“Turkey is alone”, says Robert Fisk in the Independent. “First, we’ll take a look at the racist reasons for this. If 39 men and women had been slaughtered in Paris or Brussels or Berlin on New Year’s Eve, the headlines would ripple on for three or four days. Two or three days if the victims had been western European. But of course, this being Turkey, which is a Muslim country – whose people are not always as white as those from “Christendom” – the headlines drifted off after a few hours. Not our lot, we Westerners said.” And so it goes on. Fisk is right to a point but he inadvertently points out a simple truth. It is not “we Westerners” who don’t give a toss because it’s “not our lot” but those who control the media.
I would have liked to have heard a lot more about the atrocity in Istanbul, but certainly in the media I saw, it was competing with stories about the Queen having a cold and Ken Dodd receiving a knighthood for services to HMRC (I think that was the reason. I can’t think of another). It is without question a fact that the incidents in France and Belgium were reported on for days, weeks actually, but this is far more to do with the media than those of us who get our information from it.
Turkey, like Iraq and Syria, is further away than France and Belgium and our way of life is less dissimilar to that latter than the former. Few of us will have been to Istanbul so it’s well off our radar. Paris, Bruges – these are places we do visit, know lots about. But having said all that, I don’t think your average punter cares less about disasters that happen to people with different cultures.
And there’s another thing about Turkey: the situation over there is far more complex than it is closer to home. Turkey has a variety of enemies, an elected dictator and an infrastructure that is struggling to maintain its status of being a bridge, quite literally, between east and west. I suspect much of the media, intentionally or not, has concluded that it’s too complex a story to tell, so once the initial carnage disappears into the ether, the media switches off.
Fisk confuses the media bubble in which he exists with the real world where the rest of us live. I am every bit as appalled by islamic fascism wherever it takes place, but if hardly anyone wants to report it to me, it’s not me saying it’s “not our lot”.
