Edip Yuksel’s Open Warning to

YouTube’s Turkish Team

24 February 2015

My rights protected both by the First Amendment of the USA constitution, and Article 19 of the Declaration of Human Rights have been violated. If your Turkish team does not stop censoring my videos promoting Islamic Reform via critical thinking, I may be forced to launch both LEGAL ACTION and SOCIAL MEDIA CAMPAIGN against you.

I am a Kurdish/Turkish/American author and philosophy professor who have received numerous death fatwas because of my criticism of Sunni, Salafi and Shiite religions. I immigrated to the USA in 1989 just to be free. I a grateful to God for enjoying such a freedom. Yet, I am under constant attack and frequently receive death threats from the followers of various religious leaders in Turkey. They use local political machine and intimidation to censor my appearance on mainstream TV stations and media. No problem. I do not need them. I am using YouTube to promote critical thinking, justice, liberty, human rights and peace.

Unfortunately, a great majority of Sunni/Salafi/Shiite preachers teach bigotry, misogyny, violence and utter ignorance in the name of God, Muhammad, and the saints of their choice. The impact of their false teachings is immense, and they have contributed to horrible events, oppression, repression, misery, backwardness and bloody conflicts around the world.

My main focus is to promote Islamic Reform by inviting people to reason, and providing powerful theological and philosophical arguments for rejecting all fabricated religious sources besides the Quran. By translating the Quran into Turkish and English, I expose the distortions made by clergymen in the interpretations of key verses related to freedom, reasoning, women’s rights, peace and justice. It is a daring and daunting task; but it is worth it.

Currently, my YouTube channel, which is under my name, has about 19 thousand subscribers and it is growing daily. It has more than 500 educational videos, both in Turkish (T) and English (E). Thousands of people have experienced paradigm change after watching those videos. I receive hundreds of emails/messages daily thanking me for changing their lives from religious bigotry and ignorance to critical thinking and desire for peaceful co-existence. Some even gave up joining terrorist groups after watching those videos; they were convinced through my theological, political and philosophical arguments.

I have been receiving FALSE copyright and privacy complaints from some public figures whose public speeches/lectures I have been criticizing. However, recently the number of complaints from Fethullah Gülen, Cübbeli Ahmet, Alpaslan Kuytul, Ebubekir Sifil and other religious/cult leaders have increased dramatically. They reached to the level of harassment. I command YouTube for rejecting those frivolous complaints after evaluating my defenses; but recently, I was surprised to learn that a few of my videos were blocked by YouTube Team in Turkey (See the list below).

These religious charlatans and political demagogues should not be able to escape from intellectual scrutiny by falsely claiming copyrights (for the fair use of their public speeches) or privacy rights (for the fair use of their public speeches). Copyrights or Privacy rights are not recognized by laws to protect the rights of professional religious class fooling masses with false and harmful teachings. I am a lawyer and I teach philosophy; I appreciate legal and ethical concerns regarding privacy and copyrights, but I also stand for my right of free speech if it is taken away through the abuse of such rights, and if YouTube staff is inclined to side with the rich and powerful.

I am concerned that the YouTube office staff dealing with Turkey is not abiding by the First Amendment of the USA Constitution nor by the 19^th Article of Human Rights Declaration. So, I would like to receive a phone call or a non-generic email containing a direct phone number and name of a lawyer representing Youtube in the USA to discuss this issue before it reaches to another phase.

PS: The list of my videos currently blocked in Turkey in violation of Article 19.