By Hakan Topal, April 24, 2026
What concerns me is not criticism of the West. That critique is necessary and I share it. Colonialism, slavery, racial violence, the ongoing targeting of Muslims in Europe and the United States — these are structural social issues.
What concerns me is the selective use of that critique. It has become, for too many Muslim commentators, a substitute for critical thinking. Name Western crimes, claim the victim position, and stop there. But you cannot demand honesty from others while refusing it yourself. That hypocrisy reduces a serious political argument to a sad media performance. Once that happens, critique loses its force. Criticism has to begin with intimacy, with the histories and silences closest to us.
As the genocide in Palestine unfolds, many voices rightly point to the web of political and financial structures that enable it. Yet in the same moment, there is often a refusal to confront histories closer to home. The Armenian Genocide remains denied or minimized. Ethnic cleansings, sectarian violence, slavery, and patriarchy in the Islamic world go unchallenged. Internal hierarchies and forms of religious orthodoxy persist without scrutiny. What is presented as cultural or religious continuity often carries the weight of nationalistic, imperial and colonial formations. Turks and Muslims know this very well but choose to ignore it. However, ethical consistency is the minimum requirement for political credibility.
When we were organizing as students in the 1990s, reflecting on the failures of the fractured Turkish left in the 1970s, we spoke of a platform. The idea was simple. No single issue would dominate. No hierarchy of suffering. Each struggle would stand alongside others. Minor voices get amplified, form a chorus. The goal was not agreement, but an equal distribution of responsibility and critique. Then, we could discuss the rights of others, women, Kurds, Armenians, and ecology.
That sense of universality found space in the encampments at Tahrir Square, Zuccotti Park, and Gezi Park. It feels distant now. Positions seem to be polarized along crystallized identity lines. Critique stops at the boundary of the self. Victimhood gets weaponized. If the other is always at fault, you never have to look inward, your own ancestors.
It took me years to understand what that meant for my own position. In Turkey, acknowledging the Armenian Genocide is not a neutral act. It carries a social cost. It invites accusations of treason, of serving foreign interests, of betraying the nation. I have heard all of it. And I have come to see those accusations for what they are: a way of keeping the country loyal to a lie. For me, speaking about the Armenian Genocide is not a solidarity performance or a gesture toward a progressive audience. I understand it as a responsibility of being a citizen. A condition for having a better, more just country. You cannot build something honest on a foundation you refuse to examine.
I love Anatolian lands, my country. That is not a small thing to say. I call myself a patriot, but not in the narrow sense of allegiance to the state apparatus.
States lie. States suppress. States build their legitimacy on what they erase. My commitment is to the land itself, to its layered histories, to the cultures, to the peoples, to the geography that have shaped it and been shaped by it. That means all of them. Not the official version, not the version that flatters the present order, but the full and complicated thing.
Yes, I am a patriot, but a patriot who cannot tell the truth to his own people is not a patriot. He is a custodian of fictions, a liar.
Millions of Armenians once lived across Anatolia. Their presence is not abstract. It is inscribed in landscapes, in ruins, in abandoned churches, in altered place names. I have traveled through Van, Patnos, Kars, Erzurum, Kayseri. I have visited sites that were once inhabited and are now empty or repurposed. These are not only Armenian histories. They are shared histories, entangled with those of Alevis, Kurds, Assyrians, Jews and others who have also faced displacement and erasure.
Justice is not an abstraction. It begins with recognition but cannot end there. At minimum, it requires acknowledging the right of Armenians to their ancestral lands, even if the form that right takes remains unresolved.
What is needed is a different idea of belonging. A commons. A land that belongs to all who have lived, and continue to live, within it. Recognition of complex entanglements across geographies and times.
Only from such a position can critique carry weight. Only then can one speak about the hypocrisies of Europe or the United States, or the violence carried out with their support, without reproducing another form of silence.