Quo vadis? (21.12.2016)

So why don’t I just choose another topic to write about instead of the murder of Russian ambassador Karlov?
Well, you know Aydın, old fellow, you just have to write about this murder.
If so, what is there to write?
In the papers, on television and above all on social media they have long since dispensed with the possible consequences and the lakes of blood that Turkey is thrashing about in, and have gone on to posing some real killer (!!!) questions and, having posed them, have set about answering them.
Was the murdering police officer from FETÖ or Al-Nusra?
If he was a FETÖist, did he become disillusioned with them and decide to become a jihadist and join Al-Nusra, or was he part of Al-Nusra or another similar terrorist organisation all along? Was he the member of a ‘sleeper cell’ who woke up and sprang into action, or did he decide to exact revenge for religious reasons on the Russian ambassador whom blamed, swept away by one or all of the mutually inconsistent, mutually contradictory allegations about what is going on in Aleppo? Did the sobbing of children in Aleppo brought to us on the screens provoke him into committing this murder? Or did the cleansing of fundamentalist terrorists from Aleppo engender a sense of ‘defeat’ that had to be avenged in the young police officer who appeared to have embraced jihadism?
I do not know the answers to any of these questions. Do those self-proclaimed sages who have tapped away and poured out answers by the line, paragraph or the page know anything?
They do not.
They are lost in a world of their own making as they bang away at the keyboard and make it up as they go along over a murder that is shrouded in darkness.
Making things up is acceptable on social media. But, in our profession, fabrication courts derision.
***
If you like, start with the Suruç slaughter. If you like, with the two police officers who were gunned down in their sleep in Ceylanpınar.
If you like, with the ISIL suicide bomber who exacted a deadly toll on the marchers for peace in Ankara, or, if you like, another ISIL slaughter that soaked a street full of wedding revellers in blood in Gaziantep.
If you wish, with the minibus that created carnage when it targeted contract buses in Ankara, or TAK’s blow that caused massacre at the Dolmabahçe stadium.
The list goes on.
The country is trapped in a bloody and insatiable ‘hell of terror’ whose latest manifestation was the ‘jihadist’ who the evening before last fired a bullet into the Russian ambassador to Ankara, and then another, and then another.
***
The country is writhing in the claws of terror and is bleeding away. Hopelessness and helplessness prevail.
Our chap has got his team together and is opening the Passage to Eurasia. In a country that longs for peace, he reduces populism to its most primitive in saying, ‘The people shall have whatever they want; the rest is detail’ to the bellowing that bays for blood and says ‘We want the death penalty.’
***
The use of Latin in the headline for this Claw Mark was not for the purpose of showing off. “Quo vadis” is a question that is used in all languages of the world and is taken from Christian mythology.
It is used with the meaning, ‘Hey, you! Where are you going and what are you doing having abandoned your duties and responsibilities.’
If so: Quo vadis?