The honour case

Last Friday I was at the international symposium titled "Coexistence of Religious and Cultural Differences: The Istanbul Experience," organized by the Faculty of Theology of Istanbul University, so I did not have the chance to look through that day's newspapers in order to write my column for the following day. (To tell the truth, even though I never neglect reading the newspapers, I do not generally feel the need to look at Hürriyet.) So I skipped a subject that, had I noticed it, I could never have thought of writing about anything else. I voice my busyness on Friday as an excuse for not writing about this subject in time.

The incident in question is the rape that Hürriyet launched, as a headline, against the harem of Osman Can, one of Turkey's young, courageous and far-sighted jurists. Under the headline "War below the belt in the judiciary," the newspaper brings up an incident that Osman Can's wife lived through as a student. As Ahmet Altan and Cengiz Çandar also stressed, it is an incident with no news value at all, but in the way Hürriyet presents it, it is very clear that it wants to hurt Osman Can, to discredit him, to take some kind of revenge on him.

The newspaper says it did this to report a state of war in the judiciary, but there is neither such a war report nor anyone using such an incident against Osman Can. The details of the incident are not even worth mentioning.

The party to the war, the one who tries to dig up and bring out the incident, is Hürriyet itself, but it does this with a hypocrisy so great that it cannot even say that it is a party to this war. It is obvious that it has a quarrel with Osman Can. Can is no ordinary man of law; he is among the pioneering names of a strong and modern democratic legal discourse whose spokesmanship he has recently carried out with superior success. This discourse disturbs the mentality that Hürriyet represents. But it will not approach expressing this disturbance honorably, with strong arguments, and debating like a decent man.

Though this is not the first rape of this kind by Hürriyet. It has done this kind of news many times before. It slandered honorable people and darkened people's lives, and afterwards did not show even the slightest remorse. Quite apart from any current debate, in my moral world the testimony of those with a record of slandering honorable people is invalid. That is why I do not feel the need to look at Hürriyet. With Enis Berberoğlu coming to the editor-in-chief's post after Ertuğrul Özkök, a hope had appeared that this style might change, but evidently nothing has changed from the Flagship.

To discredit the slanderer of honor, so as to leave no slander he casts without a price, is a moral duty. Of course this is not a principle to be applied only to Hürriyet. To discredit anyone who slanders honorable people, especially through honor, by invalidating his testimony on every other subject, is a human duty

Nothing is lost from either the reputation or the political cause of Osman Can, who is subjected to this attack, through this attack. On the contrary, it shows how right a path Can is on and how strong he is.

With this article I have not said anything new beyond the superb lesson of a reaction that Ahmet Altan gave, and Cengiz Çandar's article, which began by trying to explain that he, like me, had delayed his piece by a day. The purpose of this article is not to give new information on this matter anyway. There is, in the final analysis, nothing in the matter to be debated. The matter shows a level at which one is morally corrupted, and this level has a side that drags down also whoever remains silent against this corruption.

So take this article as the performance of a necessary duty in the name of not remaining silent in the face of a brazen crime committed against honor. I too am here; I too rebel against this crime.