Fairfax's editorial policy?

Independent of Context. Always.

On Saturday, News Limited served up a stellar editorialin its flagship publication, The Australian, where it alerted all those with eyes that can see and minds that can question, to Australian passport-holding Islamic warriors parading the severed heads of fellow Muslims butchered in Syria and Iraq.

Such are the spoils of Jihad.

The newspaper advocated that such villains need to be dealt with in the harshest manner possible. The paper added that it is shameful that so-called "leaders" of the Australian Muslim community are yet to condemn such barbarism.

The editorial continued:

this weekend 40,000 Iraqis from minority groups, including Christians, are cowering on a mountain in the north of their country besieged by the barbarous jihadists of the Islamic State.

The United Nations estimates another 200,000 people have fled the region" in the face of the jihadist caravan of slaughter. "But the focus for most of the world's attention – including Fairfax Media - for the past week has been not on their plight, or even that of the 170,000 people killed so far in Syria in what is one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes of the post-WWII era.

No Ma'am. The media's focus has been on Israel's allegedly "disproportionate" response to its citizens being bombarded with missiles from an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. For those who missed the news, the terror groupcalled HAMAS that rules the nascent Emirate of Gaza and fires missiles at Israeli civilians enjoys electorate-wide support for its heinous war crimes. Furthermore, it has more legitimacy representing its voters than does the Palestinian Authority's Fairfax-described " moderate President" Mahmoud Abbas. The fact is there is nothing "moderate" about a person who wrote a PhD thesis denying the Holocaust. It's worth mentioning – because Fairfax Media sure will not - that the so-called "President" is unelected.

While Fairfax stirs its readers to anger against the Jewish state in its one-sided reporting on the Gaza conflict, scant mention is made of the 1,600 people killed in Iraq in July alone, 1,800 people killed in Syria in the space of a few days, and 3,000 victims in attacks by Boko Haram jihadists in Nigeria.

The same day as News Corp's editorial hit the newsstands, Fairfax ratcheted up its misinformation campaign. It veered away, at lightning speed, from former columnist Mike Carlton's crude attacks on Israel and its supporters, and instead downplayed a dangerous development unfolding by the hour: the challenge to the security of the Middle East, to Christians in general and to Jews in particular.

Fairfaxoffered a profile of then Turkish Prime Minister but as of Monday, now President Recep Tayipp Erdogan.

Fairfax's scribe, Paul McGeough told a story of a leader who "visits brute force - police, political or profit-driven - on a people quietly going about their lives, and especially on those Turks who dare to insist on their rights".

McGeough is of course best known for nailing his colours to the Arab (or as some prefer to say, "Palestinian") mast when in May 2010 he hitched a ride on the so-called "Gaza Flotilla", an attempt to provide support to Gazans whose government, HAMAS, spends its foreign aid treasure on missiles and missile launchers rather than on education and infrastructure.

There is no doubt that the paranoia and anxiety, which Erdogan presents with his heavy-handed responses to peaceful demonstrators both of which were documented by McGeough, is an accurate picture. McGeough cites several examples of Erdogan's ruthlessness and callous disregard for protesters and for those citizens who don't share his Islamic vision of a Sunni state or his class.

McGeough is right on the money when he comments that "Erdogan is the current prime minister. But he is embarking on a Putinesque lunge for political longevity".

But it is what McGeough does not inform his readers about, which is a bigger story in today's Turkey. Erdogan's attitude to infidels. Christians and Jews that is.

Let's look first at Erdogan's anti-Christian policies. Why Fairfax chooses to ignore this is a mystery.

Spending time in Malaysia, I resorted on 6 August, to the (Muslim) Malaypress which reported that Erdogan faced accusations of anti-Christian comments merely a few days before he stands in presidential elections after saying in a television interview on the private NTV channel late the previous evening that it was "ugly to be called an Armenian".

EU politicians regularly remind Turkey that its refusal to confess to the orchestrated genocide of one and a half million Armenians some 99 years ago is not acceptable. While the Continentals may guffaw about whether a pathological Turkish denial of that genocide is or is not a hurdle to Turkey ever joining the Christian Club that is the European Union, the fact is to date, neither has Turkey admitted to genocide nor has Bruxelles found a seat at the EU table for Turkey. Turkey has resisted widespread calls for it to recognise the 1915-16 killings of Armenians as genocide as well as the slaughter of a further 750,000 Assyriansand up to 900,000 Greeksin the years to 1922.

Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks ethnically cleansed eastern Anatoliaof Christians, killing many and deporting the balance to the Syrian Desert and elsewhere in 1915-16. The Turks turned eastern Anatolia into one massive slaughterhouse.

Armenians mark the date 24 April 1915 as the start of what is widely regarded as genocide. That was the day the Ottoman government arrested about 50 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders. They were later executed.

