Israel Matzav

Turkey has been an anti-Jewish country for hundreds of years

I am sure that most of you have already seen the voluminous evidence that Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan stood behind the IHH - the terror organization that was behind the violence on the Mavi Marmara at the end of last month.

But in general, the media has been behaving as if Erdogan's support for the IHH and his government's anti-Jewish attitudes are 'only' anti-Israel or are new. In fact, even the Turkish Jewish community has made statements that everything is fine, that they support Erdogan and that they condemn the closure imposed on Gaza.

Andrew Bostom demonstrates that the media is living a lie, that Erdogan has been guilty of anti-Jewish behavior at least since the mid-1970's and that the Turkish Jewish community (40% of whom left for Israel after World War II) has been living in denial of its dhimmi status for hundreds of years. Here's some of what he writes about Erdogan and his political mentors.

Why would Erdogan and the AKP support—clandestinely, and now openly—an IHH movement redolent with jihadism (including links to Al Qaeda ^[2]) and Jew ^[4] hatred ^[5], while sundering relations with Israel?

A 7-page report ^[8] released in late January of this year by the Israeli Foreign Ministry (i.e., its “Center for Political Research”) accurately highlighted Erdogan’s personal role in fomenting Antisemitism among the Turkish populace—particularly, his granting legitimacy to anti-Israeli television programs (“Valley of the Wolves”) and newspapers (“Vakit”) rife with blatant Antisemitic content. The report concluded ^[8], aptly

For Erdogan, Israel-bashing is a way of bolstering his status with Islamic and Middle Eastern states, which Turkey would like to lead, and against the Turkish opposition, as well as with his own party’s target audience and nationalist elements of the Turkish public…For Erdogan and some of those around him there is no distinction between “Israeli” and “Jewish,” and therefore, [their] anti-Israel fervor and criticism become anti-Jewish.

Although it provides a useful introduction, the Israeli Foreign Ministry report fails to elucidate any of the critical doctrinal and historical context Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan’s attitudes reflect. Erdogan and his ruling AKP’s posture toward Israel and Jews represents the apotheosis of Islamic Jew hatred manifest in Turkey for a half-millennium, revitalized during the past 50 years by an indigenous Muslim fundamentalist movement eager to exploit both the traditional Antisemitic motifs of Islam ^[6], and those of European, especially Nazi and Czarist Russian (i.e., “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”) origin.

Just over 35 years ago, in 1974, Erdogan, while serving as president of the Istanbul Youth Group of his mentor, former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan’s National Salvation Party, wrote, directed, and played the leading role in a theatrical play entitled Maskomya ^[9], staged throughout Turkey during the 1970s. Mas-Kom-Ya was a compound acronym for “Masons-Communists-Yahudi”—the latter of course “Jews”—and the play focused on the evil, conspiratorial nature of these three entities whose common denominator was Judaism.

More recently, when the wildly popular, most expensive film ever made in Turkey Valley of the Wolves ^[10] (released February, 2006) included a “cinematic motif” which featured an American Jewish doctor dismembering Iraqis supposedly murdered by American soldiers in order to harvest their organs for Jewish markets, Prime Minister Erdogan ^[11] not only failed to condemn the film, he justified its production and popularity.

On August 28, 2007, the same day that Abdullah Gul became Turkey’s President ^[12] – replacing his secular predecessor, and further consolidating the ruling Islamic AK (Adalet ve Kalkınma) Party’s (AKP) hold on power — MEMRI ^[13] published excerpts from a chilling interview ^[14] given by Erdogan’s mentor, former Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan. The interview originally aired July 1, 2007, as part of Erbakan’s campaign efforts in support of Islamic fundamentalist political causes before the general elections of July 22, 2007, and the AKP’s resounding popular electoral victory ^[15] over its closest “secularist” rival parties.

Erbakan, founder of the fundamentalist Islamic Milli Gorus (National Vision; originated 1969) movement, mentored current AKP leaders President Gul, and Prime Minister Erdogan, both of whom were previously active members of Erbakan’s assorted fundamentalist political parties, serving in mayoral, ministerial, and parliamentary posts. The IHH—whose violent operatives featured prominently in the Mavi Maramara Antisemitic incitement, and subsequent bloodshed—has its origins in this same Orthodox Islamic Milli Görüş ^[2] movement. During Erbakan’s pre-election 2007 campaign stops before throngs of tens of thousands of supporters throughout Anatolia (including cities such as Trabzon, Elazig, and Konya), as well as cosmopolitan Ankara and Istanbul, he reiterated the same virulently Antisemitic statements captured in the July 1 interview, and other interviews.

