Our Students Met US President Barack Obama!

At a student meeting, President of the United States Barack Obama answered questions from some of the students, among whom were our University's Faculty of Law students Denizcan Demirkılıç, Ece Başaran and Emin Özfatura, and Cemil Abdullah Naseh from the Department of Energy Systems Engineering. To the question asked by our University's Cemil Abdullah Naseh, "What action will you take after having said 'Peace at Home, Peace in the World'? How can we, Turkish youth, help you establish this environment of peace?", the US President replied as follows:

"Some people say I am very idealistic. In Prague I gave a speech about eliminating nuclear weapons. Some said this is 'impossible'; they say, 'why are you trying to make contact with the Iranians?' These are difficult things; I am not naive. If it were easy, someone else would already have achieved it. If we don't aim high, then we will never make any progress. As I said in my opening speech, the most important point we need to start from is dialogue. Even if you speak a different language, you care about your families, you have the same hopes. All these values shared by human beings all over the world are more important than their differences. So this is a very important point for a start. As people get older, they are a little less willing to give up their habits. When I met with the Russian President, we had a very good dialogue. Even though we were both born during the Cold War, our adult years coincided with the period when the Cold War was winding down.

Working for the USA means this: we need to make sure that we act responsibly. While we tell Iran not to develop nuclear weapons, because if you do so everyone in the region will enter this race, we will at the same time say that we will reduce our own nuclear weapons.

If we sincerely tell countries that we care about the well-being of their people too, we need to show that our support programs are meaningful as well. I was talking with my press team a little while ago; they had a good time. They asked why I didn't solve everything on this trip, and I said it has only been a week.

The main idea here is to lay the foundation. Over time you make small efforts, and these add up and turn into great efforts." Cemil Abdullah Naseh, who lived in the USA for 1 year before university as part of the AFS exchange program, says he found President Obama's approach to intercultural dialogue very positive. Naseh commented on Obama's answer to his question as follows: "Peace is something to be achieved by both sides, so establishing dialogue is important. If everyone's goal right now were to establish healthy dialogue, there would be no room for such problems in the world; that's why I find President Obama's steps positive."

Ece Başaran, another student from Bahçeşehir University who attended the session, shared her feelings and expectations about the meeting with NBC correspondent Martin Fletcher for the Nightly News program broadcast on the American NBC television on 5 April 2009. On why President Obama chose Türkiye for his first visit to a Muslim country, Başaran stated that "Türkiye is an important bridge between East and West and has historical and geographical ties with both cultures", and added that she was very excited to meet Obama.

The students who met Barack Obama and had the opportunity to ask him questions at the meeting had also had the opportunity, on Friday, 3 April 2009, to meet university students from 80 countries at the "Istanbul, Capital of Civilizations" conference organized at the Bahçeşehir University Beşiktaş Campus by the Alliance of Civilizations Islamic Conference Youth Forum, the Bahçeşehir University Center for Civilization Studies and the Galatasaray University Faculty of Arts and Sciences.