If you are looking for Karbala, Yazid, Hussein…

Yasin AktayBy: Yasin Aktay*

Modern civilization, displayed in fancy showcases such as modernity and science, which the late Muhammad Qutb called, “the ignorance of the 20th century,” and Turkey’s national poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy described as, “The civilized [world] is but a monster with only a single tooth left,” has manifested itself with more blood and death, more lowly atrocities and crimes against humanity than ever seen before in the entirety of the history of the world.

And they call civilization humanism. What if it wasn’t humanism, what would we do then?

As we proceed within the 21st century, almost step by step, we are made to become accustomed to even more atrocities and more animosity against humanity taking place in parallel with the values of that civilization becoming further reinforced and settled in. The modern civilization of the West closed the 20th century with the genocide performance it demonstrated in Rwanda and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It entered the 21st century with the scientific-technological and cinematographic atrocities and massacres it displayed through Iraq and Afghanistan.

It entered Iraq under the pretext of taking democracy to the country and fighting international terrorism. During its decade-long invasion in Iraq, let alone taking democracy, it left no ground for a government that can fulfill even its most basic functions. The result of this was the barbaric murder of millions of civilians, deportation of tens of millions of people, the systematic and inhuman torture inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people, disregard for human honor and, beyond everything, local or international terrorism became hundreds of times more widespread compared to the past.

The images from Abu Ghraib prison are enough proof to show that neither the U.S. nor the Western world have any value to give to this world.

Regardless of how powerful a country with such potential for atrocity, it is never a big country, and in this state, it can never be. This is the actual reason for the problem in a world where what’s happening in Aleppo is happening today. It is because countries that appear to be powerful are not big at all. It is because unruly gangs that are normally and completely void of human values are in a position to control the world’s most powerful countries.

Those who have no humanitarian values, those who produce nothing other than death and massacre having these massive powers, is the world’s greatest misfortune. Let us sing, “Eşkıya dünyaya hükümdar olmaz” (Bandits cannot become rulers of the world) as much as we like; the bandit has already become the ruler of the world.

The bandit taking control over the world is why the Middle East has come to this state. At some point, even a bandit has a value, a method, a law it looks out for. The carelessness displayed today by the world’s powerful countries in protecting, looking out for and establishing even the simplest humanitarian value, shows the end point of exhaustion. The “point where words fail,” which we should never give credence to, is unfortunately where we end up.

The atrocities faced by the innocent children, the valiant youth and free women of Aleppo, says everything that needs to be said anyway: “Hasbunallahu wa nimal wakil nimal maula wa niman naseer.” (Allah (alone) is sufficient for us, and He is the best disposer of affairs (for us). And what an excellent protector He is! What an excellent helper He is!)

With the crowds they gathered, their high-tech weapons and aircraft, the Bashar Assad, Iran and Russia alliance in Aleppo, is showing not its power to the innocent people, but its performance at the level of degrading humanity. Despite this, despite all their murder, destruction and rape tools, they fail to get the free and noble people of Aleppo to surrender.

They kill them, but they cannot get them to give up.

They torture them, but they fail to get the promises they want.

The children who are evacuated with great difficulty leave Aleppo saying, “When I grow up, I am going to come to save it.”

With every atrocity they carry out, Iran’s Shiite militias, who make futile talk on Karbala and who have turned the martyrdom of Karbala into a birth myth and Hussein into an object of worship, are slaughtering thousands of Husseins and strangling thousands of Moseses in a way more tyrannical than Yazid and more lowly and barbaric than Pharaoh.

All they have left is the idolization of Hussein, from whom they have fallen far and away.

Those who are curious about Yazid and Karbala can look at Aleppo. If the Yazids think the headbands with “Oh Hussein” written on them brings them close to Hussein, they are badly mistaken. Hussein was never a tyrant.

Hussein was never even one of those who watched by as inhumane tyrants kill children without even a flinch.

Didn’t Hussein stand up so innocent children would never again be tyrannously murdered?

Didn’t he stand up against Yazid to show that you cannot prosper through tyranny?

Are you going to deceive Hussein or God, who is also Hussein’s lord, by tying those “Oh Hussein” headbands around the heads of that horde of murderers, who were gathered and armed and released on the ground, with each one of them turned into death and rape machines?

I swear in the name of God, if you were even slightly on the path of Hussein, you would find him nowhere but in the hearts of those children who are massacred under those barrel bombs.

The thing you will find as you defend Assad is nothing more than the revenge of that aggrieved child that will drag you into the bottomless pit of curse and hell.

Surely, Iran, too, is going to be asked the same question as that child: “Oh child, for what sin were you murdered?”

*Yasin Aktay is the vice chair of the ruling Justice and Development (AK Party) in Turkey.

(Published in Yeni Şafak Turkısh newspaper on Saturday, Dec. 17,  2016)