Shared Values - A Shared Future

Within the scope of “The Extremism Project”, a workshop titled “Hate Speech and the Media in Turkey” was held in the Senate Hall of Bahçeşehir University on February 20, 2009. Fourteen experts from various universities and non-governmental organizations attended the workshop. As a part of the workshop, a comprehensive open discussion was held on the Turkish national media in terms of hate speech and the media. Questions as “What is hate? What is the relationship between hate and nationalism? What is the way hate speech comes into being and in what ways we find it in the media?” were among the questions we tried to analyze.  The role of newspapers, which occupy an  important place in the daily media, in the formation of hate speech was the main axis of our free discussion, and it was also evaluated the place of hate speech in other channels of the media such as TV’s and the internet, looking into the way they publish daily news. Political, social, ethical, and juridical aspects of “hate speech and the media” have been discussed by participants from different fields.

Below are the proceedings of the workshop on “The Media and Hate Speech”, held at Bahçeşehir University on February 20, 2009. I would like to thank to all the participants of the workshop: Mr. Erol Önderoğlu, Bianet Editor, advocate Mr. Taner Kılıç, Vice President of Mülteci-Der, Mr. Ragıp Duran, Executive Editor of Belge Yayınları and Vice President of İnsan Hakları Derneği (Human Rights Association), Mr. Mahmut Çınar, Faculty of Communication at Bahçeşehir University, Ms. Burçe Çelik, Faculty of Communication at Bahçeşehir University, Mr. Kaya Özkaracalar, Faculty of Communication atBahçeşehir University, Ms. Defne Karaosmanoğlu, Faculty of Communication atBahçeşehir University, Hande Gülen, Aral Demircan, and Özge Kantarcı, students at Bahçeşehir University, Mr. Süleyman Güven, Representative of the Mutual Platform of Human Rights (İnsan Hakları Ortak Platformu), Mr. Ethem Özgüven, İstanbul Bilgi University, and Mr. Erkan Saka, İstanbul Bilgi University.
The proceedings below were prepared by Ms. Ceylan Hazinedar.

KAAN H.ÖKTEN: First of all, I want to welcome you all. Before commencing, I think some explanation about what we are going to do here will be useful. What we are participating in is an academic project prepared under the partnership of the FCO of the UK and Bahçeşehir University in the context of fighting extremism and promoting mutual understanding. We hold workshops about extremism. We transcribe the proceedings of these workshops, translate them into English, and then publish them on the website www.ortakgelecegimiz.com. As a part of the project, a research study by some 2,000 people is also being conducted by Betam, the research unit of Bahçeşehir University, in March – April period, on the issue of perception of extremism in Turkey. Such a discussion has not been done in Turkey so far, so I am also curious about what kind of a conclusion will be achieved. We will try to finish the project towards the end of May with a comprehensive, international conference. Eventually, the totality of all these meetings will be gathered in a publication.

I assume that today’s activity will take a couple of hours. The heading of our workshop today is “Hate Speech in Turkey”. It is going to be an open-ended discussion which would progress with questions such as ‘What is the media?’, ‘What kind of a thing is hate?’, and ‘What kind of a thing is the speech of it?’ I would like to make a remark at this point about why I find it important. There is a study titled Hate Crimes on the OSCE made by The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2006. The concept of hate crime is the focus of that study. I think hate crime as a concept has become a matter of consideration in Turkey only after the assassination of Hrant Dink. I would like us to make an analysis of this concept. 

