Turkish Newspaper Blames Jews for Soma Mine Disaster
It was inevitable, after Turkish Premier Recep Erdogan’s “Israel Spawn or Sperm” epithet to a protester in Soma during his visit to the site of the mine disaster that took the lives of 301 shift Miners on Tuesday May 13th. A Turkish newspaper, Yenit Akit, supporting the AKP government of Prime Minister, pinned the debacle on, who else, the Jews. In particular it was all due to the alleged Jewish son-in-law of the Soma mine owner, Alp Gurken. Yenit Akit accused Gurken of” “giving his daughter to a Jew,” and claimed that that was the main reason why foreign media outlets were “attacking Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan” The Daily Hurryiet noted the Yenit Akit paper has a “long track record of anti-Semitic slurs”.
A Daily Hurriyet column, cited the irony of Erdogan calling “Antisemitism a Perversion”, when he received a so-called Courage Award from Abe Foxman of the ADL at a ceremony in New York back in 2005. Things were different back then, Erdogan wanted to curry favor with Jews and Israel. What a difference a decade makes. Erdogan even went on in his ADL acceptance speech condemning the Holocaust saying:” “Anti-Semitism is a shameful mental illness; it is perversion. The Jewish genocide [Holocaust] is the heaviest crime against humanity throughout history. Genocide, discrimination, Islamophobia, Christianophobia, ethnic cleansing are all different forms of the same illness.”
Now it’s all about “Zionist plots” and “Israeli spies”. The Daily Hurriyet column noted the latest accusation:
Daily Yeni Akit ran a front-page headline story on May 20, saying that the son-in-law of Alp Gürkan, the owner of the Soma mine in which 301 people died on May 13, was a Jew. The paper was proud to have “deciphered the reason why Zionism-manipulated domestic and foreign media was attacking PM Erdoğan by taking advantage of Soma” by revealing the Jewish son-in-law, instead of questioning the failures of the company and the government in taking necessary safety measures in accordance with international standards. But that was not all; the son-in-law, Mario Asafrana, was using the Muslim name of “Mahir.” And his father, İshak, had been using “Izzet” as well, without, of course, mentioning that the majority of non-Muslim minorities in Turkey also use Muslim or Turkish names so as not to be a source of social attention; there was a de facto ban on giving names in Kurdish and Circassian (despite being Muslim) in the country up until a few years ago.
The same day, PM Erdoğan thanked Israel for canceling its National Day reception in respect for the three days of mourning in Turkey because of Soma. But Yasin Aktay, the AK Party’s deputy chairman in charge of foreign relations, said that he did not omit the possibility of “sabotage” in Soma, and the AK Party head of Parliament’s Constitutional Commission, Burhan Kuzu, a professor of law, mentioned the mine-owner’s son-in-law in a Twitter message.
A day before that, the ADL revealed research on global anti-Semitism. According to this research, 69 percent of Turkish people have anti-Semitic feelings, behind Iran at 56 percent but the same level with Greece.
Obviously it’s all about the Mavi Marmara incident in which 9 Turks, including a Turkish American, were killed during attacks on a boarding party of Israeli Naval commandos trying to stop the ferry from running the blockade of Gaza on May 31, 2010. A voyage backed by the pro-Hamas IHH Muslim charity that owned the vessel. IHH was raided in January 2014 because of allegations about funding Al Qaeda. Erdogan outraged demanded compensation. Israel under pressure from a visiting President Obama in March 2013 had Israeli PM Netanyahu call Erdogan and “apologize” . Israel in March 2014 offered to pay $20 million in the equivalent of ‘wrongful death compensation” as blood money to renew relations. Meanwhile, Erdogan supplanted Iran as the largest supporter of Hamas to the tune of $250 million. Hamas is a US foreign designated terrorist organization whose charter states its objective of destruction of the Jewish State. Israelis were outraged.
During the Soma visit, a protesting miner who booed Erdogan was called’ Israeli sperm” and slapped by the agitated Prime Minister peeved that his own supporters would do such a thing, when they handed a victory in the local March 2014 local elections to his AK party. This is a man who said death is an acceptable risk in the Turkish mining industry which may have upwards of 400 unsafe mines. Whose AKP super majority in the Ankara parliament rejected a study commission to investigate complaints about unsafe conditions at the Soma mine requested by the opposition People’s Republican Party (CHP) in April 2014 in the Ankara Parliament.
A Turkish Jew, Haymi Behar wrote a column in The Daily Hurriyet, “Being an Israeli Spawn in Turkey”. Behar wrote what it was like to be despised as a native born Turkish Jew:
It means being a part of a mere 13 million tribe in a sea of 7 billion in the world, and being a small sample of the 17,000 “spawn brothers” in Turkey.
It means trying to figure out why you are being held personally responsible Jesus’ crucifixion and the killing of Sultan Fatih the Conqueror, even though Jews only make up 0.2 percent of the world’s population.
It means having the ability to have all the answers ready, waiting in your mind, to respond anytime in your life to all these colossal historic questions.
It means trying to create a happy life for yourself while baring the burden of your ancestors having been enslaved, expelled constantly, despised and being the victims of the most massive industrially planned genocide ever committed.
It means keeping in your mind the question, “How did we manage to be the leading actors of so many conspiracy theories with such a small population?”
It means getting used to hearing hate speech and discrimination any God given day.
[…]
It means knowing that there will be no more “Israeli spawn” in Turkey in the next generation, but the hatred will still live on.
This weekend, Erdogan travels to Cologne, German to speak to a rally of ex-pat Turks for his campaign to become Turkey’s first directly elected President this August. He has been an admonished by German government official to be ‘sensitive’ in his remarks to a partisan crowd on the Saturday, May 24, during the European Parliament elections. German President Gauck during a visit in April to Ankara criticized Erdogan’s treatment of street protests and expansion of the police powers of his intelligence agency, MIT in the face of roiling corruption charges. Erdogan responded: “it looks like Gauck still sees himself as a priest,” and advised Gauk to “keep your advice to yourself.” Erdogan speaks his own mind all too frequently. The leopard will hardly change his spots this coming weekend in Germany. He’s eager to become Turkey’s first freely elected Emir imposing draconian Sharia on a restive and despairing Turkish population seeking an end to his Islamist autocracy.
EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared on The New English Review.
