As Iran, Russia’s war with Ukraine and NATO’s defense spending dominate the organization’s summit in Ankara, one issue that has escaped the media glare is the increasingly antisemitic rhetoric coming from Turkish leaders.

As relations between Turkey and Israel continue to hit new lows, a war of words between the two nations has erupted.

In a July 2 interview with CNN Türk, Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said Israel has “become a burden that humanity can no longer bear,” The Jerusalem Post reported. 

Fidan also said Israel is representative of “humanity’s common problems,” and asked other countries to apply pressure to the Jewish State, according to Israel National News.

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In a press statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called Fidan’s words “a clear call for genocide. The Jewish people know very well what happens when such words are allowed to go unchallenged. The first step on the road to genocide is dehumanization.

“This is a sentence that sounds very familiar to sentences from about 100 years ago,” Sa’ar added. “To speak about a people as a ‘problem for humanity.’ What do you do with a ‘burden that you can no longer bear?’” he asked.

Sinan Ciddi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and director of FDD’s Turkey program, told Fox News Digital Fidan’s statement was “some of the vilest rhetoric to come out of any statesman since the Holocaust.”

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Ciddi said escalated anti-Israel rhetoric in Turkey “goes all the way back to 2008,” when President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan “began the process of ripping apart the bilateral relationship between Israel and Turkey. But, after Oct. 7, it just went into overdrive,” he said. “I have never heard any Arab leader utter the words that Foreign Minister Fidan has said.”

Yet Erdoğan has condemned antisemitism; the Turkish Minute reported that he told Turkish religious minority representatives at an Ankara dinner in March that “just as Islamophobia is a crime against humanity, antisemitism is also a crime, an evil that cannot be considered reasonable or legitimate.”

Despite his recent condemnation, he and other ministers have continued with their rhetoric against the Jewish state.

In June, Turkish Interior Minister Mustafa Ҁiftҁi said the world would “witness the liberation of Jerusalem,” according to the Times of Israel.

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In May 2021, the Times of Israel reported that Erdoğan called Israelis “murderers,” claiming they were “only satisfied by sucking their [victims’] blood.” At the time, the State Department spokesperson issued a strong condemnation of Erdoğan’s “antisemitic comments regarding the Jewish people,” calling them “reprehensible.”

In May 2025, Erdoğan invoked similar language, accusing Israel of being “a terror state that feeds on the blood, lives and tears of the innocent,” Israel National News reported.

Anti-Israel sentiment in Turkey has infiltrated far beyond leadership. A Pew Research poll from June found that Turkey had the highest level of anti-Israel sentiment of any polled country, with 91% of the population holding “very unfavorable” views on Israel, 6% holding an “unfavorable” view, and just 1% expressing any favor of Israel.

In response to questions about whether the State Department plans to respond to antisemitic statements from Turkish leadership, a spokesperson told Fox News Digital that “Turkey is a longstanding and valued NATO ally, and we continue to engage on all aspects of our important and multi-faceted relationship.”

Ciddi said there are “numerous channels” for the State Department and Trump administration to reprimand Turkey for its unchecked hatred. 

“The president could obviously pull aside a Turkish counterpart and demand an apology,” he explained, while the State Department could address the comments or place Turkey on a watchlist.

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As the two-day NATO summit winds down in Ankara, Ciddi said Turkey “is going to try and overshadow anything else” and “promote itself as the sort of premiere NATO ally, so we need to watch out for Turkey’s whitewashing of its human rights record.

“We cannot safeguard our allies’ democratic norms, rights and practices if we don’t hold member states like Turkey accountable for the threats that it presents.”

The Turkish Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

The order comes three years after a jury found out Trump has sexually abused and defamed the writer.

A federal judge has ruled that writer E Jean Carroll can collect the more than $5.8m that US President Donald Trump was ordered to pay after a jury found he sexually abused and defamed her, clearing the way for the money to be released after the US Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal.

Judge Lewis A Kaplan ruled on Wednesday that Carroll can be paid the original $5m award granted to her by the jury, along with interest that has accrued since the verdict in 2023. Carroll’s lawyers had asked for the funds to be released after the Supreme Court refused on June 29 to hear Trump’s appeal.

“This is the end of the line,” Carroll’s lawyer Roberta Kaplan wrote in a court filing, adding, “It is time for him to pay Carroll.”

Less than an hour after the judge issued the order, Trump appealed it.

“The American People stand with President Trump as they demand an immediate end to all of the Witch Hunts, including the Democrat-funded travesty of the Carroll Hoaxes,” a spokesperson for Trump’s lawyers said in a statement.

Carroll first accused Trump in 2019, writing in a memoir that he had sexually assaulted her in a dressing room at the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in 1996. Trump denied the allegation, saying he had never met Carroll, accusing her of lying to sell books and for political reasons, and calling the claim a “hoax.”

Carroll sued him for defamation over those comments later that year, accusing him of damaging her reputation by suggesting she had lied for personal gain. She filed a second lawsuit in 2022, accusing Trump of battery/sexual abuse and defamation over another denial he posted on Truth Social in 2022, again calling the allegation a hoax.

In 2023, a jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll and for defaming her through his 2022 statements. It did not determine that Trump was liable for rape.

A second jury awarded her $83.3m in 2024 for the defamatory statements Trump made in 2019 when he was president, after she first went public with the allegation.

Trump has continued to fight both verdicts.

After the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, He called the lawsuit “a Fake Case” and pledged to continue fighting what he described as a “Weaponisation and Lawfare Case.”

On Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision not to hear the appeal. They argued that Trump would suffer “irreparable harm” if the money is paid out, because Carroll has said she intends to donate it, which would make it difficult to recover the funds if the verdict is later overturned.

