Since the year 2000, more than 90 percent of the terror attacks committed around the world have taken place in the east of the "West." Consequently, in the East, terror has been a problem as tangible as a pebble in a shoe. The East shoulders the mutual pain of humanity, while the West lectures on the situation. So to speak, terror is not an intellectual issue we prefer to ponder. However, it is always the West that tells us what terrorism is and how it could be fought and in a peremptory demeanor most of the time.

We have witnessed the latest example in the recent condition stipulated by the EU about revising the anti-terror policies of Ankara in return for lifting visa requirements for Turkish citizens, although Turkey has already deserved visa liberalization due to the Ankara Agreement signed in 1960. 

However, Turkey, which has been kept at the gates of the EU but never allowed in for years, has completed almost all the political benchmarks successfully, while fulfilling such benchmarks were not even asked for from Eastern European democracies. Nevertheless, what is the point of the EU's intervention in an EU candidate country's right of independence and interrogation of its national security policies? Does the EU assume that membership negotiations with Turkey constitute an extension of the Treaty of Sevres signed with Turkey in the aftermath of World War I when Turkish territories were occupied?  

Also, while Turkey has been confronting the threat of terrorism every single day, they have considered suspending the Universal Declaration of Human Rights "on a temporary basis" when faced with terror only several times in Paris and Brussels. What kind of a democracy might they refer to? 

I am not even mentioning the former situation. I would like to point out that Turkey, which has experienced major crises and threats reminiscent of the Paris attack numerous times in the past year, has never resorted to any kind of fascistic security measures as implemented in Europe nowadays.

So, it is evident that this issue does not entail any kind of logic, and what is happening cannot be explained with diplomatic rules and practices because the main source of the contradiction is the biases of the West regarding the East, which are treated almost like "axioms." 

According to the West's deep-seated perception of the East, which was blinded by the silvery light of positivistic values of the Enlightenment, the source of all universal evil in the East is the East's local malignancy. Therefore, they discuss terrorism, which is a "malignant" phenomenon in every region and culture, according to some changeable and erratic criteria depending on whether it takes place in the East or the West. 

For them, if terror strikes Ankara, Istanbul, Kabul, Aleppo or Baghdad, the reason is definitely the sovereign state's authoritarian and exclusionist policies. But if the same terror happens to take place in Paris, Madrid or Brussels, they think that those in charge are organized villains that abuse democracy and freedom enabled by republican regimes. And most of these terrorists come from the "outside" according to them.

With such a perception, neither the West nor the East could get anywhere.

If the West, the U.S. and EU, in particular, do not wish terrorism to become routine in their territories as it has in the East, they have to abandon their old ways of forming relations remaining from the colonialist period and exert some effort to become modernized.

Only after that can we start talking about their terrible records on backing up terrorist groups and returning terrorists that perpetrated violent assaults in eastern countries. 

I think they should not waste any time. Otherwise, the West will burn its last bridges with the East, where journalists, including me, are constantly and anxiously following the losses from each attack, as I am doing for the latest terrorist attack in Diyarbakır province, while writing these very words.