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Turkey’s Jewish minority takes the heat amid Israeli-Palestinian violence

A frenzy of anti-Israeli coverage in Turkish media has accompanied anti-Semitic attacks on the country's small Jewish community.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses his lawmakers at parliament in Ankara, on Feb. 3, 2009. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pledged never to allow anti-Semitism to take hold in Turkey, in a bid to calm the country's Jewish minority, increasingly concerned over his attacks on Israel over the Gaza war.

Turkey’s tiny Jewish community is once again in the crosshairs of the ongoing violence between Israelis and Palestinians, with its community newspaper the target of a fresh wave of anti-Semitic attacks.

Individuals who identified themselves as disciples of Necip Fazıl Kisakurek, a Turkish nationalist poet and anti-Semite revered by Turkey’s Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, hacked the website of Salom, the sole newspaper serving Turkey’s dwindling Jewish minority. They posted, “Our actions will continue until Palestine is free and independent.” They also posted a verse from one of Kisakurek’s poems evoking Palestinians responding to Israeli missiles with stones. The perpetrators have yet to be caught. Turkey’s Jews are on edge.

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