Of Kurds and Those Who Observe Them

June was a good month for the Kurds.

That is if you subscribe to the Hollywood adage: “There's no such thing as bad publicity.”

Kurds have had some bad news, for sure, but some good news too.

First the good news: “The Kurds and Iraq: A Winning Hand,” ran a headline in the usually stolid Economist magazine last month. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times went further and wrote, “Kurdistan,” without its “Iraqi” tail (as in Iraqi-Kurdistan), and likened us to Tunisia, as a hopeful example of what is decent in the crude Middle East.

A few days later, after the fall of Mosul, a Texan from Dallas called our office with this inspiring message:

“Just wanted you folks to know there are many Americans out there who are really encouraged by what Kurdistan has accomplished and really hoping you get your independence.”

After a short pause, he continued, “Regardless of what our Secretary of State and everyone else says, go for it! Have a referendum if it helps, but go for independence and screw the rest!”

If you are a Kurd living in America, it can’t get any better than that.

But don’t—not yet anyway—go to the wine cellar to uncork that bottle of Dom Perignon you have been saving for the first birthday of Kurdistan—even if it is going to be a truncated one!

There are also naysayers out there, and not just from that ex-soldier-turned-secretary of state John Kerry.

One that really irked me this past week screamed out from a blog on the website of Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the preeminent American foreign policy organization.

It came from Steven Cook, a supposed “expert” on Turkey and Egypt. But when Kurds made a dash for the city of Kirkuk—to protect their brethren from the savagery of ISIS—he dedicated his condescending entry to us:  “Kurds: Running Before Walking.”

It is supposed to “help” us navigate the quicksand of the Middle Eastern politics.

It does the opposite.

As Kurds, we are used to Arabs, Persians and Turkish ruling circles feeding us poison disguised as medicine, but for an American who grew up idolizing Kennedy and Johnson, doing the dirty work of Middle Eastern tyrants, this is simply—and there’s no other word for it—despicable.

Mr. Cook, unlike most Americans, speaks foreign languages, including Turkish and Arabic.  Growing up in Long Island, New York, “I actually enjoyed watching the news as a kid,” he says, in one of his online interviews.

Well, la-di-da!

This revelation is supposed to make us value him as a serious thinker?

He goes on, “For me, writing is a problem-solving exercise.”

Wow! That’s heavy stuff, Steven!

How many problems have you solved with the magic of your pen?

Or should I say “cooked” with your simplistic fires of fantasy?

Turkish, a language that he speaks, and Turkey, a country that he has visited, has a colossal problem called Kurdish Question—which he totally ignores.

His reports about the forsaken place mostly give us the impression of a fawning bootlicker of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s prime minister—whose state of mind, if not sanity, has now been seriously questioned by the prestigious Turkish Medical Association.

“I met him,” Mr. Cook gleefully oozed about the Turkish premier.

Boy, howdy!  That’s heady stuff!

“He is physically a formidable person. He towered over me. He gave me a nice tie with his initials on the back,” he recently told a Washington crowd.

This prompted one Turk to note, “Sounds like you had a crush on him!”

Did you, Steve?

Two thousand years ago, a famous man asked: “What shall it profit a man if he gained the whole world, but lost his soul?

But for a necktie?

That’s cheaper than 30 pieces of silver!

Writing in his blog, Mr. Cook lauds Mr. Erdogan as “the ultimate expression of a new Turkish man—strong, emotional, pious, confident, and clear-eyed and unapologetic about Turkey’s greatness.”

This sounds more like a flashy ad for a gay magazine.

Thank God, Steven Cook is not the only one who has observed the Turkish prime minister, who not long ago fomented hatred against a grieving Kurdish mom whose son was murdered by Turkish police.

This prompted the usually non-political Turkish Medical Association to issue this unusual, grave warning on its website:

“We are anxious about the emotional state of Prime Minister Erdogan. We are seriously concerned for him … and for our country.”

The medical doctors declared that a “normal” person “would never ask his supporters to heckle a mother who had lost her son two days earlier,” and that a “normal” person would “never declare a 15-year-old child shot in the head while going to buy bread to be a terrorist.”

What a contrast!

While Mr. Cook slobbers all over Prime Minister Erdogan from afar with lavish praise, those close to him, and who know him far better, sternly warn they are “anxious” about his “emotional state.”

Then there is Steven Cook’s take on the Kurds and Kurdistan. Like Turks, he is allergic to the latter word and avoids it like a plague. As to the first, instead of talking to us, he has accepted the Turkish definition for the Kurds.

And how do the Turks define us for Steven Cook?

Just like Osama Bin Laden’s definition of Americans: The best ones are the dead ones!

Because dead ones, as the Latin saying goes, can’t bite.

In Steven’s case, though, it happens in Dogubeyazit, a Kurdish town in Turkish-Kurdistan, while he was eating in a restaurant and encountered “large men, dressed in black and toting military rifles.”

He soon discovered they were Turkish soldiers, presumably fighting the PKK, who warned them “in the nicest way possible for guys with large guns, that we should not leave our hotel after dark.”

He and his friend “appreciated the heads-up and were a bit freaked out that we stupidly stumbled into a war zone, and grabbed the first bus out of town the next morning.”

You would have thought Steven, “problem solver” that he allegedly is, might have wondered why Turks were killing the Kurds, and wanted to help.

Nope, he ran away from the problem—like a scared rabbit when it hears a noise.

Kurds have long heard the Turkish war drums that Steven Cook ran away from.

As to his advising Kurds to learn how to walk before making a dash for freedom, we should firmly reject that in favor of noted English historian and author Lord Thomas Macaulay, who likened such idiocy to “the fool who resolved not go into the water until he had learned to swim.”

If men wait for liberty till they become good slaves, Lord Macaulay wisely asserted some 150 years ago: “They may indeed wait forever.”

Kurds have waited far too long for freedom, and should heed the warning of former American President James Madison, who thundered:

“It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.”

Thanks—but no thanks, Steven Cook.  We long-oppressed, subjugated Kurds will run anytime—and at breakneck speed, rather than leisurely walk—toward the warm, balmy sunshine of freedom!