ISIL, Islamophobia and a typical dilemma

There was a time when, in these colorful opinion pages of the Hürriyet Daily News, me and my column neighbor Burak Bekdil appeared as "sparring partners." We had rebuttals and counter-rebuttals on the then burning question of whether the AKP (Justice and Development Party) was a positive or negative force in Turkey. Basically, I was a big optimist on the AKP, whereas Mr. Bekdil was a bleak pessimist. 

That was the first decade of the AKP, from 2002-2012. Yet, in the next three years, I grew disillusioned and disappointed with the AKP experience. So, I will give that to Mr. Bekdil; on that old debate, he basically turned out be right, at least more right than me, and albeit for different reasons. I respectfully admit it. 

That is partly why when I opened my copy of the Hürriyet Daily News yesterday, I was curious to see that Mr. Bekdil had opened up a new debate, this time, on the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and other militant Islamists. He referred to my recent HDN piece, "Don't give ISIL the Islamophobia it wants," and asked:

"Why do we advise the victims of terror after a horrible act of terror and not the members of the culture of the perpetrators?"

The argument of Mr. Bekdil, if I may sum up, was that ISIL hates the "infidels" and "apostates" merely out of it religious ideology. So, instead of asking the West not to create a context for this ideology by its own actions, we should deal with the ideology itself. Instead of advising "victims of terror," we should rather focus on the terrorists.

In return, this is my argument: Of course, what drives ISIL is a hateful ideology that can be defined as Takfiri-Salafi-Jihadism. Of course, this ideology refers to certain texts in mainstream Islamic sources about ...