Turkish
Official Blames "Jewish Lobby" and "Crusaders" for
Election Failure
by IPT News • Jun 11, 2015 at
5:06 pm
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Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP) lost a parliamentary
majority it had enjoyed for 13 years in voting last Sunday.
Voters had many reasons to look to back candidates from other parties –
including a desire to blunt President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's hopes of using
Parliament to entrench his own power. Erdogan "asked the Turks to
grant him 400 deputies – who would then rewrite the constitution to pave
the way for his elected sultanate," Hürriyet Daily News
columnist Burak Bekdil wrote in a column republished
by the Middle East Forum, where he is a fellow.
But a senior member of Erdogan's party had another theory – it was the
"Jewish lobby" and "Crusaders" who swayed Turkish
voters.
"There's an economic lobby in the world, which is under the hand of
the Jewish lobby, and these are the ones who want the AKP to fall,"
Muhammed Akar, chairman of AKP's Diyarbakir branch, said in an interview
with Foreign Policy. "Not only the Jewish lobby, there is
another movement – the Crusaders. Because the AKP government is the voice
of the Muslims in Turkey, and all the world."
The magazine called the election results a "body blow" to
Erdogan's party.
AKP officials frequently blame
Jews and outside "lobbies" for internal woes and often resort
to anti-Semitic propaganda and slogans.
During mass popular protests in July 2013, Turkey's Deputy Prime
Minister Besir Atalay blamed Jews for fuelling the demonstrations.
"World powers and the Jewish Diaspora prompted the unrest and have
actively encouraged it," Atalay said.
At the time, AKP party mayor of Ankara also referred to the protests in
Gezi as a "game
of the Jewish lobby" in a Twitter message.
In the past, Erdogan has blamed the "interest-rate
lobby" as a destabilizing force in Turkey in an apparent reference
to Jewish global financiers.
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu also accused
Jews of working to topple the Turkish regime.
"I announce it from here: we have not and will not succumb to the
Jewish lobby, the Armenian lobby or the Turkish-Greek minority's
lobbies," Davutoglu said at a party gathering in February.
Sunday's election results likely left Erdogan speechless, Bekdil wrote,
and he won't take the results well. "He is the lone would-be sultan in
a too-expensive and too-spacious Ankara palace. The next few years will see
his existential war against real, quasi-real and phantom-like
enemies."
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