The besetting temptation of American media on foreign policy is to serve up over-simplified accounts of overseas developments and to follow the conventional script that already is in the reader’s or viewer’s mind. (Foreign media do it to us, too. One such trope is that America is such a violent, gun-crazed society that one dare not walk down most city streets at night. Every story of a killing in the U.S. supposedly proves this point.) The more I have traveled around the world, and having served abroad, the more I regret this tendency to mislead by wrong-headed generalities. I see it now in Iraq, in Russia and Mexico. The recent developments in Turkey suggest that the same cliched, un-nuanced coverage often obtains there, too. As an excellent corrective, read this fine article from the Turkish Daily Times by our firend, Mustafa Akyol. Oddly, Christians who are badly discriminated against in Turkey (they cannot even build a church or operate a seminary) might do better with a nominally Islamic government than a nominally “secular” regime that oppresses all religious groups. In any case, the political story in Turkey is not as easily understood as many news accounts suggest.
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by Stephen C. Meyer
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