These interviews and more expansive speeches were rife with allusions to Zionists/Jews (deliberately conflated), as “bacteria,” and “disease,” conspiring to dominate the contemporary Islamic world (“from Morocco to Indonesia”), as they had attempted unsuccessfully during the 11^th and 12^th centuries when Jews purportedly “organized” the Crusades, only to be stopped by the Turk’s/Erbakan’s Seljuk “forefathers.” Ultimately, Erbakan claimed, modern Jews/Zionists wished to establish “a world order where money and manpower are dependent on [them].”

And here's some of what he writes about the Jewish community.

Rifat Bali ^[16], a Turkish historian, and Jew, made a passionate indictment of Turkey’s tacit acceptance of Antisemitism, published soon after the November 15, 2003 Istanbul synagogue bombings. ^[16] The singularly courageous Bali, decried first and foremost, Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan’s and his AKP government’s abject failure to publicly denounce both the Antisemitic discourse of the fundamentalist Islamic movement from which Erdogan emerged, and which he claimed later to have abandoned, and those (like Erdogan’s mentor Necmettin Erbakan, for example) insistent on perpetuating such public discourse. With bitter disbelief, Bali further noted the near unanimously shared, albeit counterfactual view, of a respected Turkish columnist, published (in Milliyet November 17, 2003) within two days of the bombings, who maintained that, “…there has never been Antisemitism in Turkey in its racist or religious sense.”

The opportunity for honest discussion was squandered by every domain of Turkish society, not only politicians, but also media and intellectual elites. Moreover, a profoundly depressing example of collective Jewish dhimmitude was on ignominious display: the Chief Rabbi, as well as the secular leaders in his entourage representing the voice of Turkey’s Jewish community, even the Israeli government, as Bali observed,

…all seemed determined to ignore…[rather than] to confront face to face the Antisemitism which is incorporated in the political Islamic movement…[i.e., which currently governs Turkey].Bali further admonished the Erdogan regime to live up to its professed support of equality for Jews within Turkish society: Turkey’s Jews are not dhimmis in need of the tolerance and the protection of the Muslim majority. They are citizens of the Republic of Turkey.[emphasis added]

Perhaps ceasing this disgraceful and delusional behavior starts by putting an end to the hagiography of Jewish life under Ottoman rule ^[19] – including Jews living within Istanbul’s ghettoes, and Ottoman Palestine – and using precise terms that describe this half-millennium of history, appropriately and accurately: jihad, surgun (forced population transfer), and chronic dhimmitude. There was nothing “humanitarian” whatsoever in the Ottomans accepting a relatively modest number of Jewish refugees from the Inquisition – far greater numbers were accepted in other parts of Europe itself. Indeed the vacuum created for these skilled Jewish refugees whom the Ottomans re-settled in their burgeoning Empire was created by the Ottoman jihad conquest of Byzantine and Venetian territories and their Jewish populations, i.e., Jews who were subjected to the Ottoman jihad, including massacre, pillage, enslavement, forced conversion, and surgun deportation.

Also one cannot get lost in comforting happy talk and ignore the chronic, grinding Antisemitism, and vestiges of dhimmitude to which the Jews in Turkey have been subjected throughout the history of modern Republican Turkey ^[16]-including the large, government organized Thracian pogroms of 1934, and the blatantly discriminatory, deliberately pauperizing varlik vergisi taxation scheme and subsequent deportations of Jewish business leaders to “Turkish Siberia,” during World War II (WWII). This ongoing discrimination contributed to the rapid exodus of 40% of Turkey’s Jews after WWII to Israel within 2 years of its creation, followed by the steady, continuous attrition of the Turkish Jewish population – their departure accelerating again after the notorious Istanbul pogrom against Greeks, Armenians, and Jews in 1955—so that only 17,000 (or fewer) of Turkey’s 77, 000 post-WWII Jews remain.

There's much more. Read the whole thing.

Hat Tip: Emet m'Tsiyon - read his update at the bottom of his post, which ties Erdogan to the Obama administration via Obama mentor Lee Hamilton.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:35 AM