The Internet might seem a gateway to a virtual world that defies gravity, where avatars tweet messages in a bottle to a network that exists outside time and space. Yet rather than boldly go where none have gone before, I am happier going back to where I have been before. Nothing gives me greater pleasure than turning my computer, die-cast from the most sophisticated alloy, into a Bakelite radio fashioned out of valves. I punch the controls, tune into what was once called the Home Serve of BBC radio and fall asleep on my pillow in İstanbul listening to the news from London.Not surprisingly I suffer from the ex-patriot disease of split loyalties. It is not, I hasten to add, a chronic condition, but sometimes I ask myself where my loyalties lie. Do I care more that a postal strike looms in Britain, which means that parents may not get their applications in on time for their children’s primary school, or that the Taraf newspaper probably got the story wrong in reporting that Muhsin Yazıcıoğlu, a politician on the extreme right, might have died in a helicopter accident because a news station kept phoning his mobile phone? I have something I call “Private Eye Syndrome,” named after the British satirical magazine. When I spend time in London I become addicted to its schoolboy humor, but the longer I stay away the less funny it seems until I reach a point when I don’t even understand the jokes. That is sort of the point I am -- or at least where I was until the end of last week.
It was impossible not to be addicted to the progress of a news story coming out England that was centered on the way news itself is reported. There is a long-standing program on BBC television called “Question Time” in which a studio audience grills a panel largely made up of politicians. It is far from being addictive -- and as I have already confessed I prefer the radio myself. However, this week one of the guests was a member of the British Nationalist Party (BNP) -- an extreme right wing group which capitalizes on anti-immigrant sentiment. Its leader, Nick Griffin, is on record for having denied the Nazi Holocaust and hobnobbed in America with the head of the Ku Klux Klan. It is anti-Islam and anti-gay. Even so, the BBC felt obliged to invite him after his party won two seats last June in European parliamentary elections (on a turnout of only 35 percent).
It was a classic case of whether there is an obligation to defend the rights of people to utter loathsome views and whether democracies are robust enough to withstand appeals to individuals’ baser side. The conclusion of Friday morning’s British press was that Griffin gave a weak performance and was exposed for what he was. “It was a major event, right up there with Nixon-Frost,” said Kelvin Mackenzie, a former editor of the Sun newspaper, who also described his stomach “turning over” as he watched. The pundits thought the BNP might get a brief fillip in the polls just because that’s the way television works but that the interview would ultimately be his undoing. The Independent described Griffin as choking on the oxygen of publicity. The headline in the right wing Daily Express was “A disgrace to humanity.”
I have to confess the İstanbul side of my personality kept wondering why all the fuss. Many of Griffin’s views -- defending the rights of the aboriginal (white) British -- have crept into the Turkish mainstream. A much publicized recent public opinion poll in Turkey showed a huge amount of prejudice among ordinary people, a majority of whom wouldn’t like to see a non-Muslim as a top soldier or a judge. More than 40 percent wouldn’t dream of living next to a fellow citizen who happened to be a Jew. If the government is fighting public opinion to bring some sort of normality to relations with Armenia and bring peace to its own Kurdish Southeast, it is because it failed, as previous administrations failed, to acknowledge that a great component of what has been cultivated as nationalism is racism by another name.
Benzer Haberler 
