Ibrahim and Akgun, Turkish elections bring Arab silence, Haaretz, 8/30/2007
August 30, 2007 8:44 am Nonviolent Islamist Movements, TurkeyTurkey is clearly an important example of moderate and democratic Islamism. As such, it needs to be studied carefully.
Turkish elections bring Arab silence - Haaretz
While Arab opposition parties, civil society and democracy activists cheered the news from Turkey, there was official silence from Arab governments, as if the elections had occurred on another planet. Unlike the front-page headlines in independent media, the state-controlled media in many Arab countries either ignored, delayed or relegated the Turkish elections’ story to internal pages or the tail end of their regular news.
By the third or fourth day, these media pundits went out of their way to tell their respective audiences how different the situation in Turkey was from that of Arab countries. Some played up the chronic Kurdish, Armenian and Cypriot problems as if to dampen any Arab joy for their northern neighbor.