Last week, I witnessed firsthand to the difficulty of talking about the Gulen movement and how easy it was to manipulate about this issue outside Turkey.
Zaman Vandaag’s debut edition caused many to oppose the newspaper and in general to the Hizmet Movement the paper was related to. Let’s start with the positive side: Zaman Vandaag started to publish as a weekly newspaper in Dutch language in bth Belgium and Netherlands. As the editor-in-chief Mete Ozturk formulized it, the newspaper is an indicator that the Turks who came to this part of the world as guest workers 50 years ago are now settled and integrated. Zaman Vandaag wants to promote Turks’ participation to Dutch and Belgian societies, and wants to fight against prejudices as well as social clichés. The publication aims at providing a perspective that is often missed by other media organizations, telling the unknown stories of the new and the old Europeans who live side by side in today’s multicultural societies, and focusing on positive developments that are facing the danger of going unnoticed. As I mentioned in the introduction of the first copy, I hope that Zaman Vandaag doesn’t refrain from writing about controversies and conflicts that are a natural part of culturally and religiously diverse societies. I sincerely hope that it can reach out to Holland and Belgium’s mixed reader group with its nuanced news and commentary.