My wife’s uncle, Adil, was shot and killed in cold blood in a Damascus street. He had no blackmail money. He was poor. So he was shot. He was shot by killers financed and organized by the USA and Turkey, in particular by Barack Obama and Turkey’s prime minister and prime collaborator, and their equally murderous emissaries, agents, and covert collaborators, along with their overt collaborators like the Turkish and American armed forces and the CIA. I hold both so-called leaders responsible for this murder as I hold all their criminal henchmen and henchwomen. Last year there was no more peaceful border in the world than that between Turkey and Syria. Then David Petraeus and Hillary Clinton came to Turkey. They met the Turkish prime minister, the president, the foreign minister and others exactly like them. And thereafter all hell followed. Peace! they cried. Democracy! Freedom! they yelled! And Syria and Assad suddenly became the hated ones. People! This is an old American game. But there is more. Much more.
I hold all those Americans and all those Turks, both Americanized or Turkified, all of them I hold responsible. You cannot escape this death, this murder, committed under the pretense of fighting for freedom. To the extent that you all fill the air, Facebook and otherwise, with the magnificence of your vacations to exotic places, your shared recipes, your automobiles, your tastes in music, the wondrous feats of your children, the thrilling pictures of beloved household pets, your dashing profiles, your adored restaurants, your beloved sports idols, singers, actors, actresses, celebrities and other household plants . . . to the extent that this is all you have to offer this bleeding world, then you too are responsible. Adil went to work four days ago. Adil, a name meaning “just” in Arabic, a simple, honest man went to work four days ago and met freedom full in the face, American and Turkish style. And now his family knows what happened. In their grief they speak of “kader” and “kısmet” and other words meaning fate. But it was not his fate to die in the street. It was his misfortune to meet gunmen hired by America and Turkey and us. It was his misfortune to be born under a star that would allow this American president and this Turkish prime minister to pollute Adil’s world with their violence. People! Adil was one of us, an innocent caught in a disgusting political game that we enable.
Know that the bullets than killed Adil were financed by all of us. Without the taxpayers of Turkey and America these gangsters in political garb would not exist. They only have power to the extent that stupid people like us fund them. Yes, people, we are financing terrorist states. So tell someone! Tell the world! Speak out! March! Adil died because he, like many of you, went to work one morning. And now, his family knows that he will never come back. Four days he was lost. His brothers searched. They found him among the piles of corpses in a hospital morgue. And now his family knows. But what do we know? Anything?
James (Cem) Ryan
Istanbul, Turkey
19 July 2012
James Ryan was born and raised in New York City. A graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, he holds advanced degrees in economics (MBA) and English literature (MA), a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA) in writing from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in literature. He writes and has published poetry, fiction, literary criticism, and political commentary. He taught creative writing at Columbia University in New York and literature at Kadır Has University in Istanbul, Turkey.
| Print