image board called Kuvalauta. It was here, in 2008, that the popular meme Spurdo Spärde, the progenitor of Le American Bear, was born. According to Know Your Meme:
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