WEBVTT

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When I was a child,
I knew I had superpowers.

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That's right.

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I thought I was absolutely amazing
because I could understand

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and relate to the feelings
of brown people,

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like my grandfather,
a conservative Muslim guy.

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And also, I could understand
my Afghan mother, my Pakistani father,

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not so religious but
laid-back, fairly liberal.

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And of course, I could understand
and relate to the feelings of white people.

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The white Norwegians of my country.

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You know, white, brown, whatever,

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I loved them all.

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I understood them all,

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even if they didn't always
understand each other,

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they were all my people.

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My father, though,
was always really worried.

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He kept saying that
even with the best education,

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I was not going to get a fair shake.

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I would still face discrimination,
according to him.

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And that they only way
to be accepted by white people

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would be to become famous.

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Now mind you, he had this conversation
with me when I was seven-years-old.

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So while I'm seven-years-old,
he said, look,

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so its either got to be sports,
or its got to be music.

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He didn't know anything about sports --
bless him -- so it was music.

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So when I was seven-years-old,
he gathered all my toys, all my dolls,

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and he threw them all away.

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In exchange he gave me
a crappy little Casio keyboard

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and singing lessons.

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He forced me, basically, to practice
for hours and hours every single day.

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Very quickly, he also had me performing
for larger and larger audiences,

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and bizarrely, I became almost
a kind of poster child

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for Norwegian multi-culturalism.

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I felt very proud, of course.

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Because even the 
newspapers at this point

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were starting to write
nice things about brown people,

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so I could feel that
my superpower was growing.

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So when I was 12-years-old,
walking home from school,

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I took a little detour
because I wanted to buy

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my favorite sweets called Salty Feets.

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I know they sound kind of awful,

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but I absolutely love them.

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They're basically these little salty
licorice bits in the shape of feet.

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And now that I say it out loud,
I realize how terrible that sounds,

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but be that as it may,
I absolutely love them.

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So on my way into the store,

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there was this grown white guy
in the doorway blocking my way,

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So I tried to walk around him,
and as I did that, he stopped me

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and he was staring at me,
and he spit in my face,

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and he said, get out of my way

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you little black bitch,
you little Paki bitch,

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go back home
where you came from.

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I was absolutely horrified.

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I was staring at him.

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I was too afraid to wipe
the spit off my face,

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even as it was mixing with my tears.

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I remember looking around,
hoping that any minute now,

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a grown-up is going to come 
and make this guy stop.

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But instead, people kept hurrying past me
and pretended not to see me.

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I was very confused
because I was thinking, well

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my white people, come on!
Where are they? What's going on?

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How come they're not
coming and rescuing me?

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So, needless to say,
I didn't buy the sweets.

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I just ran home as fast as I could.

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Things were still okay, though, I thought.

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As time went on, the more successful
I became, I eventually started also

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attracting harassment from brown people.

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Some men in my parent's community
felt that it was unacceptable

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and dishonorable for a woman
to be involved in music

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and to be so present in the media.

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So very quickly, I was starting to become
attacked at my own concerts.

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I remember one of the concerts,
I was onstage, I lean into the audience

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and the last thing I see is
a young brown face

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and the next thing I know is some sort
of chemical is thrown in my eyes

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and I remember I couldn't really see
and my eyes were watering

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but I kept singing anyway.

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I was spit in the face in the streets
of Oslo, this time by brown men.

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They even tried to
kidnap me at one point.

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The death threats were endless.

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I remember one older bearded guy
stopped me in the street one time,

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and he said, the reason
I hate you so much

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is because you make
our daughters think

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they can do whatever they want.

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A younger guy warned me
to watch my back.

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He said music is un-Islamic
and the job of whores,

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and if you keep this up,
you are going to be raped

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and your stomach will be cut out so that
another whore like you will not be born.

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Again, I was so confused.

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I couldn't understand
what was going on.

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My brown people now starting
to treat me like this -- how come?

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Instead of bridging the worlds, 
the two worlds,

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I felt like I was failling
between my two worlds.

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I suppose, for me, spit was kryptonite.

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So by the time I was 17-years-old,
the death threats were endless,

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and the harassment was constant.

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It got so bad, at one point my mother
sat me down and said, look,

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we can no longer protect you,
we can no longer keep you safe,

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so you're going to have to go.

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So I bought a one-way ticket to London,
I packed my suitcase, and I left.

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My biggest heartbreak at that point
was that nobody said anything.

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I had a very public exit from Norway.

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My brown people, my white people,
nobody said anything.

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Nobody said, hold on, this is wrong.

