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Sorry if you were offended. I should rephrase my statement to read, "The Turkish Muslims I have met in my personal life were profoundly anti-semitic."

If you are not one of the anti-semites, that's good to hear. My own personal experience has been quite different. Even a very intelligent, extremely well educated Turkish girl I dated a few years back confirmed it for me. Of course, in her "rationalization" she and her family did not hate all Jews...they just hated Israelis. She also told me that in Turkey, Jews were generally able to blend into society with few problems except among the lower classes, provided of course that they were TURKISH Jews and not Israelis. It was highly disconcerting to hear this beautiful, intelligent girl from a good family sound like a member of Hamas.

But I've never actually been to Turkey, nor do I have any desire to go there at this point, so my own knowledge of the country is based on the personal comments of about a dozen american turks who used to live there at one time or another, as well as the increasingly anti-american sentiment that I see and hear coming out of Turkey on television.

Now wait a minute pal.. You wrote this nugget I took issue with:

the Turkish people are profoundly anti-Jewish.

Changing that to read anti-semitic changes absolutely nothing, since it means exactly the same thing.

What you mean is that you ran into some Turks who took issue with Zionism. Well, judging from the number of UN resolutions the US had to veto condemning the actions of the govt. of Israel, I guess they are not the only ones.

Granted the building of states is usually expensive in human terms.. However, keep in mind that it was the Turks who actively saved Jewish lives in WW2 and gave Jews passage en masse to what was then called "Palestine" against British wishes.

Explaining that these two murders were a result of some general "Turkish Jew hate" was an unfortunate mistake on your part.