Demonstrators in Turkey's Taksim Gezi Park. Photo: Wikipedia.

An associate of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan posted this past weekend a note to a social media account in which he claimed that the protests now raging in Turkey are part of an effort by the American “Jewish lobby” to undermine Turkey’s government.

Ankara Mayor İbrahim Melih Gökçek, a member of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, has been vocal about his distaste for the protestors in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, having both mocked and criticized them through a series of tweets on his own personal twitter account

But the incendiary rhetoric reached a conspiratorial crescendo when he posted a note on twitter, which claims that Turkish intelligence has learned that the protests are a result of a February meeting of the American Enterprise Institute, which the note further asserts is a branch of the The America Israel Public Affairs Committee. The note claims that it was discussed at the meeting to have Turkish youth spill out into the streets to protest.

The note further claims that present at the meeting were several prominent neoconservative figures often associated with a pro-Israel stance, including: Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, and William Kristol.