The view (reflection) of the Paris attacks in the Turkish media within the framework of the perception of Islam in the West

Islamophobia, built on Orientalist foundations, which is the new face of the conflict between the West and the Muslim world, due to the fact that Muslims in the West, who come from different faith geographies, are more visible in the public sphere, has become a tool of discrimination and hatred reaching physical violence and caused violations of rights that have not been encountered until today. At this point, Islamophobia has already exceeded the limit of being a pathological or criminal situation or an incidental situation accepted by a marginalized group. While Islamophobia has increased in the West, the orientalist perspective has started to lose ground by losing its value in Eastern societies and a strong stance has started to be displayed against this understanding. The detection of the point where this new tendency, called occidentalism has reached, will illuminate many dark points that may be encountered in the upcoming period and will enable the issue to become clearer considerably. For this purpose, in this thesis, the headlines / subheads of newspapers and columns were examined to determine whether there was an occidentalist attitude. In this study, which is a fundemental research, based on the interpretivist (idealist) social science paradigm, descriptive research pattern suitable for the purpose of the research was used and qualitative research method was preferred. The data was obtained through written document analysis and resolved by subjecting the relevant sections of 17 newspapers to content analysis in the ten-day period following the Paris attacks. As a result of the study, it was seen that orientalist dogmas denying the right of being a subject and self-realization of the East were not accepted by newspapers with different world views. On the contrary, it has been determined that an attitude has been developed in the Turkish press that strengthens the occidentalist tendencies that create a new Western image.It has been one of the important conclusions reached that these thoughts, which were conveyed to the readers through an occidentalist perspective by shelving the perception of the passive East imposed by the West, must go beyond a mere pumping of hostility to the West in order for the East to truly exist against the West.