About Us

ATMG was formed in 1998 to satisfy the need in Australia for a source of information about Turkiye and its people. The Group started as a small core team of enthusiastic people who were prepared to devote their time for this purpose. ATMG operates without any financial support from any source at the moment but, like any other organisation, we would be able to promote the image of Turkiye better if material and moral support was available in some shape or form.

ATMG recognises the need to change ingrained prejudices in the minds of the public - especially in Western Countries - about Turkiye. It is amazing to witness the presence of ill conceived notions that control the attitude of Westerners towards Turkiye. We attribute this inclination to condemn anything Turkish to the fact that it was the Turks who stopped the Christian Crusades and later established Ottoman presence in Europe for 600 years. Europeans - therefore Christians - have never been able to come to terms with Islamic presence in Europe. This reaction displays itself in a most barbaric fashion in the attempts of Serbians to annihilate the Muslim peoples of Bosnia Herzegovina and Kosovo in recent years. To this end, Western scholars helped create a demonised image of Turk who is barbaric, stupid, filthy and underdeveloped.

Anyone who has been to Turkiye in recent decades would have seen that these are total fallacies - false images from last century.

To mention only one fact that Westerners find impossible to believe is secularism in Turkiye. While the so called democratic parliamentarians of the West take their oaths on Bible, Turkish parliamentarians take their oaths on their "honour and integrity". The Parliament is not opened by a prayer as is the case in Australia and other Western countries. This is despite the fact that 95% of the Turkish population is Muslim !. The Western people are still encouraged to foster a 19th century image of Ottoman Turkiye but a quick look at the indicators (link to Essential Information on Contemporary Turkiye at the end of History) reveals this is not the case at all. In fact, Turkish economy is the envy of most Western powerhouses that have been struggling to pull their countries out of doldrums for the best part of the last two decades.