JERUSALEM—Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Wednesday called Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "a neighborhood bully" whose constant criticism of Israel fanned the flames of anti-Semitism in the Middle East and Europe.
Lieberman was reacting to an attack by Erdogan on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for "daring" to attend the march in Paris for the victims of last week’s killings by Islamic gunmen.
The Israeli minister said that European nations have remained silent about rampant anti-Semitism on the continent because it was not politically correct to point a finger at those largely responsible for the phenomenon, an apparent reference to Muslim residents.
"Most of the public dialogue, particularly in France, was about freedom of expression, radicalism, and Islamophobia but not about anti-Semitism, and that’s been very worrying," he said. "These same countries remain silent in the face of Erdogan’s repeated verbal attacks on Israel, which he calls a ‘terror state,’ contributing to murderous hatred towards Jews in Europe."
Lieberman said that this "cultured," "politically correct" silence that is extended also to "a neighborhood bully like Erdogan and his bunch, brings us back to the reality of the 1930s."
Four Jews were killed in a kosher supermarket in Paris Friday by an Islamic terrorist who was subsequently killed by police. A total of 17 people died in the terror attacks that began with the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo office.
Erdogan said at a press conference that Western hypocrisy and Islamophobia lay behind the Paris killings. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who had attended the Paris march, was also at the press conference which was held in Erdogan's new 1,000-room presidential palace, built at a reported cost of $614 million.
"Games are being played with the Islamic world," Erdogan said.
Erdogan singled out for condemnation Netanyahu's participation in the march. "How dare he go there?" he asked. Referring to video clips showing Netanyahu waving to the crowd as he marched near French President Francois Hollande, Erdogan said "How can a man who has killed 2,500 people in Gaza with state terrorism wave his hand in Paris, as if people there were waiting in excitement for him to do so?"
Erdogan said that Netanyahu owed the Palestinians an accounting "for the children and women you have killed." Some 2,100 Palestinians were killed in last summer’s Gaza war, according to United Nations agencies. Israel says at least half were combatants.
Erdogan did not participate in the Paris march but his prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, did.
The Turkish president said the French security forces also shared responsibility for the 17 deaths last week, noting that the perpetrators had recently been in prison. "Doesn’t their intelligence organization track those who leave prison?" he asked. "French citizens (the gunmen) carry out such a massacre and Muslims pay the price."
"Acts of terror are not carried out in a vacuum," Erdogan said. "They follow a predetermined script and we should be alive to a plot against the Islamic world."
The mayor of Ankara, Melih Gokcek, speaking at a separate event, said that the Israeli intelligence had planned the Paris attacks in retaliation for France having recently expressed support for Palestinian statehood. "It is certain," said Gokcek, according to the English-language Turkish newspaper, Today’s Zaman, "that the Mossad is behind these kinds of incidents."