Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday said Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s comment that Zionism is “a crime against humanity” is “objectionable,” echoing the White House’s reaction today, saying his remarks are “offensive and wrong.”

Erdogan made the comments on Wednesday, speaking at a United Nations-sponored event meant to try to bridge the gap between Islam and the West. Instead, Erdogan managed to widen the divide:

“We should be striving to better understand the culture and beliefs of others, but instead we see that people act based on prejudice and exclude others and despise them,” Erdogan said, according to a simultaneous translation provided by the UN. “And that is why it is necessary that we must consider — just like Zionism or anti-Semitism or fascism — Islamophobia as a crime against humanity.”

“We not only disagree with it, we found it objectionable,” Kerry said during a press conference in Ankara with Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu. According to Reuters, Kerry said he personally raised the issue with Davutaglu and will do so with Erdogan.

“That said, Turkey and Israel are both vital allies of the United States and we want to see them work together in order to be able to go beyond the rhetoric and begin to take concrete steps to change this relationship,” Kerry added.

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s office said it’s “unfortunate that such hurtful and divisive comments were uttered at a meeting being held under the theme of responsible leadership.”

CAP’s Matt Duss and Michael Werz also condemned Erdogan’s comments on Thursday. “While Prime Minister Erdogan’s outrageous comments seem intended to isolate Israel, they also threaten to further isolate Turkey,” they wrote, adding that his comments ” seemed like an attitude from a bygone era. Casting Zionism together with anti-Semitism, fascism, and Islamophobia in this way is not only deeply offensive but also quite historically inaccurate and has the potential to promote or justify violence.”

Former State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter and New York Times columnist Tom Friedman engaged in an hour and a half discussion with CAP moderator Michael Werz on Thursday, heralding the release of a new series of essays related to the link between climate change and insecurity titled “The Arab Spring and Climate Change.”

A product of CAP, the Stimson Center, and the Center for Climate and Security, the report collects five essays that show how what were once local issues have become global, showing for example how a drought in China led to increased food prices in Egypt. In the preface to the report, Slaughter borrowed the concept of a “stressor” — a “sudden change in circumstances or environment” that interacts with various other factors that leads to sudden change — from criminal science to show how climate change acts to “ignite a volatile mix of underlying causes to erupt into revolution.” Those stressors include the way weather patterns effect the migration of peoples and shifting climates’ contribution to food insecurity, which serve as a multiplier of other factors blocking sustainable security.

Speaking before a packed house at CAP, Friedman implored the audience to think of the Middle East not by the current national borders, but instead envisioning as overlaid maps of culture and climate to understand the region. Slaughter took the concept a step further, adding in maps of political networks — government, corporate, NGOs, and others — and seeing where the larger “nodes” in those networks exist. Tracing where those nodes intersect, Slaughter said, shows where policy can be made.

Climate change overlaps with both a decentralization of foreign policy making and an increase in the technology that may be able to fix it, according to Slaughter and Friedman. Decision-making is spreading away from solely being governments interacting with each other and into a more dispersed framework, Slaughter said, citing the reporting of air quality by the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China, which is then picked up by Chinese nationals. Referring to the interconnected networks that the Internet facilitates, Slaughter said she wants to “see the world like the Millennials see it.”

As the population of people in the world having the same standard of living as the United States increases, Friedman said, so too will the dangers associated with climate change. Modern technology is showing the ability to help fight that, Friedman said. He provided the example of how the combination of a new ID law, advancing IT infrastructure, and emerging energy technology can allow villagers in India to refrain from moving into larger cities, lowering carbon emissions in the process.

Speaking to ThinkProgress after the event, Slaughter advised those seeking to help prevent further climate change, and the insecurity it brings, to “consider where they are in the network they’re trying to influence.” Global cities and states topped the list of those networks whose combined influence would be able to affect change on the global stage. “Then think, ‘Where am I placed?’ and my point is, you want to be in or be able to influence the central node,” Slaughter continued. That might mean cooperation between individual actors or linking between networks, through reaching out to corporations or local governments.

Watch the full event HERE.