In April, Erdogan offered 'condolences' for the mass deportation of Armenians in 1915. But denied Armenian claimsthat up to 1.5 million people were killed and that the event constituted an act of 'genocide'.

Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia and Uruguay are among more than 20 countries that have formally recognisedgenocide against the Armenians.

The European Parliament and the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities have also done so.

The UK, US and Australia are among those that use different terminology to describe the events. They all fall short of uttering the word "genocide".

In 2006, Turkey condemned a French parliamentary vote that would make it a crime to deny that Armenians had suffered genocide. The bill did not become law - but Turkey suspended military ties.

In March 2010, Turkey withdrew its ambassador to Washington after a US congressional committee narrowly approved a resolution branding the killings as "genocide". The House Foreign Affairs Committee endorsed it, despite the objections of President Barack Obama.

In June of this year the Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop, perhaps with an eye to the required cooperation of Turkey at the upcoming ANZAC centenary, reassured the Turkish Communityin Australia that Australia do not recognise the events of 1915 as 'genocide' and states and territories have no constitutional role in the formulation of Australian Foreign policy.

In a letter signed by herself, Julie Bishop responded to our CEO Mr Ertunc Ozen's concerns about the motions passed by then Premier O'Farrell in the NSW Parliament in 2013 and 2014. She made it clear that the Federal government alone makes foreign policy and not members of state parliaments.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, the Harvard educated lawyer is playing smart politics. She clearly and correctly doesn't want to do a thing to jeopardise the commemorations next year at ANZAC Cove, for which Turkish cooperation is a sine qua non.

Hopefully on her flight back to soils girt by sea she'll find her voice and put finishing touches to a "Recognition of the Armenian Genocide 1915-1916" Bill and present it to the House soon thereafter.

The other glaring omission by McGeough is Erdogan's well-documented anti-Semitism.

Erdogan's virulent anti Jewish diatribes and that of his acolytes puts him in the same cesspool of undiluted racism that Hungary's Prime Minister Victor Orban'sgovernment has waded into.

It speaks volumes that not Fairfax, but instead the Emirate of Qatar, the proud funder of the Muslim Brotherhood's HAMAS terror group and publisher of Al-Jazeera last week ran an article by David Lepeska not only revealing but indeed criticising Erdogan's Jew hatred.

Referring to Karakoy, the Istanbul neighbourhood where the reporter lives, which takes its name from the "Karay", Turkish-speaking Jews from Crimea who settled in Turkey en masse in the 19th century, Lepeska notes that "the Karay and other Jewish communities have mostly left, but some of their places of worship remain".

And that "Turkish Jews are on edge. Since Israel began its latest assault on the Gaza Strip, Turkish officials have launched a verbal offensive of their own.

At an Istanbul campaign rally this week, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who also happens to be the leading presidential candidate, declaredIsrael 'will drown in the blood they shed' "

Meanwhile the head of the government-backed Humanitarian Relief Foundation, Bulent Yildirim said, "Turkish Jews will pay dearly" for Israel's actions. He warned Jewish tourists: "Don't dare come to Turkey." Hours later, protesters descended on the Israeli Embassy in Ankara and the consulate in Istanbul, throwing stones, smashing windows and hoisting the Palestine flag on the home of the Israeli ambassador.

According to the Turkish daily HürriyetYildirim is credited with organising the Gaza Flotilla as well as coming under investigation for funding the Turkish branch of al-Qaeda. This past January, Turkish police arrested two employees of Yildirim's "charity" for alleged links to al-Qaeda.

While hardly a pro-Israel stance, Al-Jazeera does exhibit more balance and less unfairness than the folk at Fairfax. As its reporter concludes: "Condemning Israel's operations in Gaza is one thing. But crossing the line into racist insults for political benefit is an offense of a higher order. If Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) continues to win elections, as expected, this sensibility is sure to trickle down into society at large, inciting broader racism and hate crimes".

It has already begun. "If Allah allows, it will be again Muslims who will bring the end of those Jews, it is near, near," popular Turkish pop singer Yildiz Tilbe wrote on Twitter on July 10. Samil Tayyar, a prominent AKP parliamentarian, the party of Erdogan, recently tweeted similar sentiments.

"Hope your race disappears under many more new Hitlers," he saidin a reference to Jews. On July 19, the pro-government newspaper Yeni Akit ran a crossword puzzle in which the final answer, displayed under a photo of Hitler, could be translated as "We long for you."

While Erdogan's wickedness towards non Muslims is widely applauded, reported and commented upon even in Islamic media outlets like Qatar's Al-Jazeera, his bigotry is apparently too inconsequential and hence unworthy of reporting by Fairfax.

From Fairfax's standpoint, it seems, who the hell cares? After all, Erdogan is only fanning the flames of anti-Semitism and trivialising the systematic slaughter of millions of Christians.