If your high schools are stirred up
Let’s say your social peace is at risk; you are under a terror siege domestically and internationally. The perpetuation of your nation and your state is attacked. It is serious. You are fighting for survival.
Your streets are subtly being stirred up. The agitation has gone all the way to your high schools. You are afraid of social explosions and street incidents being incited. An insidious provocation is ongoing; it wants a domestic fight, to play you against each other, to divide and disintegrate you…
What would you do to stop those who want you to fall?
In this situation, you do not add fuel to the flames. The only thing you would do is obviate.
You would do what President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan starting doing on his return from the U.S., not what Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ has been doing.
You would use careful language, strengthen your unity and put the fight against terrorism above political conflicts. You would not be uncomfortable that the main opposition leader attends martyr funerals; on the contrary, you would encourage him.
You would be able to recognize that preventing Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu from attending martyr funerals is exactly the thing the terror organization desires. You would notice the size of the danger and grasp its severity. You would stop and think over the heinous calculations once more.
The main opposition CHP has been saying that it is ready to provide all support to you in the fight against terrorism. Stop pushing away those who are coming closer.
You would embrace rather than exclude.
You would also be determined to persistently keep those in the legal zone who the terror organization is trying to shift to the illegal zone.
If you criminalize the CHP and put it at the same level as Kandil with the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), you should know that this can only make those in Kandil very happy.
Even if you have been dragged into this debate, you would not prolong it. You would not insist on showing that the CHP visited the terror organization. You would not try in an endless ambition for polemic to prove that the prison visits were not within the scope of the parliament’s monitoring activity but with the aim of supporting terror. You would not define the visits that your ministry allowed as if they were wrong and illegal.
When it is revealed that your own party members also met the prisoners and convicts from all organizations at prisons, you would not say “that is different.”
You cannot criminalize for others what is free for you.
When the situation is this grave, you would not insist on segregating the main opposition with your own hands. Even if it has made a mistake or said the wrong thing, you would give it the opportunity to correct itself, not engage in the zeal of denial.
It is not clear whether it is a new statement or a rerun of a former one, but Justice Minister Bozdağ is reported to be continuing the prisoner visit polemic. Despite President Erdoğan’s caution against provocation, what is this but provoking?
On one hand you say that our unity is more important than ever, but on the other hand you scrape the claim that the CHP supports terror. Isn’t this the same as mentioning that the holy month of Ramadan is a time for peace, tolerance, forgiveness, love, respect and goodness, but in the next sentence insulting those who do not perform prayers?