Forty-six U.S. representatives have written a letter to Turkish President Abdullah Gul criticizing some of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's statements which they described as "anti-semitic," daily Hurriyet reported.
The letter requested Gul to publically condemn "the anti-semitic rhetoric" of government officials.
The signatories noted that another letter had been written a few months ago asking Erdogan to retract his statements that compared Zionism to a "crime against humanity," without success.
They also argued that Erdogan's accusations of an "interest rate lobby" engineering the Gezi protests were implicitly targeting Jews, recalling that Deputy Prime Minister Besir Atalay had openly stated that a "Jewish diaspora" was behind the recent unrest in Turkey.
The letter was prepared on the initiative of Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Illinois), Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas), Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Florida) and Mark Meadows (R-North Carolina) and signed by congressmen from both the Democrat and Republican parties, the report said.