The excuse of racism is greater than its offence

At a gathering I attended some time ago, right at the beginning of my talk, which I had opened with "Racism is a disease," one of the participants immediately objected and interrupted me. As for the grounds of his objection, I actually agreed with it entirely: by calling it a disease, there is a possibility of making racism innocent. Yet racism is, above all, an evil that some people choose knowingly and willingly. Yes, sheer evil, but at the same time a crime. A crime against humanity, and, according to the generally accepted laws and norms of today's world, a crime if it does not remain an idea or opinion, that is, if it turns into a ground for discrimination against others. Racism is evil and a crime, and racists are evil and guilty, plain and simple.

RACISM IS FIRST OF ALL A LACK OF SELF-KNOWLEDGE

However, racists, for their part, do not shy away from brazenly finding ways of not taking upon themselves at all the label or accusation of racism, which is accepted as evil by generally accepted norms. One way is to blur the definition of racism and to resort to demagoguery that what they do has nothing to do with racism. Even the most outright, unadulterated racists claim that what they do is not racism. Why? Is racism something whose definition is that vague?

Another way is for the racist attitude to be shared with the greatest possible number of people. When many people support these attitudes, does racism cease to be racism? Of course not; it only becomes far more dangerous, turning into a fascistic aggressiveness, into a harmful incitement that corrupts society. Unfortunately, the most appetizing option before cheap and facile politics is always racist populism. As for the cause of all the economic or other troubles experienced, the easiest targets to point to at first glance are foreigners or refugees.

Meanwhile, making a statement that blames or demeans a certain people wholesale is racism. Racism is not only about exalting one's own race, nor is it limited to that. Indeed, so long as it stays at the stage of exalting one's own race there is no harm in it either, but if this exaltation turns into hate speech wholesale against other peoples, there is no escaping racism.

WHO STABBED "US" IN THE BACK?

The sentence "The Arabs stabbed us in the back" is a racist expression from whatever angle you look at it. That those who sided with the British against the Ottomans in the First World War were engaged in treason is obvious. Admittedly, when one goes into the details of the events, the policies that fall within the scope of the heavy provocation applied by the Unionist Cemal Pasha on the lands of Damascus cannot be ignored in another part of this treason. Still, set against an Arab elite that cooperated with the British against the Ottomans and most of whom had learned politics in the Committee of Union and Progress in Istanbul, to say this of all Arabs is a great betrayal of the moral personality of hundreds of thousands of our Arab brothers who, as a part of this nation, regarding this land as their homeland, defended this homeland body and soul together with their Turkish, Kurdish, Circassian, Laz and Indian brothers at Çanakkale, Kut al-Amara, Tripolitania, the Hejaz and many other fronts, and fell as martyrs.

Yet those who today use this sentence recklessly in order to demean all Arabs easily, setting aside this disrespect and betrayal, can still say that what they do is not racism.

Their condition is a bit like that of Molière's The Bourgeois Gentleman, I would say, though minus the innocence peculiar to his naivety, of course. You know, the astonishment he experienced when he learned the meaning of the concept of prose, and that the ordinary speech he had been speaking all along was prose. These racists, whether out of ignorance or brazenness, refuse even to see the fact that what they do is plain racism. In fact, against all the charges laid on them, the most brazen way of escaping the law is to deny what one has done.

ANYTHING CAN BE EXPECTED FROM THIS MINDSET

The Mayor of Bolu, distinguished by his hostile attitude toward foreigners, has evidently devoted all his creative intelligence and talent to this path. He goes to bed and gets up asking what he can do today to disturb foreigners. Most recently it occurred to him to charge foreigners water fees at the dollar exchange rate and to set marriage fees at 100 thousand TL, and as soon as it occurred to him he tried to put it into practice, and with the votes of the CHP and the İYİ Party in the municipal council he passed this practice that harms reason, conscience, sound judgment and humanity.

He has also defended what he did; he has no problem with it anyway. The Mayor of Bolu is also famous for standing behind the many strange practices he has carried out. But the words he uttered while denying the fact that what he did is racism are far from the bluntness he tries to attribute to that stance. He tried to cram what he did into the scope of protecting the interests of the Turkish nation and said:

"We are not practicing racism. We are definitely not fascists. I am a person who has pledged to protect the interests of the Turkish nation. I am an elected person. Have our foreign refugee brothers been disturbed by this? If they have, water is cheaper in Damascus. Welcome to it. Marriage fees are also cheap in Damascus. The Damascus Municipality does not even perform marriages. There the hodjas perform them. The hodja takes whatever you stuff into his pocket. So they do not necessarily have to marry in Bolu. I said I do not want two refugees to come to Bolu and settle in Bolu. If our refugee friends do not like Bolu, welcome to go; if they receive services more cheaply in their own countries, let them go and get them."

Put all the debates held so far about refugees on one side and these words on the other. To tell the truth, I was horrified that this outlook, moreover, sits in the office of a provincial mayor in Turkey. From a person who dares to use an office in this way and can defend it with these words, every kind of evil is to be expected.

There can be no book, no principle or value that could bind or restrain someone who can think up and put into practice this evil against a defenseless refugee who has taken shelter in the country, and who, while doing so, can also make this irony so brazenly. May God protect humanity from this mindset.