"Selective sensitivity", racist from any angle, Orientalist from any angle

With the entry through Turkey's borders of Kurds forced to flee the clashes between ISIS and PYD forces in Syria, or more precisely, ISIS's unstoppable advance and its horror, the matter of Syrian guests has gained yet another dimension.

Of course, we would far rather that such incidents had not occurred, in order to prove the claim that Turkey, in humanitarian aid, and especially in being a safe harbor to which those whose lives are in danger take refuge, looks at no religious, sectarian or ethnic origin.

If only they had not happened. But they did.

In what happened there are lessons for us as well as tests.

The attitude Turkey has shown toward the wave of humanitarian migration coming from Syria and Iraq is, whichever way you look at it, an exceptional stance, and beyond any praise.

Let alone praising this exceptional stance and these practices from the start, we expect nothing that would shame those who compete to find fault of every kind.

Not only do they do no good, they are busy obstructing the good of those who do. Thus they are after a pretext that will justify their own insensitivity and their irresponsibility toward humanity, and that will also ease the crumb of conscience that the stinginess and miserliness they are in might stir.

This pretext makes them more aggressive and more brazen with each passing day. The nature of this state of mind requires it. They are able to say that all of the nearly 1.5 million guests accepted so far are Sunni and that there is no humanitarian dimension in this.

Yet in the composition formed by those forced to come from nearly everywhere in Syria and Iraq, there is nobody who is not there. There were Turkmen and Arabs, both Shiite and Sunni, Armenians, Yazidis, Christians, and Kurds, too, but it is now understood that a greater number of Kurds will come from Syria.

When it comes to humanitarian aid, Turkey teaches the world that neither the religion, nor the sect, nor the ethnic origin of either the oppressed or the oppressor can be asked about. Today's world is in great need of this lesson on this matter. For this factionalism in which the world is submerged is not a good omen at all.

The heedlessness that looks at the identity of the oppressor, indulges its own oppressor, does not question him, and gives way to no awakening of conscience against him is a catastrophe for humanity, and this catastrophe is at present almost the norm of foreign policy in the world.

Especially if one's own oppressor has committed the oppression, a world in which it can be so easy to remain blind to the plight of the oppressed and deaf to their cry...

Unfortunately, this world sums up the state of the so-called international community toward what has been taking place in our region for the past four years.

While Israel was massacring some 2200 civilians, 500 of them children, in Gaza by aerial bombardment, an academic in Europe, whose attention I had wanted to draw, explained the unresponsiveness of ordinary Western citizens as follows: "The average Westerner looks at Palestine and Israel as 'they have been attacking each other for about 70 years.. In this attack, who has killed how many of whom does not matter much. Even if peace is established, it won't last very long anyway. So it comes to the point of 'let them sort out whatever their situation is.'"

This is a terrible indifference that denies what is happening in the Middle East, a geography in which great dramas are produced in every small piece. According to this perception, no human drama taking place in the Middle East has any economic value. Let us set aside, for the record, that this insensitivity toward what is happening in the world today switches on all its antennas at once when 1915 is mentioned, and of course goes into uprising mode against the new great monster called ISIS.

You can call this selective sensitivity, too. Racist from whichever side you look, Orientalist from whichever side you look.

In fact, this perception produced about the Middle East, which I relayed from the Western academic, is a result of the successful legitimation campaigns that each of the Western countries has run among its own citizens regarding what takes place in this geography.

Undoubtedly, one result of these campaigns is a thoroughly insensitive, carefree society. Yet sensitivity and altruism are the most important indicators of a society's vitality.

Turkey, which in three or four years has been a safe refuge for those who see their lives in danger and want to take shelter, by hosting nearly 1.5 million people in the best conditions, in fact reinforces its own vitality through the sensitivity it shows.