The government, meanwhile, has been locking down larger and larger portions of the internet: more than 1,000 websites have been banned, among them YouTube. Most of these bans have been initiated by the judiciary, not the executive, but the AKP has done nothing to change the laws the judiciary is enforcing.

So what's left? Chiefly such newspapers as Zaman and Yeni Safak — the AKP's unofficial mouthpiece — which are staunchly Islamist and connected to or controlled by the AKP or the Gülen media empire. Now, cronyism and government influence over the media is nothing new in Turkey; it would be completely misleading to suggest otherwise. What's new, and disturbing, is the agenda this media consolidation is now serving and the eagerness of foreign journalists to swallow it whole and promote it.

If Turkish citizens are taking to the streets to denounce Israel, who can blame them? Here's what they're reading in the Turkish press. Yasin Aktay of Yeni Safak, a popular figure on the talk-show circuit, writes: "Israel is contrary to logic, to human rights and to democracy." Ali Bulaç, a columnist for Zaman, describes Gaza as "a concentration camp that in reality surpasses the Nazis camps". In Ortadogu, Selcuk Duzgun warns: "We are surrounded. Wherever we look we see traitors. Wherever we turn we see impure, false converts. Whichever stone you turn over, there is a Jew under it. And we keep thinking to ourselves: Hitler did not do enough to these Jews." Abdurrahim Karakoç of Vakit adds: "It is impossible not to admire the foresight of Adolf Hitler...Hitler foresaw what would happen these days. He cleansed off these swindler Jews, who believe in racism for a religion and take pleasure in bathing the world in blood, because he knew that they would become a big a curse for the world...The second man with foresight is evidently Osama bin Laden...It was Hitler yesterday, and it is Osama bin Laden today." 

What is astonishing, then, is not that we see so much hostility towards Israelis among Turks, but that we see so little of it. Given the level of anti-Semitic propaganda to which they are exposed, this can only be attributed to their basic decency. 

The Turkish Penal Code clearly prohibits incitement on the basis of religion, but no one is ever prosecuted for writing this garbage, although the prime minister has, par contre, sued a cartoonist for depicting him as a cat caught in a ball of string — after all, that was really offensive. Turkey's religious affairs department has recently been given the right to request the banning of anti-Islamic and sacrilegious websites. They are duly banned.

The wonderment of this story is that, certain honourable exceptions aside, the Western media embraces the idea that the main threat to press freedom here comes from the military and from the antediluvian, anti-democratic secular elites, who in the received narrative long to return to what Michael Thumann, for example, in the Wilson Quarterly, published by the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, calls a "decaying old order". On the other hand, he continues: 
"Pious Muslims lead the way toward modernisation...The AKP is conservative, but contrary to critics' suspicions it is not a religious party...after eight years in power the AKP has not pursued any Islamist objectives, such as establishing laws based on religious sources."