Amid reports that the Turkish intelligence service has been spying on the Jewish community, relations between Turkish Jews and the government are at all-time low, according to the Algemeiner. The media is also to blame:
The relationship between the 30,000 or so Jews living in Turkey and the rest of the Turkish population has become tense ever since the relationship between Israel and Turkey began to deteriorate shortly after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010. Anti-Israel sentiment is high in the country, and anti-Semitism has also been on the rise at the encouragement of Turkey’s Islamist government. A report in Al-Monitor quotes several Jews who fear a backlash against their community.
“As a Jew, I can attest to you there is a difference between being a Turk and an Israeli,” Ediz said. “But whenever there is fighting between Israel and the Palestinians, the atmosphere in Turkey turns against us, and people start acting as if we committed a crime.”
Leri, another Turkish Jew, told Al-Monitor that the media is also to blame. “The media is painting such an image that many won’t even consider us human.”
According to the Al-Monitor article, the prosecutor’s office in Istanbul that tried Israeli soldiers in-absentia for their role in the Mavi Marmara incident asked the Turkish National Intelligence Service (MIT) for a listing of Turkish Jews who traveled to Israel two weeks before and after it occurred. These people were put under surveillance. There are also allegations that the MIT identified five Jews in Turkey as suspicious, and that they expanded surveillance in Istanbul and Izmir — where the majority of the country’s Jewish population lives.
While Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has made
appeals to Turkey’s Jewish population to help mend the relationship with
Israel, there’s a sense among Jews in Turkey that he has put them in a
difficult and compromising position.
For the record, Erdogan and his party have been promoting Jew hatred in Turkey through various means, pretty much since he first came to power through the backing of movies like the Valley of the Wolves and television shows based on the Protocols. And he does not have clean hands with respect to the MM incident. You don't dispatch large vessels loaded with religious fanatics ready to employ violence to back their bid to break another country's legal naval blockade of foreign territory.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, Erdogan has been making propaganda against the Jews since long before he became PM in 2002. Another point is that he is a good friend of Obama. So obama ought to be urged/pressured/embarassed into intervening with his friend in behalf of the Turkish Jews.
ReplyDeletehttp://ziontruth.blogspot.co.il/2010/06/erdogan-has-judeophobic-nazi-like.html
Secular turkey is gone Forever.
ReplyDeleteThe sad truth is that secular Turkey as Mustafa Kemal Ataturk envisioned it is a thing of the past. As the Turks get rejected from the EU they have no other choice but to embrace their own Islamic identity. The vast majority of Turkish jews are immigrating to USA, Israel and Canada. Secular Turks (especially on the west coast, such as Istanbul, Izmir, Antalya, etc) they are a dying demographic. Similar to how western Europeans are being outbred by Muslim immigrants in EU, Secular Turks are being outbred by devout muslims from the rural countryside.
The birth rate in Central Turkey is 4-5 kids per family, while the birth rate in Istanbul, Izmir and Ankara is only 1-2 kids per family. The country will stay "Secular" for the sake of its own government institutions, tourism and economy.. but the social values and pressures have gone from modern to very religous. Even if Turkey had a military coup tomorrow, the changes that Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP have made to the judiciary, educational system, and the Constitutional Referendum are simply irreversible...
As The EU dream fades, Turks are now becoming like any other middle eastern /muslim country.
The Secular Muslims who are guardians of Ataturks legacy are being RAPIDLY outbred by the religous conservative muslims from the middle of the country.
The fact of the matter is this: Turkey can use western legal codes (Swiss civil code, Italian Penal code, etc), use a latin alphabet, an ban the headscarf, but in the end its still a muslim country.