Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hates Israel. He has in the past suggested the formation of a pan-Islamic army to launch an attack on the Jewish state, leaving no doubt as to whom he thought best qualified to lead such an army. As a Sharia-adherent Muslim, he has used his office to undo the secularism once put in place by Ataturk. He has built many thousands of mosques, and close to 6,000 Imam-Hatip schools that combine a standard, secular academic curriculum with intense religious studies, including the Quran, Arabic, and Islamic history. He used the coup attempt in 2016 as an excuse to fire from their jobs tens of thousands of civil servants, military men, university rectors, judges, lawyers, and others who were secularists opposed to Erdogan’s re-Islamizing of Turkish society.
Hs anti-Israel animus has spread throughout Turkish society, and is reflected most starkly in the Turkish media, which routinely accuses Israel of “genocide” and engages in antisemitic rhetoric about “the Jews” who are said to control much of the world’s media, banks, and so on — a script taken right from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
More on the Turkish media’s expression of support for Hamas can be found here: “Nearly 90% of Turkish Opinion Columns Favor Hamas, Study Shows,” by Ailin Vilches Arguello, Algemeiner, January 30, 2026:
About 90 percent of opinion articles published in two of Turkey’s leading media outlets portray the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in a positive or neutral light, according to a new study, reflecting Ankara’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel.
Earlier this week, the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute released a report examining roughly 15,000 opinion columns in the widely read Turkish newspapers Sabah and Hürriyet, revealing that Hamas is often depicted positively through a “resistance movement” narrative portraying its members as “martyrs.”
For example, Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, writing in Hürriyet, described the assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as “a holy martyr not only of Palestine but of Islam as a whole” who “fought for peace,” while portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the new Hitler.”
JPPI also found that most articles in these two newspapers took a neutral stance on the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, offering almost no clear condemnation of the attacks and failing to acknowledge the group’s targeting of civilians.
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