The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece (KIS), the country’s EJC affiliate, has condemned and denounced the “unacceptable and deplorable” statement by Turkey’s Deputy Foreign Minister Yavuz Selim Kiran on social media, who compared the alleged treatment of migrants seeking to cross the Greek border with conditions at the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.
“Six million Jews were persecuted, hunted down, deported, tortured and exterminated by the Nazis in the most industrialised and barbaric method in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and in other German concentration and extermination camps,” KIS said in a statement.
“The policy of the Turkish government to exploit innocent people and create impressions by trivialising the Holocaust for political purposes is nothing but an obscene and despicable operation of misinformation and disorientation of global public opinion,” the statement continued.
KIS said that any “unsustainable comparison” to the infamous Nazi camps of World War II, insults the memory of all Holocaust victims and urged the Turkish minister to retract his comment and apologise.
Kiran posted a series of photographs of migrants from the Turkish side of the border who he claimed had been beaten up by Greek police.
“These photos are not from Auschwitz, but from Pazarkule. Greece takes the money, phones, identity cards and clothes of innocent migrants crossing the border and sends them back,” he said.
