AK Party MP Süleyman Soylu said:
“We border Israel. Israel is only 5 hours away from Hatay.
Alimallah, if Israel tries to do to us what it has done to Muslims, we will give 300-400 thousand martyrs, but by the permission of Allah, there will be no country called Israel.”
Whenever the language of politics gets in the way of conscience, blood and tears begin to ooze from there. The reckless language we have witnessed recently, which puts the lives of hundreds of thousands of people on the table as if they were “strategic costs”, is not just a slip of the tongue; it is the manifestation of a dark mentality that reduces human beings from being human beings to numbers, to “objects”. The horrible comfort in the phrase “we would give 300-400 thousand martyrs” actually reveals the biggest disease of modern politics: instrumental reason.
FALL FROM HUMAN DIGNITY TO “NUMERICAL DATA”
At the root of this mentality lies a Machiavellian sediment that sanctifies power and sees human beings as a “fuel” used to achieve that power. According to this understanding, the human being is a “piece of inventory”. Those who present the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives for their own ideological calculations or geopolitical dreams as a “success criterion” are in fact undermining human dignity.
To measure a mother's twenty years of labor to raise her child, a young person's dreams, the future of a society with a five-hour drive and six-digit figures is to devalue human beings as much as “a Çorum chickpea”. However, while a world collapses with the loss of a single life, to talk about hundreds of thousands of deaths as an “assumption” is a decay of conscience.
IRRESPONSIBILITY HIDING BEHIND THE HAMAS
True humanity is not to boast of leading your people into the fire, but to show the wisdom to protect them from the fire. Those who romanticize the war from their comfortable seats at the table never mention whether those 400,000 people will include their own children, their own loved ones. For them, these numbers are just pawn moves on the map.
The source of this “disregard for human beings” is a totalitarian collectivism that ignores the individual and sees him/her only as a cell in the masses. From this point of view, the “homeland” is measured not by the people living in it, but by the lines on the map and the amount of blood shed for those lines.
TO SUSTAIN OR TO DESTROY?
Our claim to civilization is based on the philosophy of “Keep human beings alive. Protect nature, treat all living things as equal to your life”. Any discourse that tries to evolve this philosophy to the point of “Sacrifice human beings so that a group of people can live in prosperity” is alien to these lands.
Since this philosophy is the philosophy of Zionism, marching on Israel loses its meaning. It reproduces Zionism on this land. And what happens is that 400 thousand young people die.
No political goal, no border line and no desire for revenge is more precious than the dreams of a single human being or the tears of an orphan. Defending life, peace and human dignity against this outdated logic that sees human life as a statistic, and conducting politics on this axis is as vital as standing against Zionism and imperialism today.
Because a human being is not an ammunition to be spent, but a life to be protected