Turkish daily calls Chabad a pro-LGBT Zionist group spying for Mossad in Cyprus

A pro-Islamist newspaper in Turkey accuses Chabad of Northern Cyprus of being a criminal enterprise with a pro-LGBTQ agenda and ties to Mossad.

The article in Millî Gazete quotes unnamed sources making general and wide-ranging allegations against Rabbi Chaim Hillel Azimov, who lives in Kyrenia. That city is in an area that Turkey occupied following its 1974 invasion of Cyprus, leading to the establishment of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, which is recognized as a state officially only by Turkey.

“Chabad commits many crimes. They launder money and leak information to MOSSAD. They decipher all military points. They buy land near military areas,” one source is quoted in the article titled ”Chabad is a criminal organization.”

It calls Chabad, a Haredi organization with a complicated relationship with Zionism, a “Zionist group” that “supports LGBT.”

A well-known rabbi in Turkey, speaking with The Times of Israel on condition of anonymity citing the political sensitivity of the issue, says the article is “a loose collection of defamations, in which antisemites used ‘Chabad’ as a stand-in for antisemitic conspiracy theories to make them more palatable.”

Rabbi Azimov is not immediately available for comment on the article.

Chabad, a semi-hierarchal outfit with thousands of rabbis in dozens of countries, is often featured in antisemitic conspiracy theories.