Netanyahu takes a beating for Paris politics, recruiting

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday blasted Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu for “daring” to attend an anti-terror solidarity march in Paris, accusing him of leading “state terrorism” against the Palestinians. The comments, at a press conference in Ankara with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, were the latest verbal assault against Netanyahu by Erdogan under whose rule Turkey’s relations with Israel have steadily deteriorated. Indeed, the Israeli prime minister managed to ruffle a few feathers while taking part in the “Charlie Hebdo” rally in Paris, an event his office initially said he would not be attending for security reasons. Perhaps most awkward was his invitation to French Jews — alarmed by the Paris attacks and the killing of four people at a kosher supermarket — to migrate to Israel if they wanted, leaving French Prime Minister Manuel Valls scrambling to reassure the community it was safe and an integral part of France.

Anyone familiar with the European reality knows that [emigration] is not the solution for anti-Semitic terror.

Rabbi Menachem Margolin, the head of the European Jewish Association

At Israel’s initiative, the bodies of those killed in Friday’s kosher supermarket shooting are being flown to Jerusalem and buried in a ceremony Tuesday with Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin in attendance. Leaders of France’s Jewish community, by far the largest in Europe at about 550,000, say that is but the latest of more than 8,000 anti-Semitic acts since 2000. France’s Interior Ministry has calculated that anti-Semitic threats and incidents have doubled in the past year. Surveys indicate that such sentiments arise largely from the fringes, particularly far-right political parties and disgruntled French Muslims, many of whom see racism as a far bigger problem than anti-Semitism.

Politics