Time to think again

Islamophobia, Turcophobia, Erdoğanphobia or whatever it might be called, is a reality that Western nations perceive that they face an existential threat from foreigners flooding into their countries. The number of Syrian refugees embraced by all EU countries cannot exceed a fraction of the number of refugees Turkey has taken, which became their second home. If Germany is to be excluded, it could easily be argued that Europe has indeed turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the worst humanity the world has faced since the war in former Yugoslavia.

The world should not of course forget how a Dutch commander and his soldiers watched thousands of Muslim people get butchered in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War. Accusing only Serbian ultranationalists and the Slobodan Milosevic regime for the Srebrenica massacre would be a big unjust to reality. The Dutch commander, who preferred to watch the butchering of Muslims from a distance rather than taking action in line with the mandate he was dispatched with, to this day is provided impunity, making him a less criminal.  

Accusing the Christian culture of the West alone, however, cannot be a remedy for anything. The other day Murat Yetkin, the editor-in-chief of Hürriyet Daily News, had asked in one of his articles why despite all the negative perception toward the West, Muslim people saw western countries as places where they could live in security. He asked, what the reason behind it was if those "running for their lives are Muslims, but they are not seeking shelter in other Muslim countries, except for Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, where the political systems are not based on religious law. They turn their eyes to predominantly non-Muslim, mostly Christian societies in the West."

The reason,...