An editor at the Islamist magazine Sancaktar, Eyüp Gökhan Özekin, shared an image of Uslu wearing an orange prisoner suit while he appeared to be waiting to be beheaded by Chairman of the Humanitarian Aid Foundation (İHH) Bülent Yıldırım
Two Turkish journalists critical of the government have been targeted by pro-government journalists through the sharing of altered images on the Internet showing the journalists as the victims of the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
Taraf and Today’s Zaman columnist Emre Uslu and Editor-in-Chief of Today’s Zaman Bülent Keneş have been the subjects of photoshopped images on the Internet that could be considered a hate crime, since ISIL’s atrocities are used as a tool to criticize these two journalists who are skeptical of the government.
An editor at the Islamist magazine Sancaktar, Eyüp Gökhan Özekin, shared an image of Uslu wearing an orange prisoner suit while he appeared to be waiting to be beheaded by Chairman of the Humanitarian Aid Foundation (İHH) Bülent Yıldırım. Uslu has become a target after he questioned the alleged ties between ISIL and the İHH, which is the organization that organized the Mavi Marmara flotilla campaign to Gaza which resulted in the killing of eight Turkish citizens by Israeli forces in international waters. In the image Uslu is portrayed as a prisoner of ISIL, while Yıldırım is depicted as an ISIL militant. The Sancaktar editor criticized Uslu for calling the İHH an ISIL supporter.
The same image was also shared by Adem Özköse, an Islamist journalist who works for the state channel TRT.
Sancaktar, which takes an Islamist editorial line, was recently in the news after the education minister visited the magazine at the beginning of the school year in September.
Keneş was also a target of the pro-government Twitter users after a columnist, Turgay Güler, from the staunchly pro-government daily Akşam, wrote that he wished it was Keneş who was taken hostage by ISIL due to Keneş’s criticism of the government’s handling of the recent hostage crisis in Iraq. After the release of the 46 Turkish hostages, Keneş criticized the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government for its negligence in the first place that led to a 102-day-long imprisonment for the hostages.
Similar to Uslu, Keneş was portrayed in a photoshopped image as an ISIL victim waiting to be beheaded by a militant wearing black.
In the face of growing concern for sympathy towards ISIL among Turks, these images being circulated in social media led to fears of approval by the Turkish public of the atrocities by the extremist ISIL. A recent poll indicated that almost 10 percent of the population in Turkey does not consider ISIL a terrorist organization.