In an enormous PR victory for the country that jails more journalists than any other in the world, The New York Times performed a shocking act of journalistic vandalism, crowing “Turkish Forces in Syria Protect 5 Million People” — subsequently re-titled to a still objectionable “In Turkey’s Safe Zone in Syria, Security and Misery Go Hand in Hand”.
This exercise in pro-Ankara propaganda neatly parrots the Turkish military occupation’s script. In so doing, it sidelines the ethnic cleansing of Afrin’s genuine local population, the Kurds, the forced Turkification of cultural heritage, and an unprecedented deterioration in human rights, particularly for women — all of which is being perpetrated in plain sight by a NATO member. A must-read account of the controversy surrounding this article, as well as rebuttal of its surrealistic narrative, is most trenchantly provided by The Jerusalem Post’s Seth Frantzman in his “NYT accused of whitewashing Turkey’s Afrin occupation”.
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As perhaps the best exclamation mark to this call to action, on the very same day as the Afrin coverage debacle, another article was published in the outlet ForeignLobby.com under the title “Erdogan-bashing Kurdish advocacy group lobbies Biden for reset with Syrian Kurds.” This piece noted that last year, to commemorate the first anniversary of the Turkish invasion of northern Syria, JFK published a two-page spread in the same New York Times, but in this instance titled “It’s Time to Break with Erdogan.” Against the visual backdrop of a bravely defiant Kurdish female soldier, we evidenced literally dozens of recent headlines from reputable publications calling Turkey to account for its malign behavior not just against the Kurdish people in Syria, Iraq and Turkey itself, but also in the Levant and broader Eastern Mediterranean, as well as North Africa and the Red Sea – not to mention its dubious, two-faced loyalty to NATO.
Read more: jpost
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