Nearly 90% of Turkish opinion columns favor Hamas, study shows

Some journalists even went so far as to praise the violence as serving the Palestinian cause, the study noted.

By Ailin Vilches Arguello, The Algemeiner

About 90 percent of opinion articles published in two of Turkey’s leading media outlets portray the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in a positive or neutral light, according to a new study, reflecting Ankara’s increasingly hostile stance toward Israel.

Earlier this week, the Israel-based Jewish People Policy Institute released a report examining roughly 15,000 opinion columns in the widely read Turkish newspapers Sabah and Hürriyet, revealing that Hamas is often depicted positively through a “resistance movement” narrative portraying its members as “martyrs.”

For example, Turkish journalist Abdulkadir Selvi, writing in Hürriyet, described the assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as “a holy martyr not only of Palestine but of Islam as a whole” who “fought for peace,” while portraying Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “the new Hitler.”

JPPI also found that most articles in these two newspapers took a neutral stance on the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, offering almost no clear condemnation of the attacks and failing to acknowledge the group’s targeting of civilians.

Some journalists even went so far as to praise the violence as serving the Palestinian cause, the study noted.

In one striking example, Hürriyet published an article just one day after the attack, lauding the “resistance fighters” who carried out a “mythic” assault on the “Zionist occupying regime” and celebrating the killings.

In other cases, some journalists went as far as to portray Hamas as treating the Israeli hostages it kidnapped “kindly,” denying that the terrorist group had tortured and sexually abused former captives despite clear evidence.

“There was not the slightest indication that the Israelis released by the Palestinian resistance had been tortured,” Turkish journalist Hilal Kaplan wrote in Sabah, denying claims that the hostages had suffered brutal abuse.

“They all looked exactly the same physically as they did on Oct. 6, 2023, more than a year later,” he continued.

Prof. Yedidia Stern, president of JPPI, described the study’s findings as “deeply troubling,” urging Israeli officials not to overlook the Turkish media’s positive portrayal of Hamas and denial of its abuses.

“We must not normalize incitement and antisemitism anywhere in the world – certainly not when it comes from countries with which Israel maintains diplomatic relations,” Stern said in a statement.

According to the study, nearly half of the columns expressed a positive view of Hamas, while approximately 40 percent took a neutral position.

The analysis also found that around 40 percent of opinion columns mentioning Jews or Judaism contained antisemitic elements, with some invoking “Jewish capital” to suggest global power, while others compared Zionism to Nazism or depicted Jews as immune from international criticism.

For instance, two weeks after the Oct. 7 atrocities, Turkish journalist Nedim Şener wrote in Hürriyet that global Jewish capital and control over media and international institutions had brought the United States and Europe “to their knees,” allowing Israel to carry out a “genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.”