Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the ‘‘Paris terrorists’’ who carried out the bloody attacks last week in Paris, saying both had committed crimes against humanity.
In a news conference in the wake of a visit in Berlin, Davutoglu said that Israel's bombardment of Gaza and its storming in 2010 of a Turkish-led aid convoy to the Gaza Strip, in which 10 Turks were killed, were on a par with the Paris attacks, whose dead included shoppers at a Jewish supermarket.
"Just as the massacre in Paris committed by terrorists is a crime against humanity, Netanyahu, as the head of the government that kills children playing on the beach with the bombardment of Gaza, destroys thousands of homes ... and that massacred our citizens on an aid ship in international waters, has committed crimes against humanity," the Turkish Prime Minister said.
Davutoglu, joined other world leaders, including Netanyahu at the Paris march on Sunday in memory of 17 people killed.
His comments risk ratcheting up a new row in the increasingly tense relationship between Turkey and Israel after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan blasted Netanyahu for “daring” to attend the weekend’s anti-terror solidarity march in Paris after the attacks.
Netanyahu spat back Wednesday that Erdogan’s “shameful remarks must be repudiated by the international community.”
The Turkish president is known for his anti-Israel outbursts, declaring in July that Israel had “surpassed Hitler in barbarism”.
Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman for his part called Erdogan an “anti-Semitic neighborhood bully” and accused Europe of contributing to increasing anti-Semitism on the continent by ignoring Erdogan’s recent anti-Israel statements.
“European states’ silence in the face of the recurring diatribes of Erdogan, who calls our state a terror state, leads to the same murderous hatred against Jews in Europe,” Lieberman declared. It’s bad enough that leaders in Europe fail to condemn blatant human rights violations in Turkey itself, he said, “but their ignoring of the hatred and the incitement against Israel that this man cultivates is something that we cannot ignore.”
“If one looks for the reasons for increasing anti-Semitism in Europe — why and how it happens — this is one of the reasons. The silence of the lambs of cultured Europe — the Europe of political correctness — in the face of an anti-Semitic neighborhood bully like Erdogan and his friends brings us back to the situation of the 1930s.”