[The following, by bataween, is crossposted from Point of No Return.]

With thanks: Sara

How bad are things for Turkish Jews? One Jewish lady reassured a friend in the UK, anxious at reports that the flotilla incident would stoke Turkish antisemitism, that they were all fine.

Turkish people were angry at the government, she said, for using the flotilla incident to distract them from other, more pressing issues - notably Turkey's repression of the PKK, outlawed as a party of Kurdish militants. The Turks are claiming the reverse - that the Israeli secret service is stirring up the PKK as a decoy.

Here is what the Jewish lady wrote to her friend:

"For the moment in Turkey, people around do not think as the Prime Minister does. In only one month 35 young soldiers died; on the very day of the ship (incident), seven Turkish soldiers died, two from Izmir, in the Eastern part of Turkey, in the internal war with the PKK terrorists.

"The government forgets these are very important Turkish issues and act as if they were the government of the Palestinians. Therefore people around are very angry.

"Poverty, hunger, unemployment are real problems in Turkey now and the government does not even mention them.

"Maybe this is just a tactic to make the population forget the real problems and close its eyes to internal issues."