Where Israel struck

Nobody with even a modicum of self-respect can remain indifferent to Israel's attack on Gaza.

With its rabid and spoiled aggression Israel is striking not only Palestine; with every missile it launches it strikes Turkey, it strikes the Islamic world, it strikes humanity, it strikes all faith in human beings and human values. Where it strikes, it hurts, kills, wounds, makes bleed.

But the more it strikes, the more it also brings the Islamic world, indeed humanity, to its senses. Istanbul, Ankara, Rabat, Beirut, Cairo, in the desperation of Israel's attacks that cuts to the marrow, rise to their feet with their millions of people; they defy the rabid misuse of the technology that God, with an opportunity He has granted once more in the end times, has entrusted to the Children of Israel.

The fireballs launched by Israel are also falling on Ankara, Diyarbakır, Konya and on all the homes of Turkey, and they are raising the whole Turkish people to their feet. Turkey has rarely in its history been this tightly united, become one heart, one body. As Israel strikes Palestine, it shakes off the deadness that has settled over the Turkish people, the Islamic world, and the oppressed nations. From Rabat to Cairo, from Istanbul to Beirut, from London to Paris, it is establishing extremely busy bridges of heart and conscience.

Scenes glitter, like clear signs, in the eyes of minds and consciences not dulled by Israel's attacks. These scenes set in motion, make rebel, the humanity that still has a modicum of reason and conscience. But they do not so much as stir a hair on the "civilized nations" that give the world lessons in human rights, democracy, and freedom.

"An ambulance carrying patients has been hit, 5 doctors have died; a mosque has been bombed, 15 people at worship have died; a market has been bombed, 5 people have died and 40 been wounded; in other attacks hundreds of children, babies and women have died. Scenes of babies torn to pieces are being served to every part of the world from the television."

Even these incidents do not stir the conscience of some even slightly.

The EU's term presidency announced that this savagery of Israel is not aggressive but defensive, that they consider it within the framework of Israel's defending its own people. What French President Sarkozy has done in the meantime amounts to "condemning both Israel and Hamas".

US President George W. Bush, for his part, displayed an example of diabolical intelligence even in unconscionableness by holding Hamas responsible for the deaths of the 450 Gazans killed as a result of the attacks. "The response of a country trying to protect its people" can mean, within the civilization we live in, to some people, the savage massacre of babies in cradles, women, children, civilians, houses of worship, humanitarian aid workers.

Every bomb Israel drops hits the eyes, the ears, the conscience of this civilization. Its unseeing eyes grow thoroughly blind, its unhearing ears thoroughly deaf, its unstirring consciences thoroughly turn to stone. Every missile that kills a Palestinian child in its cradle also hits all the civilizational values Europe represents, exposing their true face, their hypocrisy.

Those European values which, when the occasion arises, stir all humanity's sense of pity over stray dogs shivering with cold; when the occasion arises approach the eastern man groaning under the "tyranny of customs" with displays of women's rights and displays of compassion. When the occasion arises, by opening the files of cases lived a century ago and having parliamentary resolutions passed on these cases, they set about selling "values of infallible justice and historical consciousness".

That its philosophical discourse on rights and freedoms, extremely refined, becomes extremely banal, blind and deaf when it comes to a Palestine matter, just as in the Bosnia and Iraq matters, must be a European tragedy.

Europe, which as punishment for its anti-Semitic sins against the Jews saddled this world with Israel, now shows an indifference to the oppression of that same Israel, which is no less than its own sins, and this rests on far more complex reasons than supposed. Each of these reasons, when scratched beneath the surface, reveals a face of Europe more repugnant than the other.

As Israel with its attacks departs from humanity, it first of all hits itself. It exhausts its capital stemming from being considered Europe's "oppressed and aggrieved child", and at the same time it takes off one by one the masks of this world that the modern world has built, hypocritically but with great care.

As these masks come off, the Islamic world, along with the oppressed and downtrodden people of the modern world, are confronting the reality that plainly shows they have no guardian but God.

Allah is sufficient for us, and He is the best Disposer of affairs.