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ANKARA: The Orient is always the Orient for the West...

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  • ANKARA: The Orient is always the Orient for the West...

    Zaman Online, Turkey
    April 30 2005

    The Orient is always the Orient for the West...

    by MEHMET KAMIS


    Media channels, which have multiplied in recent years, subject our
    people today to very serious misinformation.


    Tens of TV channels, newspapers, magazines, cinema, Internet portals,
    and billboards constantly send messages to people's minds. Despite
    such a bombardment, we can have deep information about almost no
    topic. We neither have the time nor the appetite to attain deep
    knowledge even about issues that we have our own ideas or opinions
    on. Since this is the situation, images and small messages gain
    greater importance. The Western media often emphasizes certain issues
    when writing about or monitoring Muslims. Turks and Arabs are either
    terrorists or thieves or cheaters. This is such an accepted fact that
    a few years ago it was insistently underlined in newspaper film
    advertisements that a Muslim character was the good man in a film
    called the 13th Warrior, the lead role of which belonged to Antonio
    Banderas. It is such a rarely encountered situation that Muslims are
    portrayed with good images in Western films that the company that
    brought the film to Turkey felt it had to insist on this.


    Again, a majority of news articles about Turkey and the Islamic world
    in the Western media include negative photographs and information. A
    travel and culture magazine called Mare, which I saw in the hands of
    our photography editor Selahattin Sevi, had a photograph of Istanbul
    on its October 2004 cover page. The photography and publishing
    editors of this magazine published in Germany had chosen the worst
    photograph they could find of such a magnificent city for their cover
    page. Photographs of Istanbul, which is full of wonders and beauties
    in every corner, were chosen as if with an approach of "which bad
    side can I find" rather than of "what beauty can I capture."

    Venice is a foul smelling city even at a temperature of -2. This
    city, which is referred to as the city of romance, is a place where
    in reality the channels are full of pollution, the houses are not
    plastered and are in bad condition. You cannot see; however, any
    negative photographs or articles about Venice even in Turkey,
    whereas, if Venice were in the Orient, the whole world would hear
    about all the environmental pollution and smells from the canals
    there. France, which carries the Armenian issue to the agenda the
    most and which wants to blacken Turks and Muslims in this way, never
    carries the massacres it committed in Algeria to the agenda. While it
    did not say to history how it would pay for the cost for this, the
    great sin of 500,000 massacred in Rwanda also belongs to France. I
    don't say here that if we did, you did, too. I only say to those
    attempting to distribute justice: "Don't forget your own murders!"

    We have said that contemporary man makes decisions according to
    images and symbols. He also constructs his truths on these images.
    There are only a few who are interested in the details or the reality
    of the issues. It is possible to stigmatize a big region through a
    few negative pieces of information or images sprinkled in a film or
    on the news. This negative image is not used only by Western media or
    Westerners. Even the Turkish media approache everything belonging to
    the Orient with an Orientalist point of view. For example, you may
    well remember discussions of the Feast of the Sacrifice, articles and
    photographs about it. Bloody images and not-yet-buried bowels were
    published in newspapers. Television channels competed much to
    broadcast images of escaping bulls kicking their masters and animals,
    their legs knifed to make them lay down. In short, I don't know how
    one can explain the silence of France and Germany, who stood up by
    saying that women are beaten in Turkey when their own demonstrators
    were harshly beaten. Yet, their tolerance to their own sins is in
    fact not new.
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