Israel is where the West shoots itself in the foot with all its claims

Israel's very existence as a state also has a meaning that, in fact, nullifies all the claims of today's so-called modern, democratic world. So to speak, Israel's existence is the place where the modern democratic world is struck down by its own claims. It is Europe's softest underbelly.

In every matter in which the US or Europe, which emerged in the modern age as the bearers of all the values of the modern world, explains its superiority to itself or to the rest of the world, Israel steps onto the stage as an actor who spoils the work. Israel is the testing ground of modern Western values, and generally the ground on which they fail.

The Western world, which explains or tries to impose secularism as a model of politics on the world, especially on the Islamic world, neither remembers nor reminds anyone of secularism when facing Israel, which takes all its references from its religious texts and justifies its politics, its wars, its occupations and its massacres with its religious texts. This is a case that most of the tons of sociological analyses about the secularization of the world also ignore.

Israel, which has begun to determine the international relations politics of the whole world today, is the chief cause of unrest, instability, spilled blood and masses uprooted from their homes in the region. Israel does all this merely as a religious community, Jews, settling on the lands it believes were promised to them in the Torah and realizing this promise of its holy book.

No one has anything to say about people's desire to live out their beliefs. Throughout history Muslims have even provided all the free and honorable conditions necessary for Jews and Christians to live their own beliefs freely. But the belief of those who govern Israel is not a belief that stays to itself; it is a belief that aims at the lives, property, homelands and peace of people who stay to themselves. The price of these Zionists living out their belief is paid with the lives, property, homelands and peace of other people. Such a belief is absolutely a dangerous and harmful belief, and it has nothing to do with Judaism. And there are also tons of Jews who say every day that it does not.

However, an extremely bigoted, dangerous and harmful interpretation of Judaism has today been made the official state religion of Israel. In fact, this could have been a place where the modern world's claim of secularism might perhaps have worked in favor of humanity. It could have been a regulation that would protect other people against an understanding of religion whose definition and nature is to harm other people, and it had set out with that claim; yet in the face of Israel it is of no use at all, it does not speak, it does not remind those who commit these acts of its own principle, it forgets. Secularism remains a principle remembered only against certain countries, especially against Turkey. When you dig into the matter a little more, you see that Europe and the US actually fail to apply the narrative of secularism even within themselves. It is very clear that an important part of US and EU politics stems from religious motivations, from Crusader and Zionist motivations.

It also becomes clear that the arguments the contemporary world has developed against racism, genocide and massacres have no meaning at all when Israel is in question. Israel displays the most repulsive, most barbaric form of the apartheid regime, yet the Western world does not diagnose, cannot diagnose, even its racism. It has no word to say against the occupation policies that Israel pursues step by step.

Israel has so far ignored no fewer than 30 resolutions of the UN Security Council, yet it has never occurred to anyone to apply even a sanction against this disregard. They perceived the barbaric attacks that racist, bigoted, fanatical Jewish groups carried out on the Muslims' mosque, merely for the sake of a show according to their own interpretation of religion, as an utterly routine act. At the end of the day, the most severe (!) reaction offered against the killing of more than 200 Palestinians, 60 of them children, as a result of Israeli warplanes' attacks on civilian areas, was "calling on the parties to show restraint."

To perceive the matter as if there were two symmetrical sides in terms of power and war capacity, and as if both sides could wage an equally effective war, is to be a partner to these war crimes.

Where does this motivation come from, which, when Israel is in question, drives the Western world to trample all the criteria it has itself set regarding war and crimes against humanity?

The motivation that drives the US and Europe to trample all the criteria they themselves put forward in the face of Israel kept them blind and deaf even to the most recent barbaric bombing by Israel of the building housing their own news organizations. The building, which housed news organizations of their own countries such as Reuters and Associated Press, was razed within a few minutes, in an attack reminiscent of the September 11 attacks, on the pretext that Hamas members were also operating inside it. This attack was the result of Israel's intolerance of the world media's reporting of the crimes it systematically commits and the routinized crimes against humanity. We did not hear a proper voice on this either from the champions of freedom of expression and of the press, who never cease to talk about pressure on journalists in Turkey.

Thus Israel is the place where all the values and all the claims that the West has painstakingly cultivated for two centuries are rendered void. This non-reaction to Israel strikes the West down by its own claims.

Moreover, for it to extend support to it in the name of the "right of defense" or with the shamelessness of "restraint to the parties" is an outright suicide in the name of all the West's claims.