If deaths have become a matter of account

Let us keep railing at the "disproportionate" reaction of the world to what has happened in Syria and Egypt. Every day we witness with amazement that the real great disproportion is emerging inside Turkey.

In fact, I am not among those who believe that a person's course between the "noblest of creatures" and the "lowest of the low" recognizes land, race or sex. Islam's philosophy of the human being states repeatedly that goodness is never the property of a people, a country or a nation. Likewise, it holds that no people can be absolutely evil either, and that by human will and the leaven of goodness in his fıtrat, a person can repent from his worst state and become one of the good. It is hoped that this will direct one toward an interest concentrated on a mode of existence against geographic or ethnic essentialism. That is why a Muslim is not, cannot be, right or correct merely because he is ethnically Muslim, or because he is of the East, an Arab or a Turk or a Sunni, or because he holds a belonging based on these traits.

What is truly striking is that those who accuse Turkey of sectarianism over its stance in the Syrian affair have never been willing to undergo a moral reckoning with a dictator who made war and carried out massacres against women and children, against his own people, recognizing no moral rule. Turkey's stance toward Assad was never based on a sectarian sensibility. This is so clear that it makes even trying to prove it unnecessary. But it is again understood that the value priorities of those segments who, from the very beginning, have tried to let no dust touch Assad whatever he does are entirely sectarian.

We can never find it strange to attach importance to a sect as an identity or a bond of belonging. But to see how far the limits of tolerating, even regarding as legitimate, the errors, crimes and immoralities of one's own sect's members can stretch is frankly frightening.

The moment I first heard of the use of chemical weapons, we should doubt the humanity of those who did not show the reflex of "damn whoever did it." Those images of innocent, guiltless children dying while writhing are images that compel the complete revision of all political calculations from scratch. Yet for some people even those images are still treated as "if ours did it, one must ask why it was done."

Those people can still regard Assad's massacres, which have reached the death of 130 thousand people, as part of defending his homeland. And those people can still suspect that in Turkey's stance toward Assad there is a calculation that also includes sectarian preferences. And what they do does not count as sectarianism, but it is Erdoğan, it is Turkey, who is sectarian, because this time the sensitivity Turkey shows for people unjustly slaughtered, whoever they may be, happens to strike someone of their own sect.

In fact, the stance Turkey displayed toward what happened in Egypt clearly showed how unbecoming the sectarian sensibility attributed to Turkey is. Turkey showed that it is in a diametrically opposite approach and sensibility to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, the supposedly strongest components of the Sunni axis.

It showed, but to whom did it show?

Those who should really learn a lesson from this are not affected in the slightest in their sealed hearts. At Adawiya, as a result of the putschists targeting and strafing with automatic weapons people who were unarmed and showed no inclination to violence, a full 2600 people die in a single day. More than 10 thousand people are wounded. Such actions are repeated many times, though on a smaller scale, by the state's security forces. Massacre becomes a routine, a style, of the Egyptian state or the Syrian state.

A crime against humanity is being committed, yet we do not expect a reaction from the Gezi people. Let them stay silent. But they do not stay silent toward the Prime Minister who reacts in the name of humanity. They say that because he killed 5 people at Gezi he has no right to give this reaction. Well, when the prime minister does not speak out out of respect for those 5 who died, will you speak in his place? When the prime minister is silent over the 5 who died at Gezi, will you weep and shout in the name of the oppressed and victims of Adawiya?

These are of course empty questions. They pay no heed. In return for those who died at Gezi, their hearts can bear the most savage massacre of hundreds of thousands of people in Egypt merely because the prime minister weeps for them. Even worse, they can place those 5 people against the thousands who died in Egypt and the hundred thousand who died in Syria. A kind of "one Gezi person is worth the world" racism, that is.

Well, did those who died at Gezi really grieve them? Ask that too, if you wish. Do they desire that those dead be several times more, merely to shout more loudly? Otherwise why do they include in Gezi's total balance sheet even deaths that have nothing to do with Gezi? Really, where did these 5 people come from? Who killed them?

Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, who died trapped under an overturned vehicle, is also included in these 5. Medeni Yıldırım, who died in the raid on the police station in protest of the raids on the drug fields in Lice, is also included in these 5, is he not?

Of course no death can be taken lightly, but it should not prevent us from seeing the disgusting trade conducted over these deaths.

If the deaths have been made the subject of such a calculation, the time has come for us to weep not for the dead but for our own condition...