Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US President Barack Obama met for an hour and a half at the NATO summit in Wales last week. One sentence in the brief White House statement issued after the meeting caught attention: “The president and President Erdogan also discussed the importance of building tolerant and inclusive societies and combating the scourge of anti-Semitism.”

After Israel’s latest Gaza attack, anti-Semitism has skyrocketed in Turkey. The US administration is not the only party concerned with the rise of anti-Semitism there. In Turkey, the nongovernmental organization Say Stop to Racism expressed its concern about the magnitude of this issue, stating:

“Racist propaganda that has reached the point of asking Jewish citizens of the Republic of Turkey to leave the country, threats against synagogues by some anti-Semitic circles and the silence of public officials on such threats are not compatible with the rule of law. … This aggressive attitude that exceeded all limits, even setting a deadline for Jewish citizens to leave the country and encouraging action and attacks against synagogues, didn’t get the support of the public. It became a petition-signing campaign to annul the citizenship of Jews who have dual citizenship. The campaign, which gave the impression that it was seeking the punishment of 'murderers guilty of crimes against humanity,' in reality seeks to eliminate the right of our Jewish citizens to live as human beings in this country.”

Umut Ozkirimli, a member the faculty of Lund University, says Israel’s Gaza operation ignited a racist and anti-Semitic state of mind in Turkey. He points to a study by research group Gonzo Insight that reports, “Between July 17 and July 18, 27,309 Twitter users tweeted 30,928 times in Turkish supporting Hitler’s genocide against the Jews."