The victims of Reina are also heroes

Look, the guy and the girl on the street, my brother and my sister, the politician in Ankara, take a look. 

Do you know who those brothers and sisters who were massacred in the early hours of Jan. 1 morning in Istanbul’s Reina are? 

Let me explain it to you…

Twenty-three of them were the citizens of this country. They were the people of a country where bombs have been going off every week. 

While everybody else told them, “Oh, please do not go there, do not go to this and that place, do not even go out,” they were the people who still had confidence in their country, who went to the venue to boost the country’s economy.  

Do you know who they were? 

While the entire world was saying, “Turkey has become Saudi Arabia, Turkey has become an Iran,” they were the ones who gave the message, “No, we are also here, we are also present in this country” proving it with their life-styles and their entertainments. 

For this reason, each one of them is a hero. They deserve our heartfelt prayers and for us to recite the surah al-fatihah.  

Sixteen of them were citizens of foreign countries. Do you know who they were?
 
They were the people who came to this country while their countries told them, “Beware, do not go to that country.” Some of them were here for New Year’s celebrations, while some of them were here because they chose to work in this country and decided to have fun during the celebrations. 

Every single one of them is a hero.

Murderers have massacred these people on New Year’s Eve… These people who defended their country, who defended their lifestyles, these people who still had trust in the country…  

You knew very well our police officers who were massacred in Istanbul’s Beşiktaş, near the Vodafone Arena Stadium. You knew very well the soldiers who were massacred in the central Anatolian province of Kayseri.

You should know these people very well too. 

They are, at the least, as heroic as the others are. 


Apple’s heart is here, what about ours? 

The CEO of Apple, the giant multinational technology company, Tim Cook, posted a tweet after the Reina Club massacre in Turkish saying that their heart was in Istanbul… 

Hey, this country’s citizen, did you ever ask this to yourself? What about your heart? What about the heart of the politician that you have elected to parliament? Where is that heart? 

The hearts of those people who opened a banner at the Beşiktaş Stadium during a game expressing their support to the “presidential system,” where are you, even on this day when we are holding at least 40 funerals every weekend?

The heart of the one who is taking advantage of such a day to kidnap an Atatürk statue…

Are we sure that their hearts are also present here? 


The power we need 

In his New Year message, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has upgraded our state from “national mobilization” to a “liberation war.”   

A country can win its liberation war by making the hearts of all the people in this country beat in unison.
    
The Head of the Religious Affairs Directorate (Diyanet), Mehmet Görmez, issued a statement after the Reina massacre, which found its place in all our hearts. “There is no difference between committing this inhumane massacre in a marketplace and a worship place or in an entertainment venue,” he said.  

When Atatürk, the founder of our country, was fighting the Liberation War, he said that “the power we need flows in the blood in our veins.” 

The spirit and the mood we need are also present here in this tiny sentence.