President Obama Holds Town Hall in Istanbul: WH Live Stream

by A. Tran | April 6, 2009 at 07:24 pm

1083 views | 64 Recommendations | 8 comments

Update: Full transcript of the US - Turkey Town Hall on Apr.7, 2009

President Obama opened the Town Hall in Istanbul with these opening remarks:

I enjoyed visiting your parliament. I've had productive discussions with your President and your Prime Minister. But I also always like to take some time to talk to people directly, especially young people. So in the next few minutes I want to focus on three areas in which I think we can make some progress: advancing dialogue between our two countries, but also advancing dialogue between the United States and the Muslim world; extending opportunity in education and in social welfare; and then also reaching out to young people as our best hope for peaceful, prosperous futures in both Turkey and in the United States.

Apr. 6, 2009

It is apparent to many around the world, and particularly in his first presidential visit to Turkey, a Muslim country, that the US President Obama has gone out of his way to demonstrate the new US administration's foreign policy approaches, which included listening to what the rest of the world is saying. President Obama has also attempted to re-brand America and to present a new image of the American people to the rest of the world.

Before returning to the United States on Apr. 7, President Obama will engage in a unique live and online discussion with a hundred university students from Turkey and various exchange programs. It will be the first time that a US President will be hosting a Q&A session with Turkish audience.

These students represent a diverse attitudes along with wide ranging background and experiences.

The US-Turkey Town Hall will be open and streamed live for online audience around the world in the morning of Apr. 7.

This is the second town hall that President Obama has conducted since Strasbourg, France. As President told the Turkish General Assembly on Apr. 6, "Turkey and the United States must stand together -- and work together -- to overcome the challenges of our time." This town hall discussion would be a first step towards that goal.

The White House has made special arrangement to stream this unique event live at 5:20 AM EST US time, and 12:20 PM Eastern European Summer Time.

The White House has also made exceptional provisions by providing an embed code on its main live-stream page for newspaper websites, blogs, social network, and website around the world to cut and past the code to feature the webcast on their own site. The process will give everyone a form of public domain live feed inside the event.

In Turkey, the social network site Yonja.com has a registration page for people to sign up.

There will be the full transcript and video after the town hall for those Americans who are not awake quite that early.

Check back here for information. The transcript and video link will be posted once they are available to the press and public.

Related Articles on President Obama's European Visits by this Writer:

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Rachel Nixon

at 19:41 on April 6th, 2009

Thanks for previewing this.

A. Tran

at 20:06 on April 6th, 2009

Thank you so much, Rachel, for reading and your recommendation. I appreciate your interest.

I'm quite intrigued by this town hall, given the venue, and the university student audience. The Turkish social website has both English and Turkish invitation to people to sign up. The rest of the site is in Turkish...

A. Tran

at 20:34 on April 6th, 2009

Thank you so much, Esta, for your interest, comment and recommendation. :-) Cheers

The time difference is a bit early for me, but I will watch the video and post the URL for everyone here.

Mary Richard

at 20:49 on April 6th, 2009

It certainly will be interesting to watch, but not interesting enough to get me up at 5 a.m. ;-)

A. Tran

at 21:07 on April 6th, 2009

Thanks so much, Blue Crush, for your read, comment, and recommendation. Not to worry, as I've mentioned above, I'll post the transcript and video URL once the town hall is done.