EROL ÖNDEROĞLU (EDITOR OF BİANET İFADE ÖZGÜRLÜĞÜ /BIANET FREEDOM OF SPEECH): What is hate crime? Before beginning to explore that question – well, I have some acquaintance with the French society. The French society and media approach hate crime in a very different manner from that of the Turkish society and media. This is a difference that gives me the opportunity to be able to look at what happens in Turkey from outside too. First of all, let’s take the media in Turkey. Conditions that make it possible for one to keep one’s calmness and objectivity are in fact rather poor within the Turkish media. From the very day we began to scan the local media… for I prefer to scan the local media rather than the national one whenever an event of importance come up in the national agenda, be it about the Kurdish issue, or the Armenian, or the Greece issue. I think that the local media is a much more abundant resource and when you try to get views of someone in the national media, you will usually get commonplaces –a language not very interesting or exciting for a journalist… When you monitor the local media, on the other hand, you are in the very place where the problem arises. And you see that there is not any opinion too wrong to advocate within that media. I don’t think that this is just sensitivity or lack of education. Those are just one side of it. I began to scan the local media in the Black Sea region shortly after the assassination of Hrant Dink. I was made an explanation that ‘there is nothing here to release the energy of youth but the local soccer team playing in the national league’. And the people there make this somewhat curious explanation of the widespread nationalism in the region: ‘After the international soccer match between Turkey and Georgia, played in Trabzon, a rumor spread that there were more Georgian flags in the tribunes than were Turkish flags, and the local people found that claim very offending’. Another anecdote is about the Malatya murders. I was present in several of the early hearings in the lawsuit in Malatya. No sooner than I arrived in the city, I began to scan the local newspapers wondering whether they would announce the hearing. I did not see any news about it at all. And I found out on the day of the hearing that a couple of days before the session, a national news agency very known to us had distributed a piece of news to the local newspapers, which were seemingly in such a difficulty in accessing original news that they purchased and broadcast it. The story about it is something like this: as a professional success, the journalist reached some documents from the internet about where in Turkey Christian missioners live, while the killed bodies of some of them were still being on the floor. The journalist also declared the list of the names and hotel addresses of the plaintiffs’ advocates to attend the succeeding hearings. Personally I think such news cannot be explained by ignorance or intolerance – at least, these terms cannot be adequate to explain it.

Advocate TANER KILIÇ (VICE PRESIDENT OF MÜLTECİ-DER): May I add something at that point?

E.Ö: Yes, of course.

T.K: Orhan Kemal Cengizoğlu is one of the most important advocates in the Malatya lawsuit and I know him personally. Such news about him published in the local media that he thinks it is not possible to get such information without bugging his phone and hacking his e-mail account. Words that he never said or wrote publicly were published in the newspapers. They did not omit any little detail of his personal information, which is not possible without service of information from somewhere. I think this example is worth considering because it makes us put forward the questions ‘To what extent is the local media local and to what extent is it media?’ And then, the increase in the number of the threats reached such a degree that Orhan had to make the situation publicly known with a press statement and to employ a bodyguard.

K.Ö: By the way, Mr. Ragıp Duran has also come in. Welcome Mr. Duran.

RAGIP DURAN (EXECUTIVE EDITOR OF BELGE YAYINLARI, VICE PRESIDENT OF İNSAN HAKLARI DERNEĞİ –HUMAN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION) Thank you.

K.Ö: We have organized today a program containing free discussion on hate speech and the media. We are organizing workshops within the scope of the project of fighting extremism. This is one of them. For about two hours, an open discussion… well, should I call it a discussion? Let me call it an open conversation. For about two hours, we will be in a workshop in which an open conversation would take place. And we have just started. Now, back to our topic, let me put forward a question: What is hate, then? And what is the relationship between hate crime and nationalism?

