Turkey's Collateral Damage: Its Jews

by Burak Bekdil • May 29, 2021 at 5:00 am

The loss of 232 Muslim lives in Afghanistan did not make even a single column inch of news in the Turkish media.
Once again, it is wartime for Palestinian terrorists, a wake-up call for the usual Turkish hostility, and hard times for the few thousand Turkish Jews squashed in between the bitter truth and their fear of a potentially dangerous autocrat.

In this year's Middle East clashes, as in the past several years, Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey globally championed the Palestinian cause. Erdoğan, referring to Jewish people, said on May 17: "It is in their disposition that they are only satisfied by sucking blood" -- a comment that triggered a duel of words between Ankara and Washington. Pictured: Erdoğan hosts Ismail Haniyeh (left) leader of the Hamas terrorist organization, at the Turkish Parliament in Ankara on January 3, 2012. (Photo by Adem Altan/AFP via Getty Images)

In a 2015 study, the Anti-Defamation League found that 35 million out of an adult population of 49 million Turks, or 71%, harbored antisemitic attitudes, compared to an average 49% in the entire Muslim world. Statistically speaking, a 22 percentage point difference from the average is a significant deviation. In Turkey's case, the deviation is also empirically visible.

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