Ahmet Hakan the Külyutmaz's displays of valour

He is Külyutmaz (the "Ash-Swallower").

The referee of democracy, the supervisor of etiquette, the guardian of the bourgeois lifestyle, the philosopher of ethics, the judge of law, the critic of art, the gourmet of cuisine, and the scientist of politics as well. He leaves no field empty; he does not let any flaw, any neglect, any violation in any field pass, he catches it at once, and if need be he prints the penalty from his column and lays down the law.

He is Külyutmaz.

In the performance of not swallowing ashes, he is a new-generation Uğur Dündar. Not a notch ahead or behind. Just new generation: bohemian, bearded, arrogant…

You know the Külyutmaz teacher in Hababam Sınıfı (The Chaos Class): while he thinks he lets no one raise their eyes, the cheat sheet that his brilliant students stuck on his back means he swallows all the ash without noticing.

That is our Ahmet Hakan, more or less. One would think he had foreseen all of FETÖ's tricks beforehand, knew them, explained them, and nobody understood. One would think not a single trick of that satanic, insidious organization escaped his eye, that it never deceived him, that it never managed to get anything over on him.

While telling us these things with great bravery, and even while merely repeating the CHP chairman's group speeches, he once again does not shrink from confessing not only that he never stepped outside FETÖ's game, but that he knowingly cooperated with them.

He has taken a narrow-angled rote script he repeats, bothered to split it into four, and is supplying answers from four angles. From the sum of those four angles not even a vantage point that would let one see comes out. He is not even aware that with everything he says he is swelling his own criminal file.

Yet I have only one question, Ahmet:

If in this column of yours too you are telling us that you have long known that FETÖ is a terrorist organization, then what happened after 17-25 December that made you suddenly conclude that they were not a terrorist organization?

You accuse us of being naive for not having known all along what they were; evidently you knew very well what they were, and have never swallowed ashes. You explain all this throughout your column. Fine, but why did you suddenly form an "alliance" on 17 December with this organization, which you know so closely to be a criminal organization and about whose tricks and swindles you tell us in such a know-it-all manner?

One of this organization's swindles was the Gezi incident, as you know perfectly well. How did the organization, whose every swindle you are so familiar with, make you swallow the ashes of Gezi? What happened that it turned you into an adolescent militant in search of revolution in Gezi Park? Because you were so naive? Or because you were in an open "alliance" with them? For how much money, for how many bundles of benefit did they make you swallow those ashes?

Another of their swindles was the alliances they spearheaded in the most recent elections. In all those elections, while you were in front of the whole world embellishing Selahattin Demirtaş, whose baggage held Yasin Börü and the blood spilled in Kobani, were you setting up the game yourself, were you taking part of your own will? Were you swallowing the ashes of a fire lit somewhere?

I repeat: you have no word to say, you have an account to give. Come on, start somewhere

.

Aha, you say you confronted yourself with a column you wrote in September.

That is a fine trick, I must say

. Make all your dirty alliances, join all the dark games, then when it comes to nothing, blow up a self-criticism column and wash your hands and face of all the dirt?

You make everyone else swallow the ashes you yourself swallowed. What a fine country! Do you think this account can be closed with cheap tactics like these?

Do you think that by bellowing from your column you can throw your own criminal file onto our backs?

On this occasion, a few small but important lessons for Ahmet Hakan:

1-

When angry you have loosened up and built sentences longer than five words. There, I was going to say, but your level of nonsense has not decreased, it has increased. Man, remember a piece of information correctly too, give it correctly to your reader. For instance, I am not a professor of political science, I am a professor of sociology.

2-

You call our past relationship with FETÖ an "alliance." We call it only "infiltration." When they fell into the error of seeing themselves, in this period as in earlier governments, as partners or even owners of the government, things happened. An alliance is what you did at Gezi and in the processes after 17-25 December.

3- No one other than the AK Parti and, of course, the President could have dealt with a structure that had been active for 50 years and had insidiously infiltrated every level of the state. The starting point of those types who you say warned us so much was a struggle targeting all religious people. With their mindset and approach, nothing could have been done, let alone fighting FETÖ, other than making it grow even stronger and, moreover, legitimizing it in the eyes of all pious people. I say this explicitly with my sociology credentials, which you do not remember.

4-

If you are going to quote someone, and in quotation marks at that, you must convey what he said word for word; you cannot construct your own understanding of it and present it as his words. Most of the sentences you attribute to me in your column are distortions of this kind. For instance, at no time in my life have I regarded or described Fetullah as an angel, or even as someone who should be followed. On the contrary, even in the single time I visited him together with a number of journalists and writers, the only feeling I had about him was curiosity. The columns I wrote in that period are also there.

5- You have resorted to Can Dündar's cheap tactic too. You put my picture with Fetullah and tried a cheap perception game. Evidently you did not take what I said to him personally, so let me say the same to you. I have many pictures with you too, Ahmet Hakan. This neither clears you nor stains me. Likewise, at Abant I played more oud than I did in your circle; I played and sang. Deduct that from the account as well.

6-

Lastly, congratulations to you. You managed to make me address you. However much I resisted not falling into such a situation, it was in vain. What can one say, may God forgive me.