MAHMUT ÇINAR (Researcher Assistant at the Faculty of Communication of Bahçeşehir University): Actually, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has made a definition of hate crime. Let me read it out to begin with, if you wish, for I think it could provide us with a guiding principle. It reads: “Any criminal offense committed against a person or their property is a hate crime if it is motivated by a bias against their race, national origin, nationality, religion, sex or sexual identity, age, orientation, physical / mental handicap or their identity concerning it.” Now, as far as I know, there is something called hate crime so defined in some of the member countries of OSCE. As my position requires, I evaluate this concept in the context of nationalism. We can put the situation that way: There are two definitions in the media with this regard, which are “those on our side” and “those on the other side”. There is an English theoretician named Michael Blink, frequently referred to in studies on nationalism, and he talks about two basic orientations of the English press in a study of his on it, one being “We”, and the other “Here”. What he means is that every nation lives within national borders that are closed to those who are not part of it and that the press there takes this perception for granted. We are all familiar with some obvious examples of that in the media, such as the motto ‘Turkey Belongs to Turks’. “News and comments,” says Blink, “refer to a national criterion that is the homeland of the reader.” Then, the media hypothesizes a consensus on identity, acts according to it and hates any one different. Well, what kind of an identity is that? In the Turkish case, it is absolutely male – I am talking about the mainstream media, of course. It is Sunnite Muslim in terms of religion and it is absolutely anti-gay and absolutely Turkish. The media always qualifies those who are outside of these groups as ‘strangers’ and ‘strange ones’, though not always obviously. As you know, I am the editor of the school newspaper. A friend of mine was preparing a piece of news someday, which had really nothing to do with the so-called nationalism. He wrote somewhere in the article ‘strangers living in that neighborhood such as Americans and Armenians’. I asked him why he had used the word ‘stranger’ and asked ‘Are Armenians strangers?’ His reply was ‘Are not they so?’ As it can be conferred from that reply, he is not aware of the fact. He may make news that could be approved by an editor with similar misconceptions when he becomes a correspondent, unless he experiences a radical change. Actually, I don’t think that the media acts like that intentionally for the most part. As Stuart Hall says, “We do not produce ideologies personally; we are born into them.” We speak from inside ideologies and we utter what they dictate us to. My friend who wrote that news was also born into such a situation. He has heard the same discourse at home, among friends, and in other social circles, and his conception of Armenians as strangers has been built up. Back to the matter of nationalism again; a nation being considered as a construction, it is necessary to create for it some internal and external enemies in order to transform the heterogeneous structure composed of different groups into a homogeneous community. I mean it is an indispensable procedure for nationalistic theories. All the nations have definitely been founded against internal and external enemies. Nationalism, with this respect, is the most convenient one of the methods people have used throughout history to become integrated with their likes and to feel powerful and in peace. Firstly, to put an enemy in front of the nation annihilates every possibility of debate on the concept of nation, closing all the doors to ontology. Secondly, an enemy put there makes every method to be used in the name of the nation allowable. The Turkish national media also puts against the nation some enemies seeming to be omnipresent and always trying to disintegrate the nation and annihilate the state. The identity and composition of those enemies depend on the current conjuncture as might be expected. Kurds for example can become the enemy if Kurdish policies are topical. Or if it is laicism that which is currently disputed, ‘two opposing groups in the country’ becomes the most popular discourse. We can discuss why the media does that. But I want to talk about some researches now. When we examine the hate crimes committed through the media, we can see that minorities are the main victims. This is also the case all over the world. In Germany, for instance, there are rather a large number of crimes committed against the Turkish minority through the national media. But, interestingly enough, there are three groups that are invariably subjected to the hate assaults. The first of them are women, the second the gay people, and, in the European case, the third one are Gypsies. We can see even on a newspaper which we may find surprisingly objective such headlines as ‘Murder in the Armenian Lodging House’. I think it is something a priori. You can’t see in any news an expression like ‘Murder in the Turkish Lodging House’, for example. I mean the press moves along a path with some definitions, criteria, or anticipations. I think nationalism is a very important component of this context and I see that hate crimes generally come about through nationalism. But of course nationalism is not always the case. We can see for example how powerful the male and macho side of the national identity can be, as I mentioned above, when it comes to transsexuals and transvestites. The blame is usually put on them in all news stories concerning hate assaults towards them. Every time it is put forward that they engage in prostitution and that it is a provocative factor leading to crime. And, interestingly, the criminal records of these people are highlighted in every story. Their past composes most prominent part of these news items. One can see such news about different orientations on a very large spectrum in the media. That’s what I want to say for now.

K.Ö: It’s very interesting. After all, don’t we show our affection to someone by saying to her or him ‘I’ll kill you’? When you translate this phrase into English or German, the person you address is simply shocked! And this being the case, a man can wrap himself up with a bomb on, as in the Zincirlikuyu explosion, and go into a bank, blowing it up. Can not he? But is it really hate what motivates him? I mean, is hate a matter of extenuation? Can you justify your murder by saying ‘I hated him’ as a matter of extenuation? Pain threshold is increased in order that one may not feel anything when one commits a murder. Most of us hate mice for example. And we don’t feel bad about it when a mouse is killed. If you see a human being as an object like a mouse, if you describe him that way, you won’t feel sorry about it when you kill him.

HANDE GÜLEN (Student at Bahçeşehir University): May I say something at that point?

K.Ö: Yes, of course.

H.G.: I want to say something about what you have just said. We are all informed about the Engin Çeber case, who was killed by torture. Celalettin Cerrah, the police chief, made a statement after the event, saying, “Should we deprive our policemen of their authority just because some people got some cuts on their heads or some bruises on their eyes? Can it be called torture?” I think these words are related to what you have talked about here. I think the mainstream media cannot act independently from capital and the political power. Hate is directed toward the imperialism of USA in the left-wing media, while it is related to racism in the right-wing media. So I think that hate is about society for the most part. It seems to be a problem about society, going beyond the domain of the individual…

M.Ç: Can I add something, by the way? I browsed the internet to know the general view about whether hate is considered as a matter of extenuation and this was what I found out: Hate is generally considered in discussions about hate crimes as a factor to aggravate the punishment. Murder is itself a crime that requires major penalty, and if hate is also a motive, the sentence will be even more severe.

