Debating the theology of Islam while genocide is under way in Gaza

The massacres of unprecedented brutality that genocidal Israel has carried out against the people of Gaza are about to complete their ninth month before the eyes of the "modern," "civilized" world. By now nearly 50 thousand people have lost their lives. Among them are more than 20 thousand children and more than 15 thousand women. That so many children, women and civilians die in a war is sufficient proof that the warring side has been blinded by bloodlust and has gone leagues beyond humanity. For Israel, children are tomorrow's armed enemies... That is why there is a motivation that justifies their killing on religious grounds, and even encourages and incites it further, and although this outlook targets Muslims today, it is a great danger to all of humanity.

Modern technological weapons can completely switch off human feelings in massacres; nobody has the time or the state of mind to calculate what pain, what tragedy a pulled trigger will cause. Besides, in the extreme explosion and destruction caused by that trigger, human bodies too turn to dust, and the tragedy is, as it were, covered up amid that dust and smoke. But of course, the one thing that cannot be hidden at all amid all that dust and smoke is that those targeted and killed were, for the most part, children in their mothers' wombs, in incubators, in cradles, or in playgrounds.

Meanwhile, the vile practices displayed in Gaza by Israeli soldiers who have shed their humanity, during ground operations, stare humanity in the face in a way that cannot be ignored. Hospitals bombed over and over, health workers trying to be a hope of healing for the wounded deliberately targeted and killed, more journalists trying to tell the world what is happening killed than in all previous wars combined, schools, mosques and churches bombed.

The bodies of all the wounded who were being treated in hospitals occupied by Israeli bandit soldiers were soon found in mass graves near the hospitals. Israel has by now committed more crimes than all the criminals who have so far been tried for crimes against humanity put together. Moreover, while doing all this, it has a holy book that motivates it terribly: "When you enter a city, kill woman, man, child, elderly, or anything that breathes."

Not long ago Ismail Haniyeh, the Head of Hamas's Political Bureau, whose 3 sons and 4 young grandchildren had been murdered in an assassination, has now had 10 more members of his family martyred, among them his sister, his nieces and nephews and 6 grandchildren.

Not in Gaza, where Hamas is, but in the occupied West Bank, the transport of a Palestinian youth wounded by Israeli soldiers, tied onto the front of a military vehicle, on top of the vehicle that was running in the sun, is yet another example of villainy etched into minds. At that moment the military vehicle passes in front of an ambulance and, instead of handing the wounded man over to the ambulance, makes a shield of him and drives on.

There is a theology that sets, on a religious foundation, a cruelty that makes people hate those who are not their own, especially the Muslim world, and that deems lying, adultery, usury, torture and death permissible against everyone, and in the final analysis this theology also has a place, formulated in one way or another, in the ethical foundations of today's Western civilization. Colonialism, Orientalism and Eurocentric modernity feed from the same emotional sources from there.

Zionism and Western colonialism have the same epistemological roots. That is why, in fact, behind what Britain did in India and in all the other colonized-occupied regions, the genocides committed against the natives on the American continent, and what France did in Algeria and its other colonial regions, there is the same mentality, the same racism, the same supremacist feelings. That the reaction we expect from the Western world to this example of racist savagery that we see in Gaza today never comes is to some extent a result of this commonality.

And what of this genocidal civilization, so far from humanity, shamelessly claiming human values in the name of "modernity"? Doing so brazenly, treating people as fools... After the Cold War, the United States, the most important power behind genocidal Israel, taking the Europeans along behind it, had said that it would bring democracy to the Middle East. Did it not know that, if it truly set about bringing democracy, the most natural first result of this would be Israel being expelled from the region?

The discourse of democracy meant nothing other than a means of psychological pressure and a discourse of belittlement over these countries, especially those whose peoples are Muslim. The peoples of the region could not have a problem with democracy. Indeed, in the first democratic processes the peoples came to power, and the first thing they wanted was the will of the people, the decision of the people, and therefore that the occupiers get out of these lands. They said this much democracy is too much, and the US and the Western countries themselves did not shrink from exposing themselves as the forces that obstruct democratic processes in the Middle East. After this, the only answer deserved by those who ask whether Islam and democracy are compatible, or why Muslims are not democratic enough, was to be spat in the face.

Nowadays too, Israel and the US, despite all their modernist, postmodernist or globalist humanist discourses behind them, appear in Gaza only as child killers and genocidaires, and the people of Gaza openly expose this face of theirs to the whole world. There is no way left to mask this face again. In fact, it was precisely for this reason that we said that any initiative that would draw the main agenda away from 7 October, from Gaza and the Zionist-imperialist world, should be viewed with suspicion. This is where all the codes of the real truth can be accessed. This is also the front on which the war, the struggle, turns. No initiative that would disperse this should be allowed.

That is why I cannot even bring myself to look at the new distracting attempts that some people are trying to ignite, about the marriage age of Hz. Aisha or the difference between Sharia and Islam. Some people may be in search of a new Messiah, chasing a new revelation from utterly ignorant people. Nothing that is said has any importance or validity that would fill a fig leaf. In the middle of a war in which more than 20 thousand children have been killed through a vile theological-philosophical justification and motivation, the only function that a debate on the marriage age of Hz. Aisha can serve is complicity in the massacre of children. If at this moment theology or religion must be discussed at all, it is not the theology of Islam, but the Zionist-imperialist theology of our so-called contemporary world.

Let us also set aside, as noted, these moves against Islam, the only salvation of humanity, against this genocidal child killer that threatens not only Gaza but Turkey and the whole world.