The Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece KIS, 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 Nazi death camps at 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 released on Monday.
“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 the 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 official to retract his comment and apologise.
Kiran posted a series of photos 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.
We always welcomed refugees and people in need at our borders. During WWII “Neutral Turkey” managed to save thousands of Jews living in Europe, through issuing Turkish passports even to non-citizens. https://t.co/3AFpuulEGc
— Yavuz Selim KIRAN (@yavuzselimkiran) March 9, 2020