Uh oh; we are so awfully shocked!
At the time of the early video productions of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu suggested a rather soft, kind and empathetic diagnosis for the bloodshed: “Past anger, alienations and insults [against the Sunnis] have caused a reaction [which is ISIL]. Such an accumulation of anger [ISIL’s anger] would not have existed if Sunni Arabs in Iraq were not alienated.” Replace the words “Sunni Arabs” with “Turkish Kurds” in his original text perhaps a similar understanding should emerge – minus the Kurds’ similar video productions and the prime minister’s empathetic diagnosis.
This time we had a 24-year-old angry Turkish Sunni who felt alienated and insulted. Who, in Turkey, alienated him? Who insulted him? Who angered him in Mr. Davutoğlu’s Turkey?
Wrong diagnosis, again. A most recent survey on the topic found that 13.6 percent of Turks (nearly 11 million) do NOT view ISIL as a terrorist group; and 22 percent (nearly 18 million) do NOT view it as a threat to Turkey (unsurprisingly, the percentages are higher among those who vote for Mr. Davutoğlu’s party). The angry Sunni Turk did not kill because he was alienated or insulted.
A journalist from an Islamist TV station recently broadcast street interviews about non-believers with ordinary men, often youths in Western attire. The answers included comments like these:
“Catch them and kill them. They don’t believe in Allah or the Quran.”
“They [the unbelievers] are animals. They are not human. They’re not human. They are not like us.”
“God damn them. They don’t believe in Allah. To hell with them.”
“God damn them. I shall stab them one by one wherever I find them.”
Upon reading those lines remember to mimic that you are so terribly shocked. We all are!
Typical of the well-known Islamist taqiyya practice, the TV station deleted the video –which it had proudly exhibited before the latest ISIL attack. Just like the lady, an AKP chief propagandist for the women’s branch of an Istanbul district, who deleted her good wishes for the injured Israeli citizens after the March 19 attack in Istanbul: “Let the Israeli citizens be worse, I wish they all died.” In her Facebook account, she described herself as “an [President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan fan and an Ottoman lover.” So shocking!
At the beginning of March, while the government-controlled prosecutors were running after one terrorist after another -terrorists who use “pens” instead of bombs- some 5,000 supporters of the radical Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir gathered at a public sports hall in the Turkish capital “to discuss the re-establishment of the caliphate.”
In his speech, Mahmut Kar, Hizb ut-Tahrir’s media bureau chief, pledged to re-establish the caliphate, contrary to the expectations of the “infidels” – the same infidels Turkish interviewees would “stab one by one wherever they find them.” Mr. Kar said: “Infidels who were enemies of Islam thought they buried Islam in the depths of history … We are hopeful, enthusiastic and happy. Some 92 years after March 3, 1924, when the caliphate was abolished, we are shouting out that we will re-establish the caliphate, here, right next to the parliament.”
On its website Hizb ut-Tahrir defines itself as a political organization aiming to “lead the ummah” to the re-establishment of the caliphate and rule with sharia law. Another group of angry Sunni men who feel alienated and insulted? How shocking.
What a coincidence that, in their terror attacks on Turkish soil, the angry Sunni men have been killing whom any angry Sunni man would view as infidels: pro-Kurdish activists on July 20, 2015; pro-peace, leftist activists on Oct. 10; German infidels on Jan. 12; and three “Jooos” and one Shiite infidel on March 19.