How many "genocides" does the Syrian tragedy make?

In Syria, the violence that targets human life, honor and dignity has risen to the point where, after a while, it has become the subject of statistics, and the violence that each individual person endures, each of which contains enough crimes against humanity, has gradually become invisible within the magnitude of the numbers. So much so that it is as if the numbers themselves no longer matter.

Since March 2011, when protest movements against the regime began to be suppressed with blood in Syria, how many people have died, how many have been displaced? How long ago was it that this number passed 400 thousand? Now what has the number reached; does anyone in the world care?

Recently the opposition, as a result of the unity they have achieved among themselves, has begun to make very effective breakthroughs. As a result, they recently captured Idlib and many places under regime control. Now they are pressing on Aleppo. But meanwhile, the regime's air raids immediately begin on the places they have taken control of, and in these attacks bombs that are considered war crimes under international law of war are dropped. Barrel bombs cause terrible deaths and destruction wherever they fall, without distinguishing women, children or civilians.

Just yesterday, in Aleppo and Idlib, dozens of children lost their lives as a result of barrel bombs and chlorine bombs, whose use is forbidden even in wars, being dropped. As a result of this kind of bombing, dozens, hundreds of civilians lose their lives every day. The balance sheet of the war in Syria can now be expressed numerically as one million deaths and the uprooting of more than ten million people from their homes and homelands. How many Genocides of the kind said to have been committed against the Armenians does this make?

The US, which accepted chemical weapons as a red line on the Syrian issue, has not been able to see a line crossed even in the face of nearly a million deaths taking place before its eyes.

What the US cannot see, of course, the world cannot see either. As a result of the merciless operations of a regime that has declared war on its own people, there are nearly a million deaths and a deportation reaching 10 million, but there is nothing that can be called genocide, no one to be held responsible for it. Yet those who cannot see and identify the genocides unfolding before their eyes today can easily pass judgment as genocide on an event said to have taken place a hundred years ago, about which they can have much, much more difficult knowledge compared with today's.

In Bosnia, after the massacre of 250 million Muslims in the end, and in an operation that openly aimed at ethnic cleansing, after long trials the International Court saw genocide but said it could not find anyone who had committed this crime. That is, it was able to say that there is clearly a crime but no one to be accused. Yet the culprit was plainly there.

It is certain that there is another sensibility that makes them so blind to what is happening before their eyes and so wide-eyed about what happened in history. We had called that sensibility, in short, Islamophobia or the crusader sensibility, and every day we experience examples that make this sensibility even more visible.

The US and Europe, which discovered ISIS in Kobani as the most criminal organization in the world, hastily formed a coalition against it and put their signature to a show of preventing a human tragedy, but every day they continue to remain blind and deaf to the commission in Syria and Iraq of crimes against humanity much worse than Kobani. In contrast to ISIS's savagery being promoted to the world with a pornographic appetite, we hear not a single word about the massacres of the Shiite Militias, especially in Iraq, which make ISIS's look mild, and about their ethnic cleansing against Sunnis. As a result of these actions, a terrible demographic operation is being carried out in the region, let us say, or to put it more plainly, a full ethnic cleansing is being implemented. None of these crimes against humanity finds the slightest place in the Western press in any way that would attract attention. But for Kobani the same world jumped up and down, and yet the actual help to the Kurds in Kobani, in the end, was again given only by Turkey.

Yet when behaving consistently, all of them should be evaluated in the same category; why is there this hypocritical selectivity on genocides or crimes against humanity?

Starting from so many examples, we can say with ease today that the Western definition of genocide is limited to its application against crimes committed against themselves or against the elements they support.

They can easily put under human rights pressure a resistance directed against elements that carry their own values or interests and act in line with their own agendas, and, when needed, in order to deliver outside aid, they can easily produce any definition of crimes against humanity even out of these rightful resistances. But whatever is done to people they see as distant from their own values, it is understood that they do not care.

The terror activities, murders and crimes against humanity of the PYD or PKK women militants, who live together with men in the mountains without leaving any traditional, moral values, together with their men, are promoted as a struggle for freedom. Another violence that moves against them can be constructed in an instant as a reactionary resistance. Because in this state those women no longer represent anything belonging to the Muslim world, and with their entire being they are counted as belonging to the Western world of values.

The same goes for the Nusayris in Syria. No one said to Assad, who has killed nearly a million people in 4 years, "you are killing Sunnis," but as soon as the people who have lost a million of their own rise up a little and make progress, suddenly the danger and possibility of a massacre against the Alawites began to be spoken of.

From the beginning Turkey, regardless of who is killed or who kills in Syria or elsewhere, targets only massacres and crimes against humanity. Whoever they come from and whoever they are against. In contrast, this hypocritical selectivity displayed in the face of massacres also shows how racist or Islamophobic a motivation is inherent in the Westerners' sensibility about genocide.