Relationship Between Education, Media, and Terror

Introduction

In its most general definition, education, which is the process of making behavioral changes in people in the desired direction (Ertürk, 1982: 12), can be performed in different ways in every setting and community. When education is performed in a certain discipline with educational stakeholders such as schools, teachers, and students when it is the state and it can also be performed differently by illegal groups such as terrorist groups in different environments, with different tools, or materials. It is possible to mention terrorist groups in the first place among illegal groups. Unfortunately, there is no universally accepted common definition of terrorism (Şimşek, 2016: 319) which means “to discourage” in Turkish (TDK, 1982) and is a Latin expression. As a result, some groups, which are considered terrorists in one region or in a country, can be propagated via education in textbooks in another country.

For example, the Partiya Yektiya Demokrat-Yekineyen Parastina Gel (PYD-YPG) terrorist organization, which is one of the many extensions of the Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane (PKK) terrorist organization, which has caused great brutality and traumas in Turkey, and which has caused the great humanitarian tragedy in Northern Syria, like the PKK, is not recognized as a terrorist organization and even supported in western countries because it is fighting against another terrorist organization Iraq Sham Islamic State (ISIS). The latest example of this organization showing that it is supported by the West was its introduction in a supplementary textbook that was prepared for history lessons in the final year of high schools in France. There are two pages mentioning the terrorist organization YPG/PKK in the training material prepared as a supplementary book for the 2020-2021 academic year. The book, which has a section with the title “A nation without a state: Kurds”, includes chronological data on the history of the Peshmerga, and on the terrorist organization PKK, along with the symbols of the YPG and photographs of armed terrorists in uniforms mentioned in the news dated October 2019 under the title “The End of Syrian Kurdistan” released in the newspaper Le Monde. The news mentioned in the textbook also says that although “Operation Peace Spring” that was launched by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in October 2019 to ensure the security of the borders of Turkey and to prevent the creation of a terror corridor in the south is accepted as a counter-terrorism operation for Turkey, it can be presented as an attack on the Kurdish race using the publication of a media establishment (“Fransada lise yardımcı tarih kitabında terör örgütü”, 2020).

It is possible to mention the PKK in Turkey performing activities in educational institutions to recruit terrorists, and being interested in young people at high schools and universities to include in their organizations as another example of the education-terrorism relationship organizations. All of these show that terrorist groups use educational settings or train themselves to either recruit new terrorists or to convey their teachings. For example, when new terrorists are recruited to a terrorist group, the first step is to impose the ideas of the group in a way that will gain the sympathy of the other party, and the second is to have their publications read and to provide the necessary training (Kartal, 2019: 55). Aside from these, they also try to reach more people and gain more sympathizers via the means of media.

It is seen that terrorist groups make use of the influence of peer groups on each other in educational environments and use the media intensely as one of the most effective means for propaganda. As a matter of fact, digitalized and individualized media has become one of the most basic tools for terrorist organizations to acquire financial power as much as human resources. For example, a woman who joined the PKK tells the story of her joining the mountain organization after being influenced by the publications of the terrorist organization: