Selahattin Ülkümen

There are more Muslims entered into the rolls of Yad Vashem and altogether a larger story.

Here I would like to suggest a few things not mentioned.

First, the role of religion, any, may be less important as regards the energizing of a seemingly religious conflict than the attitudes, beliefs, characteristics in personality (e.g., charisma, narcissism) and self-concept of leaders and the followers attracted to them that together comprise malignant subcultures and, at times, malignant societies.

Next: I believe, albeit not quite superstitiously, that language holds the content, shape, and interests of each mind together, and that “language uptake” includes the internalization of intergenerational attitudes, beliefs, and social behaviors. To de-energize what drives some men, usually, although there have been “black widows”, to blow up innocents, much less offing 14-year-old Pashtun school girls, wants for getting into that living language machinery at perhaps overlooked and very early developmental levels.

For this educated and highly literate group, I’ll stop here: the basic experience of language is mouth-to-ear, not text-based, and ears are conduits to signal discerning minds.

We’re a curious species, always listening (from womb to tomb, probably), always filtering and discerning.

The behavior that deflects attention from culpability for crime or disaster, that extols virtue, virtuously, on one hand and denies all presence of or association with evil in some part gets its start somewhere in the narrative of personal development.

A tank (or drone) cannot be aimed at that, but a switch in signal — example, expression — can (or so one may hope).