The language used by international media outlets on Palestine should be reworked and revamped to better help the Palestinian cause, said experts at a conference on Palestine on Saturday.
The consensus came in a panel called “Developing the Global Media Discourse on Palestine” during the two-day Palestine Addressing the World Conference held in the Turkish city of Istanbul.
Professor Azzam al-Tamimi, a Palestinian writer and researcher, said: “The genuine truth should be highlighted while addressing the Palestinian cause by attributing the reasons for the conflict to its origins, which is the Zionist movement and its atrocities committed on Palestinian Land.”
He added that pro-Palestine discourse “should not highlight the importance of creating a mere Palestinian political entity or even a Palestinian state but the origin of the problem resulting in the ethnic Zionist regime.”
He said this rhetoric should be used to found “an international movement against the Zionist movement the same as the movement against the Apartheid regime originated in South Africa.”
For his part, Metin Mutanoglu, deputy director general of the Turkish Anadolu Agency, said that the Palestinian cause has a large presence in Turkish media outlets and newspapers.
“As Turkish people, we felt that the Israeli shells were hitting our homes when they were fired against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” he said.
He added: “Everything that happens in Palestine has immediate effects here in Turkey, since people see the Palestinian cause as their own.”