Dirty legitimacy produced from the "war on ISIS"

The Middle East is a geography in which, especially since the Cold War years, dictators who keep their own peoples under control with tight intelligence regimes have survived through opportunistic relations with Western countries. One of the rewards of these opportunistic relations for the dictators here is generally to be exempted from an unbearable and insurmountable pressure on matters such as human rights, democracy and freedom of expression.

These dictators can easily point to the Islamist tendencies existing in their countries as an excuse for not developing democracy and human rights, and these excuses can easily be accepted by Western circles that they have appointed as referees over themselves. Their mere contact with the Islamists in the penalty area suffices for a penalty decision to be given against the Islamists, regardless of whether they are in the wrong.

No one feels any need to ask whether there is really an Islamist violence, or, even if there is, whether the Islamists are its victim or its cause. As long as these Islamophobic feelings and prejudices exist in the world, Muslims seem likely to continue always to serve as the usual suspects with which dictators justify and excuse their own massacres, human rights violations and problems with democracy.

The phenomenon of "Islamist terror" in the Middle East is of course no longer merely a discourse; it is a case. But it is just as indisputable a fact that this case has a functionality for the authoritarian regimes here in terms of their continued existence. This functionality also shows the existence of a cooperation that can no longer be easily covered up. The cross-border mobility that al-Qaeda reached after 9/11 with the actions it carried out in every part of the world at the same time was not a situation that could be understood and explained solely by the Islamists' own means, power or strategic intelligence, without an international mind and direction.

Every place where al-Qaeda carried out an action also made room for international interventions, and these spaces certainly brought no gain for Muslims or for the native peoples; on the contrary, they only made Muslims lose.

The rapid spread of DAESH, a candidate to replace al-Qaeda, which kept its functionality for a long time with actions that strained human imagination to the extreme, disregarding geographical borders, its radicalism, its use of violence, the pornography of violence, its repulsive and off-putting presentation of Islam, its style of passing the ball to various international actors, in short its performance that rapidly surpassed al-Qaeda in every field within a short time, does not escape attention. Everywhere it has appeared in Syria and Iraq as a kind of death, it performs the function of making one look back fondly at the criminal organizations there, of the malaria sort, and of opening a field of activity for them. Thus the "war on DAESH" can become a source of legitimacy.

It appears in the ranks of the opposition to the regime in Syria, but so far it has had no war with the regime itself; on the contrary, it conducts its entire war against the Free Syrian Army. In a way, this is the most shameless, most openly played form of the dirty relationship between terror and dictatorial regimes in the Middle East; at the same time it is the most surfaced form of the dirty relationship between these oppressive regimes and the so-called "Islamist terrorist organizations"...

However, maintaining this relationship, which has come to this level, at the same level of control and with the same success at the point reached is not so easy. After a while, these instruments can slip out of the control of the very centers that manage them and turn into a brand that other actors can also use. Those who create chaos cannot always get from this chaos the result they hoped for. Indeed, those who, in the great majority of cases, embark on this production of chaos with a calculation of social and political engineering and with the arrogance of a great "supreme mind" may encounter results they never expected, even results that completely contradict their own plans.

Meanwhile, the Sisi courts in Egypt, which overthrew the legitimate government with outright coup terror, sentenced Morsi and dozens of his friends to death right after the elections in Turkey, and the mufti's office approved this decision. Sisi too announced that these sentences would be carried out as soon as possible.

Before the eyes of the so-called modern, democratic world, which regards executions as an inhuman practice, step by step a country like Egypt is moving toward the execution of hundreds of people. Everyone is in a heedlessness, thinking that it will not be carried out anyway, but the end of this heedlessness does not bode well. Looking at what Sisi has done so far and at the dose of the world's reaction to it, anything can happen at any moment in Egypt.

Suddenly we may watch the execution of the only president elected by the vote of the people in Egypt's 7,000-year history, together with ministers and members of parliament who came to office by election. It is clear that the probable reaction of the world to such a development will bring no good to the Egyptian people. For if such a development occurs, it will have occurred precisely by taking courage from the world's inaction so far.

In recent days, Egyptian police who raided a house where members of the Brotherhood, engaged entirely in humanitarian aid for poor families, were present, extrajudicially executed 13 Brotherhood officials before everyone's eyes. The fact that this inhuman extrajudicial execution came right after a clash in Sinai with the terrorist organization DAESH, unrelated to the Brotherhood, gives clues as to what kind of role has been written for DAESH in Egypt's struggle against the Brotherhood and similar movements, the movement most distant from terror.

DAESH is being brought into play for a more effective struggle against the Brotherhood, which, despite all the oppression and persecution, has not taken up arms or resorted to violence. DAESH will attack, but the regime will, using it as an excuse, execute the Brotherhood instead of DAESH. And the world will play dumb and watch.