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BURAK BEKDİL

BURAK BEKDİL

burak.bekdil@hurriyet.com.tr

“We as Muslim Turks…”

I was saddened when I read my sparring partner’s column and learned that he was put in a confinement room at Rafic Hariri International Airport and had to wait 10 long hours there before he was deported to Turkey because his passport contained a visa entry into Israel (How I got deported from Lebanon, Mustafa Akyol, Dec. 22, 2012). But I was also relieved because something worse could have happened. Only a few days after Mustafa was deported, the Turkish Embassy in Beirut issued a travel advisory, warning Turks against travelling to Lebanon.

I have no intention to spar with my sparring partner over an unfortunate incident he had to experience, and my sympathies for him about how he was treated by the Lebanese passport police are most sincere. We may often disagree or even spar but we are partners. And I found in his confinement room chronicles something very important.

“There is a larger picture that concerns me,” Mustafa wrote, “As a Muslim Turk whose sympathies are certainly with the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli conflict, I am deported and treated as a criminal not in Israel but in an Arab country.”

That can be a view shared by an overwhelming majority of Turks but when it also becomes the fundamental pillar of Turkish foreign policy it turns out we behave in the way we condemn others of when they do the same. I don’t mind if Mustafa or anyone else thinks that “as a Muslim Turk my sympathies are certainly with the Arabs in the Arab-Israeli conflict.” But I feel alarmed when very important men in Ankara think alike.