Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that Europe's silence in the face of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's anti-Israel attacks is one of the reasons for the surge of anti-Semitism in Europe.
In a meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli ambassadors, he declared: “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.’’
His comments came after Erdogan, who has a longstanding record of anti-Semitic statements, criticized on Monday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “daring” to attend an anti-terror solidarity march in Paris and accused Israel of committing “state terrorism” against the Palestinians.
‘’It’s bad enough that leaders in Europe fail to condemn blatant human rights violations in Turkey itself,’’ Lieberman declared, “but their ignoring of the hatred and the incitement against Israel that this man cultivates is something that we cannot ignore.”
He added: “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.”
The Israeli Foreign Minister also deplored international media coverage of the attack against the kosher supermarket in Paris, in which four Jews were killed.
“CNN, for example, tried to ignore the Jewish angle. When speaking of the incident at the Hyper Cacher store, the network’s journalist intentionally failed to mention that the store belonged to Jews and that the hostages and those killed were Jews who were targeted only because of their religion.’’
He continued, ‘’Across Europe, the discourse on the Paris attacks focused on freedom of expression, radicalism and Islamophobia. But the Jewish and anti-Semitism angles were not mentioned.’’
‘’And that’s especially grave in light of previous events,’’ he said in reference to the attacks on a Jewish school in Toulouse and the Brussels Jewish museum. “The ignoring of the Jewish angle is something we must not let pass silently,” he stressed.