Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Saturday claimed “Jews in Israel” beat Palestinian woman and children, telling his audience at an Istanbul meeting of the Turkey Youth Foundation that Muslims must ensure Israelis are “taught a lesson.”
“The Jews in Israel kick people laying on the ground. In fact, Jews don’t kick men but also women and children when they fall on the ground,” Erdogan said.
“But as Muslims, will confront these people [the Jews] if they have courage to deal with us and we’ll teach them a lesson,” Erdogan added, according to the Times of Israel.
Erdogan also said Turkey “cautiously” welcomes U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw US troops from Syria, revealing Turkey will postpone a military operation against Kurdish forces in northeast Syria as a consequence.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded immediately to Erdogan’s taunts, stating the Turkish leader was hardly in any position to be preaching morality.
“Erdogan – the occupier of northern Cyprus, whose army massacres women and children in Kurdish villages, inside and outside Turkey should not preach to Israel,” Netanyahu said on Twitter.
Saturday’s rhetorical attack on Israel by Erdogan is the second instance this month of his obsession with the Jewish state.
Last week he lashed out at Israel and compared it to Nazi Germany, accusing it of “trying to erase the traces of the Islamic heritage in Jerusalem for the last 50 years.”
“You [Israel] will not be able to wipe them out,” Erdogan said at the second “Conference of the Association of Parliamentarians for Al-Quds [Jerusalem],” in Istanbul.
“Today, the Palestinians are subjected to pressures, violence and intimidation policies no less grave than the oppression done to the Jews during WWII,” the president said, according to an online transcript of his speech.
In May he said something similar after Turkey recalled its ambassadors to Israel and the United States to protest the Israeli response to riots along the Gaza border fence. In that instance he called Israel a “terror state” and denounced its actions as “genocide.”
The use of the word “genocide” by the Turkish president followed the anniversary of the Armenian and Assyrian genocides, which the Turkish state continues not to recognize.
The Turkish parliament recently rejected a bill that would have formally recognized the Armenian genocide, even as thousands marched around the world to commemorate the deaths of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915.
Follow Simon Kent on Twitter: Follow @SunSimonKent or e-mail to: skent@breitbart.com
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.