Are We Going to Contend with the Mainstream US Media Now?

On the topic of the Middle East and the current state of affairs in the world, I wonder if it would be better for Turkey to take the attitude Saudi Arabia has taken in saying, “We aren’t strong enough to change this,” and watch the region and the world from the American bleachers rather than declaring, “This situation is broken!” [We should] make efforts to change it and raise objections.

You probably saw the news. There was a vote in the General Assembly to decide who would replace Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Morocco, Pakistan and Togo in the United Nations Security Council — [countries] whose temporary two-year memberships will finish at the end of the year. In the vote, Nigeria, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Lithuania and Chile were chosen. After this result became apparent, Saudi Arabia rejected temporary membership on the grounds that the United Nations remained incapable of obtaining world peace and security.

Looking on Stupidly

In fact, Turkey has begun lobbying to be chosen for the U.N. Security Council in the next term while its spokesman has been simultaneously ranting against the broken system created by the five countries that have the right to veto within the Security Council.

We can look to Saudi Arabia’s support of the coup engineered by el-Sissi in Egypt as an example of the difference between us and them. However, let’s keep in mind that behaving like Turkey brings problems along with it. Passively watching the current situation and saying, “Somehow or other America will choose the right path,” while falling for similar types of conformism, can keep a country out of certain problems.

That being said, America has failed to produce a solution for the Palestinian problem, has remained a spectator to the Syrian tragedy and has not taken the side of democracy in Egypt.

The American Mainstream Media

If you are accustomed to following the U.S. press, it probably caught your attention that publications such as The Washington Post and The New York Times — the mainstream or “cartel media” — have recently intensified stories and commentary slamming Turkey. As a matter of fact, just yesterday, The New York Times had both an editorial and a news story critical of Turkey.

Isn’t it strange that these publications that take positions critical of the tea party and similar conservative movements responsible for the Congressional shutdown in their own country, when writing about Turkey, praise the Gezi park movement, find the trial of members of a junta unjust and mention that the secularists are anxious?

No Consistency

To strongly criticize Turkey’s democratic nation, located in the same region as theocratic Saudi Arabia and Iran, and to see secularism’s departure from the control of Jacobinists as dangerous is among one of the stranger events of this period.

Another strange occurrence is the targeting of MIT [Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization] Undersecretary Hakan Fidan by certain publications. In fact, the United States has had periods of defective ideological obsession in its past. It disregarded first the Native Americans and then African Americans. Didn’t McCarthyism also drag it into a period of political blindness?

It is not easy to understand why some in the U.S. media ignore the new Turkey’s democratization efforts, including its peace initiative (between Turks and Kurds), and get carried away repeating the cliche that “The [Turkish] secularists are anxious.”

If Turkey gave its full support to Israel and did not react to the tragedy in Gaza, I wonder whether the worries of the secularists in the U.S. media would come to an end.