God's instruments

The voyage that the Mavi Marmara began by setting out over the Mediterranean on the Gaza route was carrying ten thousand tons of aid supplies. According to the statement made by the Israeli Ambassador to Cüneyt Özdemir on the program 5N1K, this material amounts to only two thirds of what Israel already delivers to Gaza every week. By making this comparison he was trying to explain that this voyage was entirely unnecessary, an obstinacy whose aim was provocation. Özdemir's reply was frankly very apt: the problem is not that the aid sent falls short compared with what Israel permits. It was, of course, by what right these prison conditions are deemed fit for a whole city that has no channel of nourishment other than what Israel permits.

Israel's attacking a ship sailing in international waters and carrying out a massacre is a flagrant crime that cannot be explained. But it did not refrain from displaying the shamelessness to defend even this. "We warned in advance," says Israel, "do not come." Does the fulfillment of conditions announced in advance make a massacre excusable? Fine, then what if everyone who comes along commits whatever crime he wishes, provided he has announced it in advance, and asks us to excuse it? Can a crime thus become excusable and legitimate?

In fact, there is no situation that calls for weeping and wailing. These flailings of Israel will neither save it nor block the way of the new order of conscience, that is, the demand for justice, forming in the world. Perhaps if the Mavi Marmara had actually reached Gaza it would not have made such an impact, but Israel's shallow and rancorous mind, tripping over its own feet, drowned in the blood of the martyrs it shed on the Mavi Marmara. The Mavi Marmara, swimming in that blood, has already reached its destination with a thousand times the effect. Never mind that the aid that reached Gaza with the Mavi Marmara (or was prevented from being delivered) amounted to ten thousand tons; let whoever can calculate the measure of the aid that arrived with this blood step forward.

In the genocide museum in Israel there is a detailed exhibition of the Holocaust that took place under Nazi tyranny, of the concentration camps, and of the cruelty inflicted on the Jews in those camps during that time. At one point in this exhibition there are display panels in which the world leaders who did not respond to the calls for help of the innocent Jewish people who were suffering that cruelty at the time, and through those leaders the peoples of their countries as well, are accused. They say this: "While the Jews suffered this pain, the peoples of the world behaved with utter indifference and unconcern. Perhaps some of them approved of these cruelties inflicted on the Jews, but a significant portion remained indifferent in a state of helplessness, with the feeling that they could do nothing against this cruelty."

The genocide discourse, which openly does not hesitate to count even this indifference as nearly complicity in the Nazi curse, today attacks the ships that, not remaining indifferent to the cruelty of the concentration camp it itself has created in Gaza, rushed to help and whose cargo was compassion. Yesterday it condemns, asking why the world stood by; today it says "Do not come" to those who listened to that voice of conscience, and sheds the blood of those who attempt to come right at the start. And it finds this entirely normal. So it follows that if the people subjected to genocide under Nazi tyranny had not been Jewish, no feeling of compassion for them would have been felt. Indeed, does anyone feel the slightest pity in Israel's genocide discourse for the Gypsies, who suffered no less than themselves in the same period?

Let us for a moment not be bound by time. This act is no different from saying "do not come" to those who in World War II heard the cries of the Jews and rushed to their aid. By stopping the Mavi Marmara, Israel, by attacking a ship laden with compassion that carried people from 32 nations and many religions, has also taken the side of Nazi heartlessness, the side of those who persecuted its own kin, openly.

The words of İHH president Bülent Yıldırım, "God forbid, but if one day somewhere the Jews were to be left under the oppression of Muslims, that ship is equipped with compassion, mercy and conscience to rush to the aid of the Jews too," speak precisely from the standing of this conscience that transcends ages, races and places. Because it speaks from there, it reaches its destination quickly. It arrives with a load far greater than the cement, medical aid and food it carries. Courage goes to that destination, love goes, compassion, mercy and will go.

There comes a moment when the Mavi Marmara with all its passengers becomes, in Hakan Albayrak's exquisite description, "an instrument of God," and by a divine intervention in history overcomes the ill fate of the oppressed.

This, it seems, is precisely God's way of intervening in history. If those people who are thought weak do not regard themselves as victims of their fate, if they truly realize that God's earth is wide, if they do not get stuck in time and place and turn them into idols, God takes them by the hand and makes them leaders of the worlds.

And this is the moment of realizing with faith that it is absolutely not permissible to produce discourses of helplessness on the basis of the world's oppressed, and above all of its superpowers, of their magnificent might that instills the idea that they manage and order everything.

The Mavi Marmara passengers, it turns out, were indeed instruments chosen by God to show humanity that accepting such a "superpower" is associating partners with God; we have seen.