Turkey 2004

 

No violent antisemitic incident was recorded in Turkey in 2004, despite reports claiming that the Islamist terrorist group Turkish Hizballah were intending to cooperate with al-Qa`ida in operations against Jewish and other minority targets. A wide range of subjects relating to Jews and Israel were treated with an antisemitic slant by the Islamist and ultra-nationalist media. Reports claiming, inter alia, that Mossad agents were training Kurdish militants against Turkey created a very negative atmosphere against Israel and Jews in Turkey. Three ongoing cases in Turkish courts concerned antisemitic statements published in the press.

 

The JewIsh CommunIty

The Jewish community numbers approximately 20,000 out of a total population of 70 million. Some 18,000 live in Istanbul, 1,500 in Izmir and the rest are scattered throughout the country.

The Jewish community is represented by the Chief Rabbinate. Before the bomb attacks on two synagogues on 15 November 2003, there were 35 active synagogues in Turkey, more than half of which were in Istanbul, where Jewish social clubs, one Jewish school, two homes for the elderly and one Jewish hospital are also located. After the attack many of the synagogues in Istanbul were closed while security measures were installed.

The community publishes a weekly newspaper, Shalom, in Turkish and Ladino, and a bi-monthly magazine Tiryaki.

 

political ideologies and parties

The National View (or Milli Görüş in Turkish) is an Islamist ideology developed in 1970 by Necmettin Erbakan who established the National Order (Milli Nizam) Party. This ideology was continued successively by the National Salvation (Milli Selamet) Party, the Welfare (Refah) Party, the Virtue (Fazilet) Party and finally the Felicity (Saadet) Party. All the parties preceding the Felicity Party were banned by the Constitutional Court on the grounds that they opposed secularism. The National View promotes Islamist values and opposes Israel, Zionism, the EU, the western world, the US and cosmopolitanism. Its proponents often use antisemitic motifs.

            The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi – AKP) split from the National View movement. While it defines itself as a conservative democratic party its ideology is Islamically oriented.

The ultra-nationalist movement is composed of: the traditional Nationalist Action Party (Milliyetçi Hareket); leftists (such as the Workers Party − İşçi Partisi), who are anti-EU, anti-US and anti-globalization; and various small nationalist groups. The movement does not have Islamist tendencies. Its supporters oppose the Justice and Development Party since they disapprove of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s pro-Israel and pro-US line.

 

AntIsemItIc actIvIty

Despite newspaper reports claiming that the Islamist terrorist group Turkish Hizballah were intending to cooperate with al-Qa`ida in operations against Jewish and other minority targets, following the November 2003 double bomb attack on two adjacent synagogues killing 24 people (6 of them Jews), no violent antisemitic incident was recorded in 2004. The Turkish police are taking such threats very seriously and have stepped up security at Jewish institutions.

Most antisemitism in Turkey is manifested in the media. There was only one antisemitic incident of note, in 2004, involving antisemitic insults hurled by fans of the Diyarbakir Sport soccer team in a match against Istanbulsport, which has an Israeli player on its team.

 

Media

A wide range of subjects relating to Jews and Israel was treated with an antisemitic slant by the Islamist and ultra-nationalist media. Extremely antisemitic articles appeared in the Islamist newspapers Vakit and Milli Gazete (semi-official organ of the National View), and in the ultra-nationalist publications Ortadoğu and Yeniçağ. These articles can be divided loosely into 1) commentaries which attacked Jews or Judaism directly, such as their alleged desecration of the Old Testament (referring mostly to passages concerning combat against pagans) or which cited books such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and 2) criticism of Israeli policies, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Zionism. Vakit columnist Abdürrahman Karakoç, for example, who routinely targets Jews, published an article (17 Aug.) praising Hitler, and accusing Israel of aping the Nazis and controlling the US. Following letters of protest by the Jewish community to the Turkish press, an investigation was opened in order to determine whether the law against racism had been infringed (see below). Dr. Shimon Samuels of the Simon Wiesenthal Center urged Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül to take action against the author and the paper.

Conspiracy theories are used by both Islamists and ultra-nationalists to demonize Jews and Israel. Turkish-Israeli arms modernization projects; agricultural projects in southeast Turkey connected to GAP (the South-East Anatolia Agricultural Irrigation Project), which employ Israeli experts; mutual visits of Turkish and Israeli officials; and the alleged role of the Mossad in northern Iraq (for example, “The Mossad is the Boss in Northern Iraq”) have all nourished these theories.

A ubiquitous subject in the Islamist media, especially, was the Donmes (Crypto-Jews, followers of Shabtai Zvi, 1626–76), who converted to Islam. Their descendants are accused by journalists such as Mehmet Sevket Eygi of Milli Gazete and by leftist Yalçın Küçük in several of his books of being undercover Jews who have attained high office in the Turkish administration, which they misuse for their own hidden agenda.

