See your craft in Leyla Muhammed's face! Can you be proud?

An elderly woman sitting on a bench to rest because she is tired from standing and walking. A face so familiar that all of us can find in it a trace of our mother, our grandmother, our paternal grandmother.

She has evidently seen and been through a great deal, the hardship of the world etched into every cell of her face.

That timid look, despite the state of our mother, our grandmother, the most innocent, the most deserving, the most venerable, the one whose hand most deserves to be kissed, who most deserves to be carried on our backs, that look spilling over into our world, those tears stuck in her dry eyes frozen with fear, wound more than a thousand enemy rockets launched into the heart of this country.

The base mentality that brought that innocent woman to this state, and that through that woman made us spectators of it, has long been pulling us down. How much further will it make us fall, how much further will it lower us, how much further will it sink us?

Ideologies, whatever their claims and contents, if when they pass into practice they cannot file down their sharpest edges and set them aside in the face of an old woman or man, a child, a disabled person, a sick person, will sooner or later turn back and pierce themselves.

But racism is a level of humanity worse even than the worst ideology. It is a level of the lowest of the low (esfel-i safilin). A level of exit from humanity, but an exit without even passing through any kind of animality.

Those who try to palm off such a level on the children of this noble people as nationalism, as ulusalcılık, who try to poison the innocent children of this nation with this disgusting ideology, should read their own grades in the eyes looking out from the middle of Leyla Muhammed's face, burned by the sun and by age.

If they can find something in what they see there to be proud of on behalf of their own nation, let them flounder about with that pride as they please, but let them keep away from the nation they claim.

Unfortunately, as racism and hostility to refugees turn into a political material, they also produce, feed and incite their own mass. There is no foreseeable limit to what these incitements may lead to. Especially in a country like Türkiye that hosts a large number of refugees, not to mention that doing politics over hostility to refugees will deepen the refugee problem far more rather than solve it, there is no preventing the disgraces and crimes against humanity that this hostility will cause from opening unhealable wounds.

We have begun to experience frequently examples of the masses incited by an uncontrolled hostility to refugees being made to adopt a blind aggression as a horizon of heroism against innocent refugees, their children, their elderly women and people who have no defense.

An ideology or politics that presents an Afghan grocer, or Arabic writing on a restaurant's menu or on a tradesman's sign, as a threat to national security can thus have all kinds of villainy carried out by its mass, which it inevitably makes stupid and numb. There the nation's young children, with the ideological grudge they have taken on, can be made into people who direct their energy to kicking in the face of an elderly woman whom they should regard as equal to their mothers.

Of course, like all ideologies, racism and hostility to refugees work by distorting facts, by dragging the masses into an action, by turning them into mankurts. The idea that refugees are the cause of all the troubles we are experiencing is turned into an obsession. Neither mind nor personality is left to discuss. Because there is nothing left to talk about with people who have turned into a machine of action and reaction that works through obsessions.

Indeed, the apparent reason for the attack on Leyla Muhammed, who was mercilessly assaulted by a person named Şakir Çakır while sitting in a park in Gaziantep, was the lie put into circulation that "they are kidnapping children disguised as women in çarşaf." Whether there is such an incident, whether it happened, whose child was kidnapped, who kidnapped, nothing is clear. But this legend for some time has been enough of a signal to trigger some youths who have been incited to action. Let a Syrian and a woman in çarşaf come together, and that is enough to set in motion that attack apparatus ready to explode.

Unfortunately, this provocative racism and hostility has now become our greatest problem. There is a situation far beyond someone's merely expressing an opposition to refugees that has a counterpart among the people. Racist politicians can try in this way to produce an excuse for themselves. Yet this politics itself provokes, forms and beguiles that mass.

The heroism of this mind-beguiling dangerous ideology and its benefit to this country and nation are only as great as what is reflected in Leyla Muhammed's innocent face.

If there is something in that face that they can be proud of, let them at least keep away from the glorious history of our ancestors, from examples of heroism and nobility, because our ancestors are free of these.

Note: As a result of the work of the Gaziantep Governorship and Police Directorate, the human wreck named Şakir Çakır has been taken into custody. Governor Mr. Davut Gül personally visited Leyla Muhammed, who was subjected to the disgusting attack, at her home and said that such criminal types would not be given opportunity. We thank them on behalf of our people, who have distinguished themselves, and must distinguish themselves, with their nobility, compassion and mercy.