Kafka is not welcome in Erdogan’s Turkey.
And while the New York Times pressures Netflix to stream Turkish Islamist agitprop pushing the Khashoggi myth, here’s what happens to actual journalists in Turkey.
Can Dündar, the former editor-in-chief of Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet, was convicted Wednesday on charges of terrorism in Turkey and sentenced in absentia.
The Istanbul court convicted Dündar of aiding an armed terrorist organization and espionage. It sentenced him in absentia to 27 years and six months in prison. Dündar was first sentenced to five years in 2016 on espionage charges and attempting to topple the government for publishing footage that allegedly showed Turkey’s state intelligence agency transporting weapons to Syrian rebels in 2014. This report contradicted Turkey’s denial that it was not supplying arms to rebels and, by extension, contributing to the rise of the Islamic State. Dündar was later released when the matter went to appeal. Upon his release, Dündar fled the country while another Turkish court ordered the seizure of his property and froze his Turkish bank accounts in October.
Exposing Turkey’s role in Islamic terrorism gets you convicted of… terrorism.
While some in the media are bemoaning the verdict, Dündar’s story still gets a fraction of the coverage and outrage of the Khashoggi narrative pushed by… Turkey’s state intelligence agency.
The media is deeply complicit in upholding Erdogan’s Islamist butcher shop.
It covered up his radicalism from the very beginning, pitching false narratives about how Islam and democracy can coexist. As Erdogan tightened his grip, the media still went along with it, and when he staged a fake coup that was used to eliminate the last remnants of an independent judiciary and police, the media treated Turkey’s Reichstag as a real event. It failed to report on the sheer scale of the repression or to do anything about it. So all that’s left is to occasionally bemoan Erdogan’s excesses.
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