H.G.: In fact, hate speech is also to do with the May 1 incidents we went through and with torture. I think these are all consequences of hate. To what extent those who commit such crimes are penalized? I think that is the matter.

M.Ç: We are all talking about a specific kind of hate, related to a specific political identity, and torture incidents are part of it.

E.Ö: First of all, when we scrutinize the approach of the best selling media, with all its influence on society, we see that it has no paradigms to compensate the destruction caused by hate crimes. In Turkey, we are in a period in which the approach of media toward social incidents is inversely proportional to their serious character. We readers deem that the media is not aware of the fact that the name of a child exposed to violence must not be mentioned in a news article. It is very well aware of that, however. The way one should report events that we have been talking about, for example, is not seen as a matter of social responsibility by the mass media. The mainstream media finds such stories newsworthy only because they mean a lot of money. There is a circulation created with such news. The Turkish media does need a real self-criticism, which it is not willing to do. The ‘principle of sensational news’ is the main argument put against any possible objection. The more sensational a piece of news is, the more it is seen important. But the case is very different with the French society. French politicians can never manipulate editorial groups or determine for them what to do, although there is a media section in France that is widely directed by capital. I believe that just tenth of such independence would change many things in Turkey. There is no media criticism in this country. Number of conscious readers or editors is insufficient. We need to prevent hate crimes in Turkey. Let’s remember the Akın Birdal incident. That event showed us what serious consequences a news report could cause. I believe that this problem can be solved out with a reasonable stance in the level of national media.

R.Z: Sometimes the media may act without knowing what it is about, I suppose. Such distortions have occurred in news reports in the Turkish press that the media received reaction from readers. The extent of the influence of governmental institutions concerning all that’s going on should also be examined. You must have heard about a ‘Red Book’, a national security document of the state. The Council of State decided to make an inspection of it for the first time but the document was not sent to the Council for security reasons. What are the content of it? Well, one of the articles in it suggests that nationalism should be removed from the list of threats, for example. The truth is that Turkey is still governed by an administration which is the continuation of the institutional actors created as part of the national security concept of the state during the Cold War. In accordance with the same concept, the definition of ‘enemy’ has been modified too and a notion of ‘internal enemy’ was added alongside the one of ‘external enemy’. The external enemy had been communism in the first place. This created very severe consequences in Turkey as in Argentine and other Latin American countries. A very huge wave of hate raised in society in those years. A similar practice was applied during the days of the 1960 coup d’etat, when the members of Democrat Party were being tried in Yassıada, by describing them and their relatives as ‘the fallen’, as opposed to the ‘pro-revolution’ part of society. In the same period, hate was being organized by ‘Associations of Fighting Communism’. Back to the ‘Red Book’ again; missionary work is mentioned as a national threat in the document, which I find an important point. There is a hate language shamelessly used in Turkey and the media is one of the most influential channels of it. This is an extensive phenomenon in the ‘embedded’ media in Turkey and can be observed at every level, justified as ‘a defensive reflex in the name of the state’. I believe for this reason that a nationwide, fundamental education campaign against hate speech must be started. Hate speech is perceived in Turkey as part of freedom of thought. This should be questioned, I suppose: Can we see hating as part of freedom of thought?

T.K: As a lawyer, I think this should be added to it: an event that is suggestive of a hate crime is said to be one only if the victim perceives a threat in it toward himself or herself. It is because we are in the face of a hate crime directed to someone who is not personally known but through whom it is committed. I mean, the assaulter does not know the victim in person. The Hrant Dink incident, for example: someone comes along from Trabzon and kills Hrant Dink. Such a crime is caused by mere prejudice, thus is defined as a prejudicial crime in Europe. Prejudicial Law appears for the first time in the United States in 1969. There is not an exact equivalent of it in the Turkish law system, but there is the Article 216 of the Constitution. Ironically, those who fight hate crime are tried in accordance with that very article. Bianet published a news item related to that point. Some Kurdish families immigrated to Denizli some time ago and a concern rose in the local people that they might be outnumbered by the newcomers. So they expelled those people from the city. Consequently, the Prosecutor in Denizli brought a charge in accordance to the Article 216. I think that was a good example.

