BICOM

The United States condemned comments by Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan accusing Israel of masterminding the Egyptian military’s overthrow of president Mohamed Morsi, a White House spokesman said yesterday.

“We strongly condemn the statements that were made by Prime Minister Erdogan today. Suggesting that Israel is somehow responsible for recent events in Egypt is offensive, unsubstantiated, and wrong,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters in a briefing.

Citing evidence found on YouTube, Erdogan in remarks broadcast on Turkish television, said Israel was behind the military takeover in Egypt last month and claimed, “We have evidence.” Erdogan then cited comments made two years ago by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, as supposed proof of a longstanding Israeli plot to deny the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt, even if it won elections. Erdogan’s office later confirmed that he was referring to a YouTube video of remarks Lévy made in 2011 during a discussion of “Israel and the Arab Spring” with Israeli MK Tzipi Livni at Tel Aviv University.

Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said Erdogan’s statement were ”well worth not commenting on.” Another official, in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, told AFP: “These comments by the Turkish prime minister are nonsense.”

Erdogan’s comment Tuesday come five months after Netanyahu phoned Turkish prime minister and apologised for operational errors that may have led to loss of life on the Mavi Marmara ship that tried to break the naval blockade of Gaza in 2010. While that apology was supposed to pave the way for Israeli-Turkish reconciliation, talks for compensation payments quickly bogged down and Turkey added that they wanted an Israeli admission that the compensation payments were the result of a wrongful act. US expectations that the apology would lead relatively quickly to the exchange of ambassadors failed to materialise.