I genuinely sympathize with some of these guys. They weren’t the ones who demonized Israel for defending itself while the Turkish military killed 700 Kurds. Many of them probably didn’t vote for Erdogan, and the ones who did almost certainly cringed when he called for Allah to personally wipe out the Jewish State.
Still, this seems a touch oversimplified:
Some 50 hoteliers from 35 Turkish hotels, representatives of the Turkish tourism ministry and Israeli tourism wholesalers specializing in travel to Turkey met Tuesday at the David Intercontinental Hotel in Tel Aviv to find ways to draw Israelis back to Turkey… Ahmet Barut, chairman of the Turkish Hotels Association, said that he understands the feelings of the Israeli public, but “we want to persuade them that they are welcome in Turkey.” Israelis, he says, are emotional people, like the Turks, and so their responses are emotional. “A little push is needed to get communication back into a positive mode,” added the representative of a well-known chain. “What was going on was political, and politics isn’t real life.”
Maybe. The “Global Jihad Against Israel” conference that met in Turkey after Erdogan pulled his stunt at Davos – that certainly had an element of the political to it. I’m pretty sure it was the “Jews” part that drove attendees to advocate the mass murder of “Israeli Jews” – and I’m not sure why that should matter to Israelis anyway – but fair enough. The guy’s in a tough position and he has to say something, and asking Israelis to shrug off calls for anti-Israeli violence isn’t that far removed from what the UN does every day.
But the anti-Israel miniseries that Turkish TV aired, which accused Israelis of pushing drugs and prostitution, played on anti-Semitic tropes of Jewish financial and sexual corruption. And the shops with signs that said “no Jews allowed, but dogs are welcome” – that was just rank Nazism. So maybe an emotional response wasn’t totally unjustified, on account of the whole “it smacked of the Holocaust” thing.
References:
* Turkey: Israel Should Be Kicked Out Of The UN (Plus: Turkey Kills 700 Kurds In 2008) [MR]
* Turkey: Allah Will Personally Wipe Out Israel [MR]
* Turkish team comes to Israel in bid to woo back tourists [Ha'aretz]
* Clerics urge new jihad over Gaza [BBC]
* Turkish anti-Israel mini-series aired [JPost]
* A climate of fear [JPost]
Previously:
* Wonderful Story Of Jewish-Muslim Cooperation On Temple Mount Destroyed… By Radical Muslims
* Is Turkey Smuggling Iranian Weapons To Syria? Umm… Maybe?
* Awww… Turkey’s So Pissed Off At Israel That They Might Not Help Israel Give Syria Back The Golan
