This is Ceylan Özbudak
Ceylan Özbudak is a Turkish peace activist. She graduated from Istanbul University as a language major and is Executive Director and TV host on A9 TV, a satellite TV network based in Istanbul. Ceylan also hosts the Building Bridges Show, which has featured many prominent Middle East experts, authors, academician and religious leaders.
Ceylan Özbudak has just published this in the Times of Israel
I am a Muslim. And a devout Muslim. I love all Muslims very dearly. My love is for all believers. Right now it is impossible to support the loss of innocent lives in both Israel and Palestine. So far, more than 130 Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed.
Direct peace talks should immediately begin and both sides should consent to this. Otherwise, whichever international laws we look at, launching rockets at a state and causing the deaths of its citizens attracts a right to reprisal. In this way, both sides justify their actions by consider the strikes as defense on their part. Besides, even if unintentionally, Hamas is putting Palestine in the wrong in the eyes of international organizations by constantly adopting this mistaken approach.
If the Palestinians wish to enjoy greater justification, the way to do this is not by slaughtering innocent people on the other side. Such attacks during a state of peace will attract a reprisal anywhere in the world. Civilian people in Israel are living in fear in shelters due to the rockets fired from Gaza. There has been blind conflict between the two sides for many years now; the children of Israel on the one side and the children of Ishmael on the other. These two peoples that should be living side by side in peace in those ancient, lovely lands are fighting one another instead.
Many people in Palestine I have spoken to are exceedingly alarmed by this behavior of Hamas’s and do not support attacks on the innocent people of Israel. There is nothing to support in this behavior, which will clearly never produce any results and that merely causes destruction. If people support that and say they are Muslims, then they are unfamiliar with the commandments of the Quran. Whether or not the response to these attacks is a just one, is another matter.
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I am speechless. I am without speech. Except to say that if this isn't a case for the Geoffff's Joint Peace Prize I don't know what is.
hat tip Israel Thives (who has more pictures)
"If the Palestinians wish to enjoy greater justification, the way to do this is not by slaughtering innocent people on the other side. Such attacks during a state of peace will attract a reprisal anywhere in the world. Civilian people in Israel are living in fear in shelters due to the rockets fired from Gaza. There has been blind conflict between the two sides for many years now; the children of Israel on the one side and the children of Ishmael on the other. These two peoples that should be living side by side in peace in those ancient, lovely lands are fighting one another instead."
ReplyDeleteIt is incredibly brave to speak like this in public even in formerly secular but now Islamist leaning Turkey.
I don't know that it's brave. A very young and very beautiful woman can say exactly what millions of adults have said before, and be treated as both wise and brave. That's the way of human perception! Not a criticism, statement of the obvious.
ReplyDeleteI think she is actually older than she looks, Caz
ReplyDeleteShe's thirty
ReplyDeletehttp://truthjihadradio.blogspot.com.au/2012/07/turkish-tv-commentator-ceylan-ozbudak.html
"... a 30 year old Middle East peace activist and expert in Middle East politics and anti-Darwinist, anti-materialist activism.
ReplyDelete"anti-Darwinist activism"?
I'm not sure which side of Darwin she is active but that sounds pretty Islamic to me.
Yes, as does anti-materialism (wouldn't want to raise the living standards of Muslim women and children now, would we).
DeleteHer believe that Islam is a peaceful religion is naive, or ignorance of her religion.
And let's face it, Islam is like all other religions: man made, to enforce what misogynistic men want in the world, including retention of their perverted power.
They all do seem to have an obsessive interest in sex, Ill certainly grant you that.
DeleteWas not going on looks, thought I read she was 19 - don't know how I read that!
ReplyDeleteComment still holds: not something no one else has ever said.
But then, you know this whole thing looks more and more absurd, as does the whole of Islam - it's 2012, and THIS bullshit is like a couple of three year olds throwing tantrums at a play date. The Middle East is stuck in some ancient era, and it's baffling to think they live the way they do, baffling to think of children being married off to old guys, baffling to think that women are segregated and not permitted to be educated and advance themselves and their families. It's beyond belief if you dwell on it.
Yet, it's all treated so seriously, as if this is NORMAL.
It isn't.
Won't change in our lifetime, either, which is intellectually indefensible.
Can only conclude the whole world is a basket case if they can't change any of this, if appeasement of the truly unacceptable is considered politically correct!
Feminism in the West has still gained precious little (more women graduate from university than men in Oz, yet fewer than 10 per cent are good enough to be on a board or a CEO, rather beggars belief, doesn't it), other than contributing to the engine of capitalism. Still no week goes by in which a woman isn't murdered by her partner or former partner, and that's only the women killed, let's not attempt any dodgy estimates of the day to day violence and fear, not to mention raunch culture and other objectification across every thread of society.
ReplyDeleteIn the West, though, women never had to fight for existence, human acknowledgement, the way they need to in Muslim lands - which as you note, seem to be spreading, even across Africa.
Hand in hand with the treatment of women goes the continued stifling of economic and cultural growth. But that's the basis of Islam: no evolution, no thought. Do you know how many Islamic books are published each year, just by the way? Do you know just how badly shackled both Muslim men and women are to a singular ancient text?
The figure is abysmal. More foreign books get translated into Navajo wind-song than Arabic. Yet they still have the resources to translate "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and hand it out in bookshops and mosques all around the world.
ReplyDelete