Halil Berktay of Sabancı University, a prominent Turkish professor of history, wrote this article, which surprised me in some ways: Dulce et decorum est to be able to lie like the BBC. Do not take me wrong. Whatever he wrote over there is correct, and it is a great and wonderful article which everyone interested in current Turkish politics must definitely read. What I am surprised at is his apparent naive expectations from the BCC in terms of journalism and truthfulness.
Halil Berktay sounds stunned at BBC's cold-blooded twisting of the truth about Turkish politics and Turkey's relations with the PKK --the Kurdish nationalist and avowedly Marxist militant-revolutionary organization trying to fully dominate the Kurds of Turkey (and now, of Syria) and force them into accepting a future independent government by it over a portion of what is today Turkey. In the article Halil Berktay suggests that this travesty of journalism which consists in telling all kinds of lies in favor of the said Marxist revolutionary organization might have possibly stemmed from a deception of BBC English by its Turkish version, which is known to be heavily staffed with educated members of a militant and regressive Marxist faction advocating communist revolutionary violence. My point is that one would expect Professor Berktay to know better than to assume that BBC would behave differently in any language version of it.
