Terror begins with names: ISIS and Muslims, PKK-PYD and Kurds

Those who for years never gave peace a thought in the face of the thousands of truckloads of weapons delivered on Turkey's border and the effort to turn an organization with openly declared hostility to Turkey into an army suddenly turned into apostles of the peace-lovers when Turkey resorted to its most natural right of self-defense.

On the one hand they say peace, and on the other, on the same sites, in the same broadcast groups, you see slogans such as "Resistance to the death continues in Afrin" and "War against fascism" still being shouted.

Resist whom? Who is the fascist? Who is the imperialist? Who are you? A strange discourse, with the meaning of all words drained away, but whose foundation and intent are vile...

In essence, in the entire discourse of the PKK terrorist organization there is an interesting violence that renders everything meaningless, that completely severs the bond between name and thing named as if they could never come together, and that targets perceptions.

We have said before, for example: it says "peace" even while, weapon in hand, it raids villages and brutally massacres innocent people, and even while it goes on a suicide attack.

While stressing a racist difference among peoples and while treating "Turkishness" as an object of hatred among the Kurds, it repeats ad nauseam the phrase "brotherhood of peoples."

Even in a situation where all decisions are dictated from Kandil, where no one can elect his own deputy, mayor, or administrator, where everyone has to vote for a candidate imposed on him, the HDP uses the concept of "democracy" more than all the political parties.

During the solution process they made it impossible for peoples to live together. In many cities they left Arabs, Zazas, Turks, and Kurds not subject to them no option other than leaving the city or dying, and yet the party's name is "Peoples' Democratic Party."

They launched a process they called "self-rule." Everyone thought that they would contribute to a process that would add to the strengthening of local governments, which was on the government's agenda and was a positive process quite in line with world standards. Yet what they called self-rule was nothing other than paralyzing the cities with trenches dug by children they had armed, and making life a dungeon for the Kurds.

The HDP has no right to speak a word about people, brotherhood, democracy, or peace, yet it is the one that speaks most of them. An interesting shamelessness. As it speaks of these concepts with the weapon in its hand and with hatred and rage on its tongue, it demolishes all the conventions of a shared perception of reality.

Does the same process not also apply in the discourse of the PYD, the PKK's branch in Syria, and the other auxiliary elements? They say Syrian Democratic Forces, for example, but through which democratic processes is this name taken? In Syria a process that all sides oppose, a process of partition, is being run by these organizations, for example. At what stage and how much is democracy honored within this process? In Manbij, whose population is more than 90 percent Arab, what kind of democratic process was it that elements of the PYD, with a record of ethnic cleansing, which is a crime against humanity, took control there?

The violence applied to perceptions through naming is a terror that targets our sense of truth. Did the US learn this terror from the PKK, or, in this pair whose relations we see went back much earlier from the start, is the US side the owner of the tactic?

Is it not the same kind of terror that DAEŞ, which has nothing to do with Islam or with any phenomenon of the state, roams about under the name "Islamic State"? The terror applied to the perception of Islam by appropriating this name and through its acts undertaken under this name, which have not the remotest connection with Islam, is no different from the terror the PKK applies against concepts such as democracy, peace, and brotherhood.

Unfortunately, because of these namings, in many places nowadays nothing but DAEŞ comes to mind when "Islamic state" is said, or when "Islamism" is said. The word Islam and the word state have both been usurped by a murderous terrorist organization of unknown provenance.

Namings are of course among the important fields of political tactics. But the namings run by the PKK and all its other elements, as well as by DAEŞ, show that this field has turned into a field of immoral usurpation that recognizes no rules.

With this immorality that begins in the most basic field of namings, how possible can a claim to represent the Kurds be? The HDP congress held over the weekend of course did not refrain from characterizing the defensive war Turkey is waging against the imperialists in Afrin as if it were a war against the Kurds. Despite all the emphasis on the brotherhood of peoples, it could not tolerate seeing the Turkish flag.

The PKK, which set out taking the name "Kurdistan Workers' Party," has from the very beginning had nothing to do with either workers or Kurds. For the sake of words, to dilute reality. Together with the PYD-JPG elements they love so much and lean their backs on, they shamelessly and vilely carry on themselves the US flags, which came to this geography with entirely imperialist intentions and plans.

Whom are you talking about resisting? Which Kurdishness are you talking about? Is there still any heart or intention to resist left in you?

In the lap of your owners to whom you have surrendered everything, you are leagues away from the Muslim Kurd. The war of the PYD-PKK is, before everything and everyone, against the Kurds. No movement that assigns the Kurds the mission of serving the imperialists can be either a friend or a representative of the Kurds.