ERKAN SAKA (Lecturer at the Faculty of communication of İstanbul Bilgi University): My thesis is about the EU for the most part. I think the Turkish jurisdiction is much more conservative than the military. Computer crimes can be handled within this context, too. What kind of a solution can we come up with in this respect? I suppose that’s the focal question. Mr. Önderoğlu has talked about the case with the French media. I think the Turkish media adopts a certain role to play and its concern is to be a political actor rather than reporting news. This being the case, I think there’s no point in expecting a media contribution to the solution. Every single editor I have met is a nice and well-educated person. When you open up their newspaper, however, you can’t help wondering how such people can write such news. Looking at the matter from another viewpoint, this is the structure of the mainstream media and these people act within limitations determined by that structure.

BURÇE ÇELİK (Lecturer at Bahçeşehir Univercity): May I speak at that point?

K.Ö: Yes, of course.

B.Ç.: What we call hate is in fact the lack of love; it is not something existing by itself. It exists alongside various kinds of anger and fear. Looking into the history of hate, we see that there is a very intensive fear underlying hate. This fear was prevalent in the case of Jews or Kurds and it is rather difficult to understand hate without understanding that fact. When it comes to the media; it is consumption what matters for the administrative people in the mainstream media. It’s fear again; for if you provoke fear, people will read what you write. The main concern of the media in terms of news reporting is, as Mahmut has stated out, to provoke those negative feelings including that very fear. And we can see another aspect of the problem when it comes to the matter of consumption. How can one become a suicide bomber, for instance? The guy fears his own self, that’s why. And, most importantly, such cases cannot be understood with reason only. Hate has reflections in our language on a large scale, too. ‘Armenian descendant’ or ‘Greek descendant’ (literally ‘a seed of Armenians’ and ‘an offspring of Greeks’), used pejoratively, are distinct examples of that. I give lectures on cultural anthropology at Bahçeşehir University. When I begin the topic of othering and talk about what the ‘other’ means, I receive such a reaction: “Why! Are there no traitors among us?’ I think this is one of the sentences of crucial importance and should be deeply examined.

K.Ö: So far, we have talked a little about what hate is. I’d like to look at the etymological aspect of the matter now. ‘Nefret’ is an Arabic word, its root being ‘f-r-t’. This word has the same root with ‘ifrat’, which means ‘to have gone to extremes’. In fact, we see that ‘hate’ is not the exact equivalent of the word ‘nefret’. ‘Nefret’ is the psychological state of a person who has ‘fallen into ifrat’, (gone to extremes) and ‘ifrat’ means ‘extremes’. The act of avoiding that, avoiding hate, corresponds to ‘basiret’, whose root is ‘b-s-r’. ‘Basiret’, or insight, means to understand the situation by the inner sight. This being the case, the word ‘nefret’ that we use is a wrong term. But language is the home of being and we, born into it, use another word for another situation, hollowing it out actually. After all, we do speak and I think it is a miracle for us to be able to communicate.

KAYA ÖZKARACALAR (Lecturer at the Faculty of Communication of Bahçeşehir University): Let me speak now as a devil’s advocate. Taking the issue in the context of the relationship between hate and extremism – I think to label some ideas ‘extremism’ is identical to labeling some people ‘separatists’ and this is another way of othering. This definition really irritates me. I find it wrong to include the term ‘extremism’ in the definition of hate. I think it is a questionable practice to deal with ‘moderateness’ and ‘extremism’ under the same topic.

M.Ç: If this project is based on fighting extremism, then, are we saying ‘Something extreme is something bad’? I think, however there is a problematical point about it, we should not put too much emphasis on that matter considering that it is not the main theme of our panel.

ARAL DEMİRCAN (Student at Bahçeşehir University): That suggests me the photo contest that Mr. Ökten made us informed about recently. It is also organized within the context of this project and it is in fact on theme of ‘your extremism’. My extremism for example is a capitalist man. I also want to speak a little about the media. First of all, the media we are talking about is the media of the predominant system and of bourgeoisie and its goal is to suppress people. So I think it is not surprising that this media has fascistic tendencies. I mean, it is the very task of the media, after all.

R.Z: Don’t you think that we are legalizing the situation by saying that?

