ISTANBUL: Turkey’s Jewish community fears that fury over Israel’s deadly raid on a Gaza-bound aid flotilla could provoke anti-Semitism in the Muslim-majority nation, a newspaper editor said Wednesday.
"We are definitely worried, because that (the anger in Turkey) can turn very easily to anti-Semitism," Ivo Molinas, the editor in chief of the weekly Istanbul-based publication Shalom, told AFP.
"The rhetoric used by the prime minister has been very radical," added Molinas, part of the 20,000-member Jewish community residing in Turkey.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has launched a series of harsh verbal attacks on Israel since Monday’s raid. Most of the bloodshed occurred on a Turkish-flagged ship and at least four Turks were among the dead.
A furious Erdogan on Tuesday slammed the Jewish state as "a festering boil in the Middle East", while on Wednesday his office said he had told US President Barack Obama that Israel risks losing Turkey, its "sole friend" in the region.
More than 20,000 people demonstrated in Turkey after the aid flotilla raid, many of them burning Israeli flags, and Turkey had recalled its ambassador to Israel.
"But the prime minister also said yesterday (Tuesday) that he was against anti-Semitism. He says it during each crisis but he repeated it yesterday," said Molinas, whose newspaper has a circulation of around 5,000.
"Both he and the leaders of the opposition have said that all of this will have no effect on the Jews of Turkey," he added.
The leader of Turkey’s Jewish community, Sami Herman, declined to make any immediate comment.
Turkey became Israel’s chief regional ally when the two signed a military cooperation deal in 1996. But relations have soured since Israel’s devastating war on Gaza last year amid criticism from Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted government.
