In reaction to the killing of dozens of Palestinians by Israeli security forces on Monday, Yusuf Kaplan, a pro-Erdoğan columnist, said “the world has a Jewish problem,” calling on the international community to stop the Jews.
Claiming that Jews control everything from finance to the media, academia, the CIA, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the Pentagon and the arms industry in the US, Kaplan wrote in his column published in the pro-Erdoğan Yeni Şafak daily on Friday, “The [soulless] Jews have no homeland; the only gods they have are capital and money.”
Claiming that he was not fueling anti-Semitism, Kaplan said: “I recall how the Jews first took the Europeans and then the Americans captive in order to create their world hegemony, how they turned them into slaves of the greedy Jewish mentality.”
“The US has a Jewish problem now. Not only the US but indeed whole world has a Jewish problem,” Kaplan said, adding: “The Jews must immediately be stopped. They have gotten out of control.”
Kaplan called on people to attend a rally in Istanbul on Friday held by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his government to protest Israel.
“Antisemitism in Turkey runs deep+during hard times like this it seeps out into open,” Louis Fishman, assistant professor at Brooklyn College CUNY, tweeted on Friday.
According to a 2016 report in The Jerusalem Post, citing the now-closed-down Today’s Zaman, Yeni Safak columnist Kaplan came under fire after panning Turkey’s “zero problems with neighbors” policy as incompatible with regional realities, leading users on social media to call for his death, accuse him of killing another pro-government journalist and of collusion with the Jews.
In a social media posting of his own, Kaplan accused his critics of “talking nonsense,” stating that while he was “accused of being a Jewish stooge and a British spy,” such statements were merely “a baseless smear campaign.