A.D: Of course we are, on one hand. But on the other hand, I also believe that the media should change.

M.Ç: I think we would better use an adjective; we are talking about the mainstream media.

A.D.: I agree. It’s not the case with all the newspapers.

E.Ö: I can say, in the light of all that is said here, that the media is a field of production which must be strictly controlled. This must be done with every piece of news, I think. It is a field that should be inspected. In fact, all that we have talked about so far is about media literacy; it’s about the discourse used in the media. It is this discourse that must be strictly inspected and this must be done by the reader. As readers, we must act as media bosses.

K.Ö: I think that the media should not be exaggerated. The problem here is that the media is a means that interrupts the thoughts of a lot of people and that provokes them. The matter is how I set someone into action in accordance with my thoughts. If I do that through the media, then I have got a very big power. If, by this power, I can make someone do the action B rather then the action A, and if the action B has a criminal nature, it means that I am encouraging that person to feel spite and hate. This is the point that I am anxious about in terms of the media. The task of political parties is to execute policies, and the task of a doctor is to heal people. But what is the task of the press? This must be understood. I think this problem is about power and about being a part of it.

Gökçe: I think there is another ideal here. I find it a little wrong to say ‘This is the task of the press’.

K.Ö: It was just provocation!

B.Ç.: The press should be evaluated with its good and bad aspects as a whole. That’s also true for the internet and other media channels.

K.Ö: By the way, Mr. Süleyman Güven has come in. Welcome Mr. Güven. You could not hear what has been talked so far but what do you think about the matter of hate?

SÜLEYMAN GÜVEN (Representative of the Mutual Platform of Human Rights / İnsan Hakları Ortak Platformu): I guess the first thing to examine about the media is the relationship between power and the media. The media generally speaks from the side of the powerful. This is the case all over the world. In Turkey, too, it is the official policy of the state what the media expresses. The media in Turkey uses the discourse of the elite section of the power. They must be called, more accurately, the ‘symbolical elite’. They are the people who create the discourse. Relationship between the media and power is an important point in that respect. 

K. Öz.: At that stage of the discussion, I would like to clarify a couple of points. It’s generally newspapers what we have talked about so far. There are television and cinema beside it. Newspapers and news are about fictionalizing of reality and both television and cinema are by definition involved in fiction. So focusing only on newspapers would be failing to see the big picture. The society must be provided with some fictional works, some positive utopias, which would not contain hate speech. Something must be put against hate speech.

K.Ö: But, may it turn out something like “Ready, aim, love!”?

K. Öz.: Of course it should not be done that way. But I guess it is possible to create some alternative works of fiction to the existing ones prevailed by hate speech.

M.Ç: I guess there are some prerequisites for being the mainstream media. First of all, you must reach very many people. So, some social categories of ways of thinking are created and the mainstream media takes it for granted that people thinks according to those ways. Some part of society may have a certain idea about the Kurdish people for instance, but when you generalize that idea on the scale of all the society, well, that’s the mainstream media. The official policy in Turkey has never been changed and the mainstream media is continuing that. I think it is all about the founding ideology. There is a viewpoint here forming the Turkish national identity and that’s why the mainstream media perceives any threat directed to the state as a one directed to itself, which is a condition of being the mainstream media. You are not the mainstream media unless you don’t do that.

T.K: I’d like to give an example. You must be familiar with the ‘breaking news’ section in the internet news and the readers’ comments below those articles. When you post an opposing view as a comment there, the editors don’t publish your post. I found that very suggestive when I heard about it for the first time and I think it is worth mentioning here. And there was also a ‘Peace Train’, a project realized by cooperation of Amnesty International and Hürriyet. I suppose that it was an important work. I would also like to mention a center in Alabama that I referred to in the article I wrote about hate speech. It’s called ‘Southern Poverty Law Center’. They browse the press in terms of hate speech, in some cases acting like private detectives. They examine for instance whether a certain case of murder was committed by a relative and they document the results as reports. They also publish a periodical whose circulation figure is about 300,000. And 6,000 of the subscribers of it are lawyers in executive posts, judges and prosecutor in the USA, which means almost all of them. I find it is important to mention that organization in that it is suggestive about what can be done.

