There has not been a single week when Turkey did not make headlines in the international media, especially by the second half of 2017.

The latest was last week; this time the subject was Israel. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s comments, though, were not totally unjustified. Turkey is the current chairman of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and it was impossible for Erdogan to sit idle while Israel imposed excessive measures denying Muslim worshippers from entering the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, the third holiest place for Muslims. Consequently, Erdogan took the initiative to call the leaders of the Muslim countries for joint action. He also called Israeli President Reuven Rivlin.

Erdogan made incendiary remarks in a speech to his party’s parliamentary group in Ankara. “When Israeli soldiers recklessly pollute the grounds of Al-Aqsa with their combat boots by using simple issues as pretexts and then easily spill blood there, it is because we [Muslims] have not done enough to stake our claim over Jerusalem,” Erdogan said.

The spat between the Turkish president and the Israeli government fell short of mobilizing the Muslim masses all over the world, but it was sufficient in inspiring certain Muslim archnationalists in Turkey to mount two attacks on synagogues in Istanbul, a new source of embarrassment for the Turkish government. Although neither Erdogan nor his government endorsed such acts of aggression, the row with Israel was enough to inspire his loyalists to take to the streets.