It was 60 years ago; I was at the middle school in a factory town in Anatolia when our Kennedy-era Peace Corps teacher, Mr. F. Pickering, was trying to teach us Martin Luther King Jr.’s (MLK) "I Have a Dream" speech. The March on Washington had happened during our summer break; this young man was fresh from participating in it, and, having listed to "The Man" himself, he was extremely excited about it.

The term "human rights" was so new in the world that Mr. Pickering had to find a proper translation of it in Turkish. Yet, the idea that percolating from the entire speech was so germane to our "Turkishness" that several of us adopted an attitude showing it didn’t impress us much. "Of course," we’d say with our limited but well-ingrained religious wisdom, "an Arab Muslim cannot be superior to a non-Arab Muslim." Even though as middle-school pupils, we were not yet well-versed in Islamic teachings, we knew that much.

The Prophet Muhammad said: "All mankind is from Adam and Eve, an Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab nor a non-Arab has any superiority over an Arab; also, a white has no superiority over a black nor a black has any superiority over white except by piety and good action."

Mr. Pickering, always mindful of the Peace Corps rule that he should avoid entering into religion-related discussions, had to make an exception and talk about the anti-supremacist belief that the Old and the New Testaments upheld as Islam does. It’s been 60 years, but I still repeat it word for word:

"Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him" (1 John: 3:15).

Then, why did this person have to start a new crusade to make this simple, self-evident, eternally true and humane "rule" be known and observed in a modern nation in a modern age? Our young teacher had to fight back his tears when he tried to answer this simple question. He had to forget for an hour that it was English class and turn it into a U.S. History 101. For the first time, my fellow students and I were learning that "slavery" was something very different from the one we heard about and that had taken place at the Ottoman palace. It was the first time we heard that even though it did not refer directly to slaves, the U.S. Constitution, in Article 1, Section 2, declared that any person who was not free would be counted as three-fifths of a free individual for the purposes of determining congressional representation. The Ku Klux Klan was not mysterious hooded horsemen like "night riders" in the matinee movies! Their primary targets were African Americans, Hispanics, Jews, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and, yes, Muslims!

We still had questions for Mr. Pickering: Why do the "good" people, who believe in their scriptures, allow themselves to commit the "crime of hate"? I do not remember exactly how our young teacher, who, I am sure, had no experience in rhetorical discussion with his Turkish students other than teaching them tenses and verbs, nouns and adverbs, answered this question. Neither do I know anyone experienced in rhetorical issues could answer this question even today. But I know this: No scripture nor law has yet been able to make humanity accept that hating another human being is a crime.

We should have many more MLKs, delivering the same sermon so very often, and many more marches on Washington and other capitals to make those sermons heard.

It was like yesterday that this idealistic Peace Corps teacher from Kennebunkport, Massachusetts came all the way from Washington, D.C. to that remote factory town in the desert of Anatolia to share the impression he had of Martin Luther King, Jr., and translate and interpret the "I Have a Dream" speech for us the boys and girls with bewildered eyes, half believing that "the white people hate the black people."

'Supremacy'

After spending almost three decades among them, now I know Mr. Pickering was telling the truth. Sixty years later, in the country of those boys and girls who would not believe that people would hate other people because of the color of their skin, now we, with bewildered eyes, are witnessing something new: Some people in my country, in this beautiful Türkiye, hate other people because of their identity. Sixty years later after its first delivery in Washington, D.C., MLK’s words strike us in this beautiful land of ours: Some people do hate others because of their racial and ethnic identity.

The root of this hate is racial supremacy! Some people are trying to find excuses for this unacceptable attitude. No, it is not, and it never was their economic worries. They did the same absurdity in the U.S.: "The African Americans are going to take all the jobs and I won’t be able to feed my family!"

Türkiye would do well to learn the lesson that MLK had been teaching all his life.

Perhaps not as dramatic as in the United States yet, where only a few days before the 60th Anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech and the March on Washington three more innocent people were murdered in Jacksonville, Florida because of the color of their skin, but recently Türkiye has been witnessing similar hate crimes.

Americans blame the country’s lax gun control laws for fueling the ongoing wave of violence in the U.S. The gunman used a military-grade assault rifle and left behind a manifesto saying he hated Black people. That the gunman’s rifle was emblazoned with swastikas brought to attention the steep rise of neo-Nazism and white supremacist tendencies in the U.S.

In Türkiye, we have very strict firearm control laws; and we are not witnessing a steep rise of racist groups clad in Nazi uniforms, donning machine guns and parading with swastika flags. However, we are now seeing more often than not incidents of people being beaten within an inch of their lives. They are usually what the people have started labeling as "Syrians," even if they all are not from Syria. It is still difficult to call these attacks "racially motivated" because it is literally impossible to tell a Syrian or an Afghan immigrant from a regular citizen of Türkiye; many of those terribly battered people turn out to be someone born and raised in Türkiye. Our country, itself, is multi-ethnic and the indigenous people are hardly differentiated from each other by their physical appearance. Yet, those thugs, acting under the rallying cries of one certain political party and of one certain leader of that group, scare the living daylights out of me because I can see the resemblance of them to those neo-Nazis who would practice firearms on the West Virginia mountains – something my wife and I had happened upon in our photographic excursions. They had not yet organized parades on the streets of the old Confederate states, but they were there, anyhow; and we used to see them practicing their target-shooting skills. They used to enjoy all the liberty and human rights we used to enjoy only to get more organized and stronger so that they could seek to annul the human rights guarantees as they do today.

Türkiye’s "black" people are refugees and asylum-seekers. Of course, they are under international protection. But the racist leader of that so-called right-wing nationalist party warns his followers of a potential civil war between Syrians and Turks. He pumps up the official number of refugees and asylum-seekers from 5 million (half a million of them had already been repatriated last year in accordance with the Turkish government and U.N. plans). He fabricates the number of countries that send refugees to Türkiye. He talks talk through his... you know! He feigns he has inside information from former military colleagues; he says there are 2 million Afghan refugees, 2 million refugees from Africa, and 2 million people from Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, and other countries residing in Türkiye. In his last count, the number of foreigners was around 13 million, which is still not good enough to start a civil war; so, in the coming weeks, we might see the number go up. A year ago, he alleged that 900,000 Syrian refugees were conferred citizenship; six months later the number climbed to 1.5 million.

The so-called Türkiye experts try to cushion the ever-growing danger that the party and the followers of its leader "Turkey's xenophobic" and "nativist firebrand"; but his lies are used in arguments and by his thugs who are already targeting "Syrians."

Hitler, Mussolini and Klansmen started with similar lies. Nobody would assume that those thugs roughing up a Jewish youth would one day become the SS and SA troops killing millions of people.

What is scarier than the existence of such a political party, its provocations, and a few horrific attacks of small groups on any person they think from Syria seems to be the fact that the main opposition party of Türkiye, which was close to winning the presidential polls last May, has made secret deals and signed a secret protocol with them promising important ministries and even the chairmanship of the national intelligence apparatus.

Türkiye narrowly escaped a major racial calamity last May. We have many things to learn from Martin Luther King Jr., to keep race issues out of politics.