Under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his party, the AKP, anti-Semitism in Turkey has increased.
In early 2005, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was the fourth best-selling book in the country, selling 50,000 copies. It is now available not only in bookstores but at venues such as Migros, the country’s fourth-largest supermarket chain, with more than 1,800 locations.
Thirty-five separate Turkish book-publishing houses have printed translations of it by at least 21 different translators; of these 35 editions, eight were published in 2016, nine in 2017, and another one in February 2018. There have been attacks on synagogues and antisemitic depictions of Jews on television programming on the Turkish state-owned TV network TRT, as documented by the MEMRI Tom Lantos Archives on Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial. Turkish anti-Semitic content has spread to other social-media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, and President Erdoğan and other AKP politicians have been depicting Jews and Israel as foes and using them as scapegoats in order to rally voters ahead of the general elections set for June 24.
This report includes Turkish-language tweets praising Hitler and Nazism. Though many are from May 2018, this report includes tweets dating back to 2010. The tweets include references to Hitler and Jews such as: “If Hitler had lived, maybe now your lineage would be extinct and the world would be purified of a handful of filth” and “Hitler and Nazi Germany will be known and remembered with gratitude and respect.”
Many include a quote attributed to Hitler: “One day you will curse me for every Jew I did not kill.” The tweets in this report received a total of approximately 1,500 “Likes” and 480 retweets.
Tweets from 2018
On May 15, 2018, Twitter user @ahmetcoskun511 wrote:
“I celebrate the Germans because they killed the Jews. Hitler, who discovered the devil in the world before everyone else, was a very farseeing and visionary person. I wish he had killed all of them.”
Twitter.com/ahmetcoskun511/status/996458761115095042
On May 18, 2018, Twitter user @BayramErgin19 wrote:
“These Jews cannot just be condemned, they need to be erased from the Earth, thrown, like Hitler did, burned in ovens.”
Twitter.com/BayramErgin19/status/997575433045635072
On May 19, 2018, Twitter user @FermanTr2023 wrote:
“Adolf Hitler really loved the Jews. He loved them so much he would host them in his gas chambers.”
Twitter.com/FermanTr2023/status/997959432221921281
On May 16, 2018, user @F_1453 wrote:
“The capital of Israel is master Adolf Hitler’s gas chambers …”
Twitter.com/F_1453/status/996851297507794949
On May 17, 2018, user @Nasihatler wrote:
“Oh Israelites, you have deserved a new Hitler for a long time. With what you have done and the curses you have received, his appearance is near. This always happened this way. And you will not find a Prophet Moses to part the sea and save you.”
Twitter.com/Nasihatler/status/997057443304796160
On May 15, 2018, user @kransrpl wrote:
“#OurHeartIsInPalestine
“It’s King Hitler.
“We just now understood the man’s value.”
“Soap made from not one, not two, not three, not four, but five Jews is just 15 Turkish lira.”
Twitter.com/kransrpl/status/996309943312683009
The full report can be viewed at MEMRI here.