Trump is also still appealing the $83.3m judgment, arguing his 2019 comments were made while he was president and are therefore protected by presidential immunity. The Department of Justice has also launched a criminal investigation into Carroll over whether she committed perjury during her testimony.

His masterclass started an hour late after Colombia’s FIFA World Cup clash with Switzerland went to penalties, leaving the opening-day crowd at the Bogotá Audiovisual Market (BAM) visibly deflated over its eventual loss. Taking the stage before the subdued audience, Mexico’s Alonso Ruizpalacios acknowledged the collective disappointment by turning to Elizabeth Butcher’s poem One Art.

“I found refuge in it when Mexico lost, too. I’ll read it and see if it speaks to you the way it does to me,” he said, before reciting the poem in full, which begins:

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”

“I’m not much of a soccer fan—I swear, I’m really not—but I’ve had to become one because of my sons’ obsession with the game. And I think one of the most valuable things they’ve learned through it is how to lose. How to lose with grace,” he went on.

“It strikes me as an incredibly important lesson, because losing is far more common than winning,” he said, adding: “I think that’s certainly true in filmmaking as well. For me, one of the greatest lessons has been learning how to lose: accepting that a film won’t always meet your expectations, that you won’t win a grant, that you’ll have to start over and try again. It’s about becoming resilient. I suppose that’s something you gradually acquire over the years.”

Speaking to Variety before his BAM Talk, presented by Mediapro, Ruizpalacios talked about his upcoming adaptation of Carlos Fuentes’ novel Aura for Netflix. “I’m approaching it not as a literal, page-by-page translation of the novel to the screen, but as a reinterpretation of it.”

On his adaptation of another novel, The Transmigration of Bodies by Mexican writer Yuri Herrera, which he deemed “one of the finest novelists writing today,” he said: “It’s set during an epidemic – a fictional one – but it inevitably brings COVID to mind, even though the novel was written before the pandemic, it turned out to be almost prophetic.”

“But it’s an epidemic of sadness—of something that’s never quite defined. Against that backdrop, the story unfolds as a kind of chilango noir—that is, a Mexico City noir. It’s deeply rooted in the atmosphere and character of Mexico City.” Presented at the Berlinale Co-Production Market earlier this year, it already has five co-producing countries attached, he said, naming Spain, France and Chile among them.

Reflecting on his four movies, which BAM was honoring with a retrospective, starting with his career-launching “Güeros,” he mused on what he calls his ‘problem child’, the black & white “The Kitchen,” which was “challenging from start to finish.”

“Raising the financing was especially hard. It took many years. We’d finally get someone on board, and then the deal would fall through. Filming was difficult too, because coordinating actors from different parts of the world and bringing them together in one place was incredibly complicated. We had everyone together for a month before shooting began—we spent an entire month rehearsing. Making that happen was difficult, but it was something I really wanted: for the entire cast to rehearse together before filming.” Finding distribution in the U.S. was even more of a challenge, given its immigration theme, he added.

Speaking about co-production at his BAM Talk, he said: “I think it’s simply the reality of filmmaking today. Every time you watch a film now, the opening credits list co-producers for what feels like 10 minutes. It’s just the way things are – there’s no getting around it.

“There’s something fundamentally right about working that way. We’re no longer living in a time when public funding alone could finance an entire film. Those funds are becoming smaller and smaller, so you have to piece together financing from different sources. There’s also something deeply stimulating about that process. It’s the only way to survive if you’re making non-mainstream, non-hegemonic cinema. If a streaming platform isn’t paying for your film, this is the only viable path.”

“It’s also the only way to stand up to dominant commercial cinema, which, honestly, I think is at one of its lowest points. I genuinely believe Hollywood cinema has reached… a breaking point,” he said, lamenting the abundance of sequels, spin-offs, reboots and the like.

Asked what he thought about the thorny issue of AI and its creeping dominance, he said: “First, I genuinely love what I do. I love writing. That’s why I find this rush toward artificial intelligence unsettling. As a tool, it’s perfectly fine. But this wholesale embrace of it – the almost frenzied enthusiasm – strikes me as dangerous. It feels like we’re shooting ourselves in the foot.”

 “What AI doesn’t really account for is that the point isn’t only the result—the point is the process. That’s what the human experience is. The human experience lives in the process. I love sitting down to write. I love searching for exactly the right word, rewriting a sentence, opening a thesaurus, flipping through a dictionary of synonyms, and finally finding the precise word I’m looking for. That process gives me pleasure. So, this obsession with efficiency – with the bottom line – doesn’t interest me at all. I don’t think life is about saving time. Saving time for what? The whole point is to spend it doing what you love.”

He called for more independent cinema as “almost an act of resistance.”

“We can’t simply make films that only cinephiles will watch. I think we have a responsibility to engage audiences – to help re-educate them, in a sense. That’s incredibly important.”

“What we need are Trojan horses,” he pronounced. “I’m a great believer in the Trojan horse. By that I mean what Martin Scorsese has described about Hollywood directors of the 1940s and 1950s. Many of them were European filmmakers who came with genuine artistic training and a real artistic vocation, but they found themselves working within the entertainment industry. So they had to smuggle anti-establishment ideas, political thought and complex artistic content inside the framework of commercial entertainment.”

“I think we need to create more Trojan horses today—works that can exist within streaming platforms, for example. I even fantasize about making a film for TikTok someday: a movie you would watch in 15-second episodes that gradually builds into something larger. I don’t know exactly what that would look like, but I think there’s something worth exploring there, he said, adding: “I no longer think it’s enough to make contemplative films, however beautiful they may be. I love those films – they’re a refuge for me – but I think we also need to find new ways of reaching people where they already are.”

The 17th BAM edition runs over July 6-10.