{"id":90786,"date":"2016-07-29T09:36:19","date_gmt":"2016-07-29T08:36:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/content\/2016\/07\/29\/let-me-explain-it-to-you-foreign-press-by-gulse-birsel\/"},"modified":"2023-04-30T15:02:41","modified_gmt":"2023-04-30T12:02:41","slug":"let-me-explain-it-to-you-foreign-press-by-gulse-birsel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2016\/07\/29\/let-me-explain-it-to-you-foreign-press-by-gulse-birsel\/","title":{"rendered":"Let me explain it to you, foreign press by G\u00dcLSE B\u0130RSEL"},"content":{"rendered":"

G\u00dcLSE B\u0130RSEL<\/strong><\/p>\n

gbirsel<\/p>\n

Let me explain it to you, foreign press<\/h1>\n

For days I have been reading and reviewing the international press. Can any incident be so vastly misinterpreted? Can it ever be written and explained in such a jumbled way?<\/p>\n

I want to call all the newspapers one by one and say, \u201cHey, my name is G\u00fclse Birsel. I\u2019m a celebrity in Turkey and I\u2019m fluent in English. Put me through to you editor immediately, I have a few things to say.\u201d<\/p>\n

Guys, haven\u2019t you ever met a Turkish person? Don\u2019t you have a correspondent here? Go to any city in Turkey, close your eyes and randomly pick any citizen. Ask them what happened that night. Ask them what would have happened if there was a successful coup. Listen to their answer.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s fair to say that even if the most objective and bright Western journalist, equipped with all good intentions, tries to report the incident and asks any of us what exactly happened, it is a far from easily grasped situation.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s say a foreign correspondent approaches you and you try to explain the situation:<\/p>\n

\u201cListen, this coup was planned by a secretive religious sect. The declaration they read out on TV contained references to Atat\u00fcrk to try to lure out secularists. But nobody bought it. The secularists never bought it. As a matter of fact, the secularists have never bought what the G\u00fclenists were selling. They always had zero trust in them. It was the government that bought it. Government officials have already confessed that they were deceived. These guys were close friends with the government but they became enemies later on. They were not enemies when they once conspired together to jail so many patriots. The animosity started later…\u201d
\n\u201cLook, these guys, long before this coup attempt, jailed dozens of staunch democrats. They falsely claimed that these people were planning to stage a coup and in that way they filled their empty bureaucratic and military positions. They did all that after they fooled and deceived the government. Got it? Later, they themselves staged the dirtiest coup ever. If you ask why they weren\u2019t caught, this secret organization not only infiltrated the army but it had also planted itself everywhere in the state. For instance, the imam of the underwater commandoes was also a member of the Banking Regulation and Supervision Agency. Yes, the banking authority. Don\u2019t ask me why, it looks as if nothing makes sense, but actually it is all related.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, I\u2019m not paranoid, I\u2019m a normal person. Listen, they are such\u2026 No, in fact they don\u2019t resemble anything in world history. They laid low and communicated with nicknames. The sheikhs of the cult handed out to them dollar bills carrying the letter \u201cF\u201d as a secret sign. Hey, don\u2019t stare at me like I\u2019m stupid!<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, whatever, they went crazy and tried to stage a coup. But then people took to the streets in their T-shirts and slippers to resist. That\u2019s what we\u2019re like, you wouldn\u2019t be able to understand. Then they shot people with machine guns. The F-16 jets attacked cities and bombed the parliament. Yes indeed, that is what happened. I witnessed it. I saw it with my own eyes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen what happened? Well, now, we are united together as a country. Yes we were being bombed yesterday, but today we are full of hope for the future because that is what we\u2019re like as people.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat? You didn\u2019t get it? Well, let me try to explain once more.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what I\u2019d say to the foreign journalist trying to understand what happened. It may sound as fanciful as the script of \u201cThe Lord of the Rings,\u201d but every word is true.<\/p>\n

To be fair, it is not possible for anyone, let alone ourselves, to understand us. Especially nowadays\u2026<\/p>\n

Leave aside those foreign journalists with bad intentions; for those with good intentions a certain amount of time has to pass for them to understand what went on.<\/p>\n

Even we are only just disentangling it\u2026<\/p>\n

July\/28\/2016<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

G\u00dcLSE B\u0130RSEL gbirsel Let me explain it to you, foreign press For days I have been reading and reviewing the international press. Can any incident be so vastly misinterpreted? Can it ever be written and explained in such a jumbled way? I want to call all the newspapers one by one and say, \u201cHey, my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":634084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[9999,10000],"class_list":["post-90786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-coup","tag-gulse-birsel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/634084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}