Your tongue ROUGH, your conscience STONE

The other day, on a television program, I caught Enver Aysever shouting "you will be tried" at Halime Kökçe, wagging his finger, in a slogan-like tone and with a militant ferocity. Although I had not watched what came before and so was not very familiar with the matter, I immediately felt the clear discomfort of witnessing a crude attack on a woman, given the imbalance of style between the one shouting and the one to whom those words were addressed.

After watching a little, I understood that the matter concerned the now-famous Kabataş incident. What was Halime Kökçe accused of? Of having reported the account of a woman who claimed to have been subjected to harassment, and who had a doctor's report for this harassment, without having been able to produce video footage, and of having stood by that woman with her news reports and her statements.

According to the wandering crowd, this was something that had to be put on trial. We are increasingly seeing that this has turned into yet another aggressive campaign. At the actual target of the campaign, of course, is Elif Çakır, who first reported that news.

But it is a campaign, and just like the crowds that spun out of control in the Gezi incident, it proceeds on. Bless whoever stops the one who first takes a name in his mouth. They start from Elif Çakır, and go on to Halime Kökçe, Nihal Bengisu, Balçiçek Pamir, and, occasionally, as a male writer, İsmet Berkan, displaying the wildest examples of a complete vandalism of discourse against everyone.

Looking at the language, the discourse and the savagery of this lynching directed especially at Elif Çakır through social media, you can bear witness from here that nothing said about the Kabataş incident could be impossible. Among those who are capable of this rudeness, this CRUDEness on social media, not a crumb of conscience that has not turned to STONE remains to keep them from doing such a thing.

These are people who are crude, who throw stones, who throw mud, who commit rape, and who, if they got the chance, would commit massacres. And they did. They sold a thousand lies for a penny. They force-fed this nation the cheapest propaganda at the highest price. Their mode of existence is lynching, lies, slander.

They bring the arbitration of everything that happened in the entire Gezi incident and rest it on Kabataş. As if, if no evidence can be put forward at Kabataş, nothing happened, and everything the Gezi Vandals did will be acquitted. There is no need for you to come as far as Kabataş. Gezi was not made up of Kabataş. How can you vouch for everything that the Vandals, whom you incited and unleashed onto the streets all over Turkey that day, did? Don't go anywhere; just look at what those Vandals wrote on the walls and cardboards in Taksim alone, the writings that you, saying "my dear, what lovely jokes these x, y, z generations make," as if it were something fine, thought you had found beads of pride in their feats, and you will find fifty KABATAŞes. All the headscarved women who went out into the streets in those days saw themselves under a great threat. Thousands of actual or verbal harassments and assaults took place in those days. There was no end to what we heard directly from those who told us.

Would those leftists, in the intoxication of seeing in Gezi the signals of a revolution awaited for a century, ever approach self-criticism? Hearing the revolutionary voices of the proletariat in a movement that was entirely backed and provoked by the lords of finance capitalism and marketed to the world in that way is, in itself, more than enough to be a source of shame for the Turkish left. And what are we to say of those who never stop talking about so-called women's rights joining, in the face of this incident, which means nothing other than that a woman who said she was harassed was listened to with the most humane reaction, in the insistent tempo of "where is the footage?"

Hadn't we agreed? Hadn't we settled that the statement of a woman who says she was harassed would be sufficient? That no evidence other than that would be asked for? Hadn't this been agreed upon as the most meaningful measure against the violence a woman is subjected to? How quickly you turn your principles from halva into an idol and eat them!

Come on, say "from now on, let all women who say they were harassed show the footage and bring evidence, with the lesson learned from the Kabataş incident." Go ahead and say it, and see for yourselves how you have disgraced yourselves before the world.

In the background of Gezi, among the actors that the leftist circles never wanted to accept, there were the lords of finance capitalism, but there was also the Pennsylvania group. They had nothing in hand but the agendas and arguments they whispered. They did the international PR, in the front line. The Pennsylvanians, who fed religion to their own members like an opiate, have been showing for some time how skilled they are at pulling the wool over the world's eyes with the same opiate.

Ah, comrade, who sees the possibility of revolution again at the end of the century like the light that appears at the end of the tunnel and rushes toward you! Come, and do the self-criticism and the analysis of Gezi in cold blood, truly in the light of Marxist principles. Who was the proletarian there, who was the owner of ideological capital, who was the power, who was the real voice of the poor and destitute. Evidently you have either never read Marx, or you have forgotten what you read.

Elif Çakır, Halime Kökçe, Nihal Bengisu and Balçiçek Pamir, who were subjected to lynching because of the Kabataş incident, all did what they had to do.

The discursive violence they are subjected to today makes it all the easier for us to believe what is said to have happened in the Kabataş incident.