Paradox of being 'pro-terror'

“If guilty, she or he should be on trial under arrest.”

If she or he is guilty then she or he is not on trial because if it can be said of that person that she or he is guilty, then it means the trial has already ended. There is already a sentence and that person should be put in a prison cell for serving jail time, not in prison cell for those under detention.

But if the trial goes on, it means there is no certainty about whether he or she is guilty. And it’s only if there is a possibility of escape or blacking out the evidence that trial under arrest can be debated.

It seems that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan sees the request for the trial of academics without detention as a demand for the privileged. There is a clear misunderstanding; perhaps it was an accident. It may sound like a cliché but it seems to me that he is misinformed. Obviously his statement (“Guilty academics should be tried under detention, why should they enjoy privileged treatment”) is a reaction to something.

Yet, those who are asking for a trial without detention are not asking for privilege or special treatment. All they expect is for them to be considered equal to a shepherd in front of the law and that they are not judged under a separate law.

Whether it is a professor or an illiterate man, trial under detention is exceptional and it is written to resort to trial under detention.

If a demand for equal treatment is seen as a demand for special treatment, then guilt is with the one who has seen it that way.

Whoever has shown it that way to the president is the person who led to this clear miscommunication.

A similar paradox exists for the concept of “terror supporters/pro-terror people,” whom the president has suggested to strip of citizenship.

We know what the crime of terror is. If you talk about those who commit that crime, suggesting to revoke their citizenship can be an idea. We can debate about it.

But it becomes a different matter when you say “pro-terror.”

How can you define that? For instance would disagreeing with the president’s suggestion that “PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party] supporters should be stripped off their citizenship,” be included in the definition of being “pro-terror?” Or if someone that believes in the freedom to criticize were to criticize these words, will he or she be accused of committing a crime?

Let’s talk about the reason why academics are being tried. They have signed a petition objecting the operations to close the diches in the southeast. While accusing the state of slaughter, they ignored the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and did not even mention it. It was an unfair, unbalanced paper. It was biased. It did not even match a minimum level of intellectual morality. But it did not say anything in favor of the PKK. There was not one single sentence praising the PKK. They are, however,
accused of being spokespeople of the PKK, tools of terror propaganda. 

It was obvious they discriminated the PKK by ignoring it and accusing the state only. But the accusations are based on comments. Will they be tried with the same crime as armed terrorists?

How can this be possible when it is difficult to even consider the PKK and the (pro-Kurdish) Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) as legally and politically the same thing?

To what degree is defining being “pro-terror” proportionate to a terror crime? And I wonder whether we realize that this will pose the risk of losing nearly all HDP voters forever?