Another claim raised frequently by ultra-nationalist papers such as Ortadoğu and Yeni Çağ since the war in Iraq is that most of the Kurds, including leaders Mustafa Barzani and Jalal Talabani, are of Jewish origin, whose alleged ultimate goal is to set up another Israel in northern Iraq under the guise of a sovereign Kurdish state. Such a state, which will serve the ultimate dream of a Greater Israel – ‘the Promised Land’ – from the Nile to the Euphrates, will include part of southeast Turkey. This would explain, so the line of reasoning continues, why Israel is supposedly buying up land in southeast Turkey, inter alia, through the agency of Turkish Jews. It was also reported during 2004 that Mossad agents were training Kurdish militants against Turkey, a claim which created a very negative atmosphere against Israel and Jews in Turkey. On 24 June 2004, for example, columnist Şakir Süter wrote an article in the mainstream newspaper Akşam, calling on Turkish Jews to warn Sharon that if Israel did not stop training Kurdish militants in northern Iraq, friendly relations with Turkish Jews might end. A member of the Jewish community lodged a complaint about the article with the judicial authorities. However, it was rejected, under Turkey’s press laws, on the grounds that it had been submitted too late.

Islamist-oriented TV channels such as Mesaj and Kanal 7 take advantage of every news item concerning the Middle East to attack the Jews with derogatory religious statements, sometimes including quotes from the Qur`an.

 

Books

Numerous books by the Turkish Islamist Adnan Oktar, aka Adnan Hodja, are on display in almost every bookstore, under the pseudonym Harun Yahya. His revisionist writings focusing on Jews and Israel are rife with false accusations and caricatures. It should be noted, however, that Adnan Oktar has undergone a change and become more tolerant toward Jews and others; he now works toward promoting inter-religious dialogue.

Two books published in 2004, Turkey under the Threat of Israel and Zionism, by the nationalist Cemal Anadol and The Wooden Sword of the Jew, by Mustafa Akgün, a columnist of Milli Gazete, were under judicial investigation (see below). Anadol’s tract is an attack on world Jewry, taking the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a starting point. Both books are filled with well-known conspiracy theories about the Jews in general and with libelous claims about Jews living in Turkey in particular.

Translations of classic antisemitic tracts such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Henry Ford’s International Jew and Hitler’s Mein Kampf are sold at well-known bookstores. Mein Kampf, a best-seller printed by various publishing houses, is apparently subsidized and sold very cheaply.

 

AttItudes toward the Holocaust

Two important events took place in 2004 which the mainstream media portrayed as demonstrating the brutality of the Holocaust and the necessity of remembering it for the sake of the future of humanity. One was the exhibition “Children in the Theresienstadt Camp,” held in the Schneidertemple, an Ashkenazi synagogue built in 1900, which was converted into an art exhibition center in 1999. The other was a documentary entitled Desperate Hours, concerning the rescue of hundreds of Jews by Turkish diplomats serving in Europe during World War II who gave them Turkish passports. The documentary was screened to the general public in a cinema and shown on TV channels.

The need for Holocaust education has become more urgent due to the significant increase of articles in the radical Turkish press, in particular Vakit, either denying the Holocaust or complaining that not enough Jews were killed in it. Expressions such as “Hitler’s ‘gas’ is a lie, so is the ‘jazz’ of the Zionists”; “the so-called Yad Vashem Genocide Museum”; “the ‘legend’ called the liberation of Auschwitz”; and “Was it enough what Hitler did to the Jews?” commonly appear in such articles.

On the other hand, the well-known writer Engin Ardıç, whose articles appear in the mainstream newspaper Akşam is an active fighter against Holocaust denial. He has written many times and in great detail about the horror and uniqueness of the Holocaust, having visited Auschwitz and other camps.

 

RESPONSES TO ANTISEMITISM

Five court cases were ongoing in 2004 in Istanbul. Two dealt with Anadol’s and Akgün’s books mentioned above. Three cases concerned antisemitic statements published in the press, two of them initiated by Minister of Justice Cemil Çiçek, who for the first time ever ordered legal proceedings to be taken against antisemitic remarks made during a newspaper interview given in December 2003 by the son of the terrorist who blew up himself in the bomb attack at HSBC Bank on 20 November 2003, as well as against the abovementioned article in Vakit.

The trial was also continuing of the murderers of the young Jewish dentist Yasef Yahya, who was slain in August 2003, allegedly because he was a Jew.

The trial of the alleged perpetrators of the November 2003 bomb attacks is continuing. Some of the arrested have been released after the court determined that the attack was not an organized criminal act. The Jewish community is not involved in the trials.

Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Abdullah Gül has condemned antisemitism on several occasions; in speeches given in Malaysia, Moscow and Maastricht he said antisemitism was a problem which had to be combated. Later in the year, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, in a speech at home, also denounced antisemitism.