The world’s biggest terror gang!
Turkish justice, notoriously capable of uncovering terror gangs from published and unpublished books, cartoons, anti-government slogans, posters, headwear, eggs, badges and every other trivial item, has been unable to uncover the gang that killed Hrant Dink. That is just normal. The Turkish justice could not have arrested all members of the gang because Turkish prisons are not big enough to house millions of inmates.
Upon the murder of Mr. Dink, I wrote in this column:
“[Who killed Hrant Dink?] A teenager, according to the full forensic report; the same teenager, according to his own testimony. ‘The murderer state,’ according to left-wing fanatics. Mr. Dink himself betrayed the lands where ‘he was fed,’ according to right-wing fanatics. The secularist state establishment, according to the Islamists. The Islamist government, according to secularists. The ‘deep state,’ according to deep state-connoisseurs.
Foreign secret services, according to conspiracy-connoisseurs […] The blood-thirsty Turks, the descendants of genocide-makers, according to the Turk-hating Armenians. The Armenians, according to Armenian-hating Turks. Xenophobic Turks, according to the separatist Kurds. Separatist Kurds, according to xenophobic Turks. Article 301 and the jurists who convicted Mr. Dink of insulting Turkishness, according to the liberals.
“Ogün Samast who pulled the trigger is no different than his mentor who had bombed a McDonald’s restaurant because the eatery was ‘a symbol of American imperialism’… or the teenager who killed a Catholic priest because the man was ‘an enemy of Islam.’ Or even anyone who belonged to the crowd of a few thousand people who wanted to lynch a handful of youths because they protested prison conditions.
Mr. Samast is only a daring/losing example in a bunch of nearly 4 million Turkish young men between the ages of 15 and 19 whose cultural myths are no richer than the book ‘Those Crazy Turks’ and the film ‘Valley of the Wolves.’
“Turkey, in the last few decades, has ‘produced’ more young people than it could afford to healthily take care of, i.e., with education, jobs, social security, etc. Inevitably, an alarmingly large part of these young men and women has “gone astray.” Some have joined the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK; some have joined this or that of the mushrooming sects of Islam, becoming, thus, the soldiers of Islam; some have gone to fight the ‘infidels’ in lands as far away as Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Iraq or Chechnya; some have become petty criminals and, some, as in the case of Mr. Samast, have preferred to ‘defend the honor of Turkishness.’
“In fact, they are the same thing although they ostensibly represent opposite or different political doctrines – it is only a matter of where and how they grow up. The PKK man who kills in the name of ‘independent Kurdistan’ is the same man who kills a priest or a judge in the name of ‘Islam,’ or the man who killed Mr. Dink in the name of ‘Turkishness;’ He is the same man who goes to the local Internet café for child porn, violent computer games or to read the daily brainwashing political material from his choice of radical website,” (“Who killed Hrant Dink,” the Daily News, Jan. 23, 2007).
As tens of thousands marched last week to defend Mr. Dink’s honor in a peaceful march, after a court verdict ruled out “organized crime/terror” in this murder case, daily Hürriyet columnist Ahmet Hakan commented on the social media side of the “Dink affair.” A frustrated Mr. Hakan concluded that a) Other [Mr.] Samasts are among us, b) The court verdict is in no way surprising, and c) Life for an Armenian in Turkey is really very risky.
That is the heart of the matter. It is a big terror gang. Too big to contain, control or jail… In vain, I am hoping I shall not have to reprint in 2017 excerpts from my 2007 article.