Children walked by their mothers so as not to freeze at night

Istanbul suffered, in the past few days, a cruelty it had not experienced since Istanbul was Istanbul. The blessing pouring abundantly from the sky put the people through a nightmare of at least two days. May God protect us from worse. Yet in every evil there is some good, and in every hardship an invitation that leads us to think of others. How many people perceived this invitation, how many thought about what the torment this falling snow inflicted on them might have inflicted on others?

In the end, the snow that held us back from our way for only a few hours, or at most a day, falls as death on the children of our own brothers. God forbid, snow does not fall as death. God surely sends it down as a blessing, but human beings manage to produce murders, even massacres, out of it too. Condemning hundreds of thousands of people to live in conditions in which animals could not live is no different from murder and massacre.

Yesterday in Idlib 15 children lost their lives, freezing in their sleep. How many people hear this, how many can feel this event? Fathers keep watch so that their children will not freeze, or rather, so as to learn at once about those who have frozen. Yes, only to learn, because in any case there is nothing they can do; they can only watch their children freeze to death.

And mothers, instead of singing lullabies to put their children to sleep, make an extraordinary effort to keep them from sleeping at night so that they do not freeze. So that they do not fall asleep and freeze, they make them walk all night over the snow in the slippers on their bare feet. Even so, the deaths, especially the deaths of children, cannot be stopped. Because the conditions are so harsh, so hard. While we lie in our comfortable beds, our neighbors' children die of cold and hunger. Really, which nation, which ummah are we the children of?

Every child who dies is a fire in his mother's liver, a poisoned dagger in his father's heart, a lifetime that suddenly makes his siblings grow up, alone. From that moment on, whatever you place in the burning heart of the mother whose child froze to death, it burns through; the father and siblings acquire a boundless claim against the world.

Last year, again in Idlib, baby Erva froze to death under an olive tree and her story rose up to the highest heavens, but evidently it had not so much as grazed some hearts.

A child should have been the most common ground among us all. Even if we differed on everything, we should have been able to meet in the purest, most innocent face of a child. That face that opens the gate of Paradise cannot even force the rusty locks of some people's decrepit hearts.

At that time, over baby Erva, Kılıçdaroğlu was able to say that those who had taken refuge in Idlib were terrorists. And now we have our very heroic, very national, very patriotic politicians who diagnose a "strategic threat" to Türkiye's future in the clenched fists of these innocent children, for now clenched against the cold.

If a homeland has become unable to warm the veins of a child, has made enemies out of a child, has come to fear the growing up of an oppressed child, then its homeland and its nation and its heroism and its victory have bitterly made the owls laugh at it.

All these scenes must act like an ice-cold shower on people's hearts, to wake them. They must remind a person of his humanity. In fact, beyond that, they must strike us in the face like a slap with our responsibility in all this.

When will we understand that nothing we think we own in this world belongs to us, that everything is entrusted to us? Are not scenes in which everything is taken from everyone witnessed repeatedly every day? Is not every death a doomsday, the sudden depletion of the resources we claim today to the death and to the death of others, over which we bend, which we withhold from others? Does not every death give us sufficient notice of our own death?

When a Syrian child, breathing his last under the bombs that rained down upon him, said "I will complain to God about what is happening here," my heart still trembles whenever I remember it.

Could not this storm, this snow, this epidemic, these deaths be a temporary answer to the complaint that the child who froze to death under that olive tree delivered to God? What if this temporary answer is a harbinger of the real answer that will come on the Great Day, when the short straw will take its right from the long straw?

What we call homeland has been occupied by those who do not understand that it is a homeland only to the extent that it can be a refuge for a child left out in the open, for an oppressed person. If that is not so, what kind of lesson are we waiting for to understand that the homeland has been reduced to a soulless property, a piece of land that is no more than a source of rent?

The child who does not die in this cold and grows up will eventually come before us carrying in his heart the account of all humanity. Those who already carry the anxiety of this today, like the Pharaohs, may even conclude that all children should die before growing up. Because the fact that they will lay this account before them when they grow up has already sown fear in the hearts of the Pharaohs.

But whatever the fear, there is no use in the appointed hour; no precaution taken out of this fear will have any result other than preparing the end of the oppressors.

The path of the Musas cannot be blocked by killing children; on the contrary, the Musas come to demand their account precisely because the children were killed.