Alwaght-Main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) Istanbul deputy Aykut Erdogdu has announced that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), led by Erdogan, has spent $65.4 million up until 2013 on efforts to express itself as a pro-Israeli regime administration, while pretending to its voter base that it is one of Israeli regime’s staunchest critics .
Erdogdu, who is the head of the CHP's corruption investigation unit, shared a number of documents with the press, stating that they reveal the strength of the relationship between AK Party and Israeli regime .
To prove his claims, Erdogdu released documents show that the AK Party paid $65.4 million to lobby groups in the US to promote its relations with the Israeli regime government. In common with a large number of countries, Turkey works with a variety of groups in Washington to lobby for its interests in the US capital. The groups that Turkey has worked with over the past years have mostly worked against the strong Armenian lobby groups in the US which have been working on the passage of a resolution which would recognize the 1915 mass killings of Armenians as a genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire .
AK Party government officials have increasingly employed anti-Israeli regime rhetoric to gain votes from the party's conservative base, before the parliamentary elections scheduled to take place on June 7 this year .
“We [the CHP] have determined that the AK Party paid $65.4 million to lobby firms in the US to tell the world that they're friends of the Israeli regime. We have documents to prove it,” Erdogdu said in a press conference in İstanbul .
The deputy claimed that the AK Party paid 19 lobby firms in the US, including DiNovo Strategies, Fleishman Hillard, Neusner Communications, Livingston Group, Gephardt Group, and DPA Piper in order to appear as a friend of the Zionist entity. He said that the AK Party government is exploiting the sensitivities of Turkish people to the Palestine-Israeli regime conflict in order to solidify its support among its conservative voter base .
“On the one hand, they portray themselves to the Turkish people as being in a constant fight with the Israeli regime, while on the other hand they worked hard to make the Zionist lobby in the US believe that the AK Party is a pro-Israeli regime administration and paid millions of dollars to that end. This is completely hypocritical,” said Erdogdu .