A.D.: I want to say something about the previous topic. What I am against is not the media as a whole, but the part of it that is used as an instrument by the predominant system. In fact, there is a mainstream media, as mentioned earlier, and all the newspapers composing it have the same properties. Posta is one of the best selling newspapers in Turkey nowadays, and it is by all means a lulling one. I think these organs in the mainstream media undertake a function of intensifying hate. The mainstream media itself hates. And it adopts the job of hyping that hate. That is why it is the predominant system, rather than newspapers, what I am against. 

K.Ö: By the way, Mr. Ethem Özgüven has come in. Welcome Mr. Özgüven.

ETHEM ÖZGÜVEN (Lecturer at İstanbul Bilgi University): Thank you. I am sorry I am late. I and Taner Kılıç are working on the matter of refugees, which is a problem relevant to hate, and that’s why I wished to join the discussion. 

E.Ö: Back again to topic of the national media; I believe that personal relations are also important in the national media. Huge differences can be observed between what one thinks personally and what we see on the screen. I know most of the newspaper editors in person and all of them are well-educated, rational, nice people. The media people seem to be forced to live with a dual state of mentality. It is frequently observed in personal relations. We have not yet had an opportunity to see good examples in media activities. We could not see the fact that we too are social beings. For a newspaper editor to be able to do that, he or she must have the same life style as other people in his or her society. There are good examples, by the way. A documentary film broadcast in TRT recently was one. It was about the Cyprus Peace Operation and the focus of it was on personal experiences. Looking into the current political structure in Turkey, I can say that the atmosphere is not as militaristic as it used to be. But I think journalists practice self-censorship now.

K.Ö: A student may feel uneasy about uttering the word ‘Kurd’ or ‘Kurdish’ in class. He does not say it. I think it has to do with censorship, too.

E.Ö: He can’t. For that is also the case with academic staff. Finally, I think we should say something about the legal arrangements that create hate crimes. Articles such as 301 and 305 are land mines laid by the politicians. These legal arrangements in the Constitution should be specially examined. I think penalty of imprisonment for such acts is a pointless practice. A fine must be the penalty for that. Imprisonment is a political practice altogether.

R.Z: At that point, let’s look at the ethical dimension of the problem. What is the condition of the press in terms of ethics? That must be examined. There is a very serious problem of ethics in Turkey. Crimes against humanity should not be dealt with within the context of freedom of thought. As a human rights defender, I believe that hate crimes are not a part of freedom of thought. But as a publisher, I can’t easily answer such a question as ‘Should Hitler’s Mein Kampf be prohibited?’ All I can do is to say, ‘They must put such books in black plastic bags before selling them, just as pornographic publications!” Mine is a really difficult situation.

ÖZGE KANTARCI (Student at Bahçeşehir University): We have talked about the dual mentality of media bosses and editors. I want to give an example about that. It is about the way Yeni Şafak reported the incident of the young people who died of gas poisoning on the New Year’s Day. “They were drunk celebrating the New Year’s Day and they deserved to be death” was the main idea of the coverage and that is a very distinct example of the dual mentality. I think another important point is that journalists rarely change their standpoints. I must say that I agree with Mr. Önderoğlu in this respect. 

M.Ç: I want to say something very briefly. A newspaper in Turkey had quitted to refer to the persons died in the war as ‘martyrs’, using an impartial discourse. They had kept on doing that until recently, when they had to use the word ‘martyrs’ again because they were warned by seven generals in secret. Then they declared it in their newspaper. The ‘Andıç’ (the memorandum on the accreditation) event and this one are all of a piece, I guess.

T.K: I would like to make a brief account of my thoughts, considering that the panel is about to finish. I think that the main victims of hate speech in Europe are refugees. But there are generally stereotype news articles on that matter here in Turkey. How many people were arrested and what happened –such information is all we can find in the media. This problem does not become a news story unless a lot of refugees die in an accident. Otherwise, the issue of refugees is only referred to within the context of economic indicators. I and Mr. Özgüven have formed a mutual platform on the issue of refugees as cooperation with our Greek counterparts and we are going to start a campaign within a short time.

E. Özg.: The apathy towards the refugee problem stems from the fact that there is big money in it, as is in drug trafficking. There is a disgusting profit in that activity. Turkey earns a lot in that job. Everybody is silent about it and much money is acquired. The discourse of the press regarding this matter is very disgusting. I think this is a scandalous situation but nobody says anything about it. I find this matter very important. I think the issue of refugees should be dealt with as a separate topic under the subject of hate speech and the media.

K.Ö: I thank you all very much for participating. We have really benefited from your thoughts. I wish a good evening to all of you.