Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to meet with Jewish leaders in New York as a part of his presence at the United Nations General Assembly for Climate Summit, the Turkish press reported.
Erdogan will meet with a delegation of the World Jewish Congress including the organization’s President Ronald S.Lauder. During the course of Israel’s Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza, Erdogan was highly critical of Israel’s offensive, even likening Israel’s actions to those of Hitler’s and terming Israel a ‘’terrorist state’.
“Just like Hitler, who sought to establish a race free of all faults, Israel is chasing after the same target,” Erdogan told his supporters in August, causing an uproar among Jewish groups. “They kill women so that they will not give birth to Palestinians; they kill babies so that they won’t grow up; they kill men so they can’t defend their country,’’ the Turkish president said, adding that Israel “will drown in the blood they shed.”
At a different rally he accused Israel of committing genocide. “Since [Israel’s creation] in 1948, we have been witnessing this attempt at systematic genocide every day and every month,” he said.
In July, Jack Rosen, president of the American Jewish Congress (AJC) asked Erdogan to return a ‘Profile of Courage’ award that they gave him in 2004. In an open letter to Erdogan, Rosen described the Turkish leader as “arguably the most virulent anti-Israel leader in the world.”
In a public letter, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Director Abraham Foxman accused Erdogan of stimulating the growth of anti-Semitism an urged the Turkis leader to “publicly reject all expressions of anti-Semitism including the scapegoating of Turkish Jews for the actions of Israel, and assure the Turkish Jewish community that they continue to have the full support and protection of the state and people of Turkey.”
Both the ADL and the American Jewish Congress have expressed alarm at the rise in what the two organizations perceive to be anti-Semitic rhetoric in Turkey during the course of Israel’s military conflict with Hamas, including a public request by Erdogan for his country’s Jewish community to condemn Israel.
Erdogan replied that Turkish Jewry “need not be concerned with the Turkish public sentiments caused by the recent events in Gaza or feel vulnerable on grounds of anti-Semitism.”