Turkish defence versus Indian aggression

While those aligned with the US get protection, Turkey is slapped on with sanctions

American media, both broadcast and print, is heavy with punditry and news stories about the Turkish incursion into northeastern Syria. Words such as “invasion” and “aggression” are used for Turkey’s action in Syria. Similar or more atrocious American actions are never labeled that way. Instead, the United States (US) media in complete subservience to power talks of American aggression around the world as some sort of a mission to bring peace and prosperity to the world by helping the invaded country in a fatherly way.

Turkey and the Kurds have been fighting against each other for a long time. The Kurds are the fourth largest ethnic minority group in the Middle East. In the early 1980s, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) launched a violent separatist movement in Turkey, which the US and Turkey declared a terrorist organisation. In Syria, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units also known as the YPG share with the PKK the goal of an autonomous Kurdish state. These YPG fighters have joined other Syrian fighters, making up a joint force that the US-supported, calling them the Syrian Democratic Force (SDF). Remember those aligned with the US are always given a nice name as if they smiled before killing people.

What Turkey is doing could be categorised as a war of defence because as highlighted above, the links and shared goal between the PKK and the YPG represent a daunting threat against the state of Turkey. If reporting and commenting on real “aggression” and “invasion” is the aim then the US media can do so on Kashmir. But that hardly registers a blip on their radar. Forget Fox and MSNBC, even CNN does not tire of talking about Trump’s impeachment and his phone conversation with Ukraine’s President Zelensky. When it takes a break from that, it shifts its attention to the Turkish attack against the Kurds in Syria.

If The New York Times and The Washington Post ever talk about Kashmir, the story is placed such that it gets drowned in the relentless articles about impeachment and Turkey. The behaviour of these leading American newspapers is vividly reminiscent of its past behaviour highlighted in the book Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann. The Indian occupation of Kashmir is a much graver issue. The Kashmiris aren’t threatening the state of India. They aren’t involved in a separatist movement. They have been living under a brutal occupation. The Kurds in Northeastern Syria or Turkey have not lived in the world’s most densely militarized zone. The Kashmiris have no links to the foreign militia. All they want is an escape from the open-air prison that the Indians have converted the valley into. Sanctions were slapped on Turkey. Why not on India?

In the US, the reaction of elected officials, journalists, and so-called experts is laughable, if not borderline fraudulent. They critique Trump’s announcement of pulling US troops out of Syria and ending support to the Kurds as the reason behind Turkey’s bold assault. Would Trump’s move encourage ISIS? Would it harm American credibility? How about a third question; would the US allow some foreign nation to provide arms to anti-American Mexicans inside Mexico who would help Mexicans in the US separate Texas from the US? Would the US accept it if some foreign nation provided arms to Cuba to help Cubans in Florida separate the state from the US?

Perhaps if Turkey starts buying all its military equipment from the West instead of buying S-400s from Russia, it will become a lucrative market for the West, like India. And then any atrocity Turkey does will no longer be “fit to print” for The New York Times and keeping Turkish atrocities in the dark wouldn’t cause democracy to die, as The Washington Post likes to say.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 17^th, 2019.

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