Maybe THIS is Why "We" Don't Stand With Ankara?

The world is now standing with Brussels.  We red, white and blued our profile pics for Paris.  We were Charlie.  Now someone is asking the question:

Where were “we” for Ankara?

To refresh our short term memories, on March 13 a suicide bomber detonated an explosion in the heart of Ankara, Turkey, killing 37 people.  The group taking responsibility for this reprehensible attack was the Kurdistan Freedom Falcons, an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that has been responsible for several attacks on Turkey in recent years.

Back to the question.  James Taylor, a British national asked the question above.  It’s been chronicled in many places and I’ve seen it shared over social media.  (You can check out his entire post here)

Reading commentary on several sites regarding his statement, everything from anti-Muslim sentiment in the west to outright racism was the reason why “we” weren’t standing with Turkey as aggressively as we did for other victims of terror.

Before I piss off the world – well, the 39 of you that consistently read us – let me state VERY clearly:

ATTACKS LIKE THESE ARE AN ABOMINATION.  They have no place in civilized society and need to be condemned whether it is the PKK, ISIS, the KKK or <insert terrorist group here>.

Now…my take on why the world can’t relate to the Ankara attacks in the same way it did to 9-11, Paris and now Brussels. 

ISIS (ISIL, Islamic State, freaking loons…whatever you want to call them) are not fighting for a cause.  They are criminals.  They are part of the majority religion of the region where they operate and have taken that religion and twisted it and contorted it to the point of being unrecognizable.  They use this twisted vision of Islam to commit atrocities so vile that they are beyond defending.  I know we’re all pissy because they kill westerners and chant death to the west, but they have killed more Muslims than any one group since the Crusaders. 

Turkish Kurds (as well as Iranian, Syrian, Iraqi and Armenian Kurds) have been fighting for their own country for centuries.  According the BBC article “Who Are the Kurds?” the Kurds are:

"…one of the indigenous people of the Mesopotamian plains and the highlands in what are now south-eastern Turkey, north-eastern Syria, northern Iraq, north-western Iran and south-western Armenia.  Today, they form a distinctive community, united through race, culture and language, even though they have no standard dialect. They also adhere to a number of different religions and creeds, although the majority are Sunni Muslims."

At the end of WWI the Kurds were promised a homeland but as the boundaries of Turkey were redrawn, the promised Kurdish state never materialized.  Instead they were spread between five countries – minorities in every one.  The Kurds have tried for nearly a century to create their own state but every attempt has been met with violence and reprisals. 

Though they were the earliest fighters against ISIS, when they found themselves pinned against the Turkish border in the Battle of Kobane, Turkey refused to assist, instead, seeing an opportunity to be rid of more Kurds, they let them flounder until the US stepped in with strong air support helping the Kurds retake Kobane.

If that sounds a little genocidal to you, let’s not pretend that Turkey has no history in genocide.  Ask the Armenians how life was under Ottoman rule.  In less than 10-years over 1.5 million ethnic Armenians were slaughtered.  My own people, the Greeks, were brutally oppressed for centuries until overthrowing the Ottoman yolk in the 1830s (Greek independence, coincidently, is celebrated annually on March 25, just a few days from now).  This time they tried to allow ISIS to do their dirty work.

In that context, and the context of decades of brutal oppression by the Turkish government, a segment of the Kurds have taken to violence.  To domestic terrorism.  Make no mistake, it is terrorism pure and simple.  It’s wrong and it is despicable.  Killing innocents in the name of a cause is to be condemned. But a comparison between a decades long struggle of a violently suppressed minority (40,000 killed and an estimated 100,000 resettled along with a crushing of their ethnic identity) and the altogether different monster that is ISIS is a comparison between apples and oranges.

Once again I condemn the actions taken by the PKK on March 13 and I pray that God (Allah, whatever you want to call the deity) embraces the innocent victims and can bring some measure of comfort to their families.  That said, don’t expect me to change my profile picture for Turkey.