Turkish Media’s Overwhelming Support for Hamas

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hates Israel. He has in the past suggested the formation of a pan-Islamic army to launch an attack on the Jewish state, leaving no doubt as to whom he thought best qualified to lead such an army. As a Sharia-adherent Muslim, he has used his office to undo the secularism once put in place by Ataturk. He has built many thousands of mosques, and close to 6,000 Imam-Hatip schools that combine a standard, secular academic curriculum with intense religious studies, including the Quran, Arabic, and Islamic history. He used the coup attempt in 2016 as an excuse to fire from their jobs tens of thousands of civil servants, military men, university rectors, judges, lawyers, and others who were secularists opposed to Erdogan’s re-Islamizing of Turkish society.

Hs anti-Israel animus has spread throughout Turkish society, and is reflected most starkly in the Turkish media, which routinely accuses Israel of “genocide” and engages in antisemitic rhetoric about “the Jews” who are said to control much of the world’s media, banks, and so on — a script taken right from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

More on the Turkish media’s expression of support for Hamas can be found here: “Nearly 90% of Turkish Opinion Columns Favor Hamas, Study Shows,” by Ailin Vilches Arguello, Algemeiner, January 30, 2026:

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.

Many dozens of hostages have testified at length about their mistreatment: sexual assaults including rape, repeated beatings, deliberate starvation, being held underground in cages, repeatedly being threatened with death, and having their legs and arms tied together behind their backs in a “pretzel-like” position that they endured for many hours, and much, much more.

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

Nonsense. We all saw that many of the hostages looked like concentration camp inmates when released. Some of them weighed as little as 88 pounds, having previously weighed 167 pounds. Hamas didn’t hide their condition. In fact, it released videos of some of the emaciated and frail hostages, including those of Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski, hoping thereby to have the hostage families put pressure on the Israeli government to stop its fighting in Gaza in order to obtain the release of all the hostages.

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

That means that only 10% of the columns that appeared in Turkey’s two most prominent newspapers, Sabah and Hürriyet, were opposed to Hamas for the atrocities — the rapes, tortures, mutilations, and murders — that it carried out on October 7, 2023.

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.”

Ah yes, That “Jewish capital” that controls the world, but somehow cannot manage to prevent most of the world’s media from repeatedly calumniating the Jewish state, nor keep the UN General Assembly from passing more resolutions denouncing Israel than it has passed against the other 192 member states combined. Amazing, isn’t it, how those all-powerful Jews can do nothing in he face of a continuing worldwide gang-up on the Jewish state.

And which “world media” does Israel control? Not the consistently anti-Israel BBC, that is the largest broadcaster in the world. Nor does Israel control Al Jazeera, owned by Qatar, that is the second largest broadcaster in the world, and even more anti-Israel than the BBC. Nor does Israel control the most important newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, all of which are distinctly unsympathetic to Israel.

Much of the Turkish media has descended into the mire of antisemitic conspiracy theories right out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It will take a long time for the sensible, secular Turks to dig their country out of that particular mire, and that can only happen after Erdogan has finally left the scene, either by being voted out of office, or by retiring, or by dying. He’s only 71, and in good health. Meanwhile, Turkey’s partners in NATO should be reminded that Erdogan once predicted a future war “between the Crescent and the Cross,” and left no doubt as to which side Turkey would be on. He’s not just against Israel. He’s against all the Infidels who according to the Quran are “the most vile of created beings,” including his supposed allies in NATO. Perhaps it is time for NATO to expel Turkey from the defense alliance, given both its threats to Israel, its support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and its attacks on the Kurds in Syria, who have been America’s staunchest allies in the war against the Islamic State (ISIS).