“The Turkish child will no longer shed their blood for the Arab deserts!”

This first article was not supposed to be about war. But the images of that blood-curdling massacre will not leave my mind. Neither I, nor you, nor humanity will be able to forget October 8…

It was the year I stepped into journalism. The Hebron massacre had taken place; a fanatic Israeli settler named Baruch Goldstein had slaughtered a Palestinian family praying in a mosque in Hebron. I went to Israel a week after the massacre, which occurred on February 25, 1994. I hid my Canon EOS5 reflex camera inside my prayer rug and entered the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Before half an hour had passed, the intifada began. With trembling hands, I took out my camera and began filming the Palestinians who were throwing brick-sized stones at the Wailing Wall with shouts of “Allahu Akbar.” That was until an Israeli soldier grabbed me by the neck with his wet hands and lifted me into the air….

Peace efforts have occasionally calmed the great anger between the two peoples, but the anger and the tension stemming from history have never subsided. As long as a fully independent, free Palestinian State recognized by all countries of the world is not established, the hostility will continue.

Humanity, which has reacted for years to the images of Israeli soldiers oppressing the Palestinian people, has now witnessed Hamas breaching the Iron Dome and slaughtering young people having fun at a music festival in Gaza. The world’s blood ran cold. For days, humanity has been watching the most brutal images of the cruelty that humans inflict upon one another… Brutally murdering innocent young girls and stripping their corpses naked while chanting religious slogans cannot be a requirement of any religion. I am ashamed because the dose of brutality is constantly increasing, because we can do nothing for those who have lost their lives and those who will lose their lives, and because we are witnessing the dirty times of a war whose intensity will only grow.

THE MIDDLE EAST; a concept created by the actors who shape the world, whom we refer to as global powers. The term Middle East was first used in 1902 by the strategist, historian, and American naval officer Alfred Mahan. He drew a MIDDLE EAST border that he imagined extending from Arabia to Iran, Afghanistan, and the borders of today's Pakistan. The economic organization called the Middle East Supply Center, established in the USA in 1939, popularized the term Middle East throughout the world.

Cemil Meriç states that the concept of the MIDDLE EAST is used by Westerners in line with their own interests.

For Mustafa Kemal, the Middle East is the backyard of Western powers. His first duty on the front was in Tripoli, under Italian occupation. He entered in the guise of a journalist. The events he experienced and witnessed during the resistance he organized against the Italians always made him keep his distance from the Middle East. So much so that in 1923, the year he declared the Republic, he told the deputies that he was very sensitive about one single subject. I had heard this from Zülfü Livaneli.

Livaneli explains it as follows: “When Atatürk was at the mansion, that is, when he was president, he did not get too involved in politics. He was not someone who interfered in every event and gave orders, as we might think. He sat in the mansion and the governments managed the country. But he was very sensitive about one issue. Whenever a new foreign minister or undersecretary was appointed, he would invite them to the mansion and remind them of the state's fundamental founding principle. At the top of these is this: 'Do not ever get involved in the Middle East.' This is such an important founding principle that the Ottoman Empire's withdrawal from the Middle East was very painful. Turkish television stations still censor the film Lawrence of Arabia; they cannot show it.

Mustafa Kemal, the commander of the withdrawal from Syria, knew the Middle East very well. That is why our childhoods in schools were always like this, even in national education; in what we were taught, Damascus and Baghdad were very far away, while Paris and London were closer. Tehran, right under our noses, was very far away. Because Atatürk had forbidden playing in the backyard. 'Do not ever go to the backyard; there are snakes, scorpions, and bottomless pits. The Middle East is our backyard.'”

We are entering the 100th year of our Republic as a Middle Eastern country. We will celebrate our 100th year as a Turkey that has drifted away from the founding principles of the Republic of Turkey. We are entering the 100th year of our Republic by accepting Afghan fugitives into our country every day in numbers we do not know exactly, by embracing our Syrian refugees whose population is claimed to be approaching 10 million, with our strategic assets sold to Qatar in the last 10 years, and with the Middle East bomb whose fuse has been lit right next to us…

In these difficult times, is it not time to listen to the warning of our Ancestor, whose first front duty was Tripoli? I commemorate with gratitude our founding leader Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the genius of our century, who saved his people from the Middle Eastern quagmire, ensured Secularism as the founding principle of our Republic, and differentiated the Republic of Turkey from other Muslim countries, and I end my article with his words: “The Turkish child will no longer shed their blood for the Arab deserts!”