Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for lessons to be learned from the international community’s failure to prevent genocide massacres in Bosnia, believing that anti-Islamism must be combated just as anti-Semitism was fought after the Holocaust disaster.
In a televised speech sent to a virtual summit on the occasion of the commemoration of the massacres of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Erdogan said that the world should draw lessons from the inaction of international institutions and countries that simply followed up during the genocide in Bosnia.
"We see now that countries that used to theorize the world on human rights and democracy issues are at the top of countries dominated by Islamophobia and hostility to foreigners," Erdogan added.
The Turkish president added that "racist terrorism" is spreading in many Western countries as an infection, and that it is now receiving care at the level of heads of state.
And Erdogan considered that the attacks targeting Muslim mosques in the West and their civil institutions and shops "have reached very bad proportions."
He also said that European Muslims are systematically subjected to racism and deprived of their rights and freedoms, "just as anti-Semitism was fought after the Holocaust disaster, hostility to Islam must be combated in the same way."
During the past days, Erdogan has strongly criticized French President Emmanuel Macron's defense of the offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, may God bless him and grant him peace, and his description of Islam as a religion in which there is a crisis everywhere.
On Friday, French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanan said that Erdogan's recent statements "crossed the line."