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: