Ankara Mayor İbrahim Melih Gökçek, a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused Mossad of being behind the terror in Paris. Photo: Twitter

The openly anti-Semitic mayor of Ankara, the capital of Turkey, has engaged in another ugly tirade against Jews, blaming the Israeli intelligence service Mossad for last week’s deadly terrorist attacks in France.

Ibrahim Melih Gökçek, a member of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party, told a youth congress on Sunday that Israel was angry with France for having voted in favor of Palestinian statehood resolution at a United Nations Security Council meeting last month.

“Israel certainly doesn’t want this sentiment to expand in Europe. That’s why it is certain that Mossad is behind these kinds of incidents. Mossad inflames Islamophobia by causing such incidents,” Gökçek said, according a report in the Turkish newspaper Zaman.

“Palestine being recognized as a state is why these [attacks] have taken place,” the mayor concluded.

As The Algemeiner reported yesterday, Erdoğan himself is also leaning towards conspiracy theory as a means of explaining the Islamist terror that has gripped France. “French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay the price. That’s very meaningful … Doesn’t their intelligence organization track those who leave prison?” the president said at a joint news conference with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. Erdoğan also lashed out at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s presence at the Paris unity rally on Sunday, asking, “How can a man who has killed 2,500 people in Gaza with state terrorism wave his hand in Paris, like people are waiting in excitement for him to do so? How dare he go there?”

Erdoğan, whose prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu was dispatched to the Paris rally, did not condemn any of the Islamist terrorist atrocities in France last week, nor offer his condolences to the families of the victims.

Like his master Erdoğan, who has a long track record of anti-Semitic statements – including the claim made at the height of last summer’s war in Gaza that Israel is “worse than Hitler,” – Gökçek has made no secret of his loathing of both the Jewish state and the Jewish community in Turkey.

Last June, he blamed protests in Istanbul’s Gezi Park on the “Jewish Lobby” in America. The following month, Gökçek declared that the Israeli embassy in Ankara “will be taken… The despicable murderers’ Consulate has to be kicked out of Turkey. We do not want an Embassy in Turkey of the murderers!”