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.