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Support this girl, protect this girl,
because she is one of us.

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Nobody said that.

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Instead, I felt like,
you know at the airport,

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on the baggage carousel
you have these different suitcases

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going around and around

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and there's always that one
suitcase left at the end,

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the one that nobody wants,
the one that nobody comes to claim.

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I felt like that.

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I'd never felt so alone.
I'd never felt so lost.

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So, after coming to London,
I did eventually resume my music career.

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Different place, but unfortunately
the same old story.

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I remember a message sent to me
saying that I was going to be killed

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and that rivers of blood were going
to flow and that I was going to be raped

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many times before I died.

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By this point, I have to say,

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I was actually getting used
to messages like this,

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but what became different was that
now they started threatening my family.

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So once again, I packed my suitcase,
I left music and I moved to the US.

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I'd had enough.

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I didn't want to have anything
to do with this anymore.

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And I was certainly not
going to be killed for something

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that wasn't even my dream --
it was my father's choice.

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So I kind of got lost.
I kind of fell apart.

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But I decided that what I wanted to do
is spend the next however many years

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of my life supporting young people
and to try to be there in some small way,

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whatever way that I could.

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I started volunteering for various
organizations that were working

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with young Muslims inside of Europe.


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And, to my surprise, what I found
was so many of these young people

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were suffering and struggling.

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They were facing so many problems
with their families and their communities

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who seemed to care more about
their honor and their reputation

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than the happiness and the
llives of their own kids.

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I started feeling like maybe I wasn't
so alone, maybe I wasn't so weird.

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Maybe there are more of
my people out there.

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The thing is -- what most people
don't understand --

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is that there are so many of us
growing up in Europe

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who are not free to be ourselves.

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We're not allowed to be who we are.

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We are not free to marry or to be in
relationships with people that we choose.

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We can't even pick our own career.

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This is the norm in the
Muslim heartlands of Europe.

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Even in the freest societies
in the world, we're not free.

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Our lives, our dreams, our future
does not belong to us,

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it belongs to our parents
and their community.

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I found endless stories of young people
who are lost to all of us,

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who are invisible to all of us
but who are suffering

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and they are suffering alone.

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Kids we are losing to forced marriages,
to honor-based violence and abuse.

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Eventually, I realized after several
years of working with these young people,

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that I will not be able to keep running.

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I can't spend the rest of my life
being scared and hiding

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and that I'm actually going
to have to do something.

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And I also realized that
my silence, our silence,

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allows abuse like this to continue.

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So I decided that I wanted to put
my childhood superpower to some use

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by trying to make people on the different
sides of these issues understand

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what its like to be a young person stuck
between your family and your country.

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So I started making films
and I started telling these stories.

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I also wanted people to understand
the deadly consequences of us

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not taking these problems seriously.

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So the first film I made was about Banaz.

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She was a 17-year-old
Kurdish girl in London.

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She was obedient, she did
whatever her parents wanted.

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She tried to do everything right.

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She married some guy that
her parents chose for her,

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even though he beat
and raped her constantly.

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And when she tried to go
to her family for help, they said,

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well you got to go back,
and be a better wife.

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Because they didn't want
a divorced daughter on their hands

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because, of course, that would
bring dishonor on the family.

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She was beaten so badly
her ears would bleed,

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and when she finally left and
she found a young man that she chose

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and she fell in love with,
the community and the family found out

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and she disappeared.

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She was found three months later.

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She'd been stuffed into a suitcase
and buried underneath the house.

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She had been strangled,
she had been beaten to death

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by three men, three cousins,
on the orders of her father and uncle.

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The added tragedy of Banaz's story
is that she had gone to the police

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in England five times asking for help,

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telling them that she was
going to be killed by her family.

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The police didn't believe her
so they didn't do anything.

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And the problem with this is that
not only are so many of our kids

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facing this problem within their families
and within their families' communities,

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but they're also
meeting misunderstandings

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and apathy in the countries
that they grow up in.

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When their own families betray them,
they look to the rest of us,

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and when we don't understand,
we lose them.

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So while I was making this film,
several people said to me:

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Well, Deeyah, you know,
this is just their culture,

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this is just what those people do to
their kids and we can't really interfere.

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I can assure you being murdered
is not my culture -- you know?

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And surely people who look like me,

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young women who come
from backgrounds like me,

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should be subject to the same rights,
the same protections,

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as anybody else in our country, why not?

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So, for my next film, I wanted
to try and understand why

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some of our young Muslim kids in Europe
are drawn to extremism and violence.

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But with that topic,
I also recognized that

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I was going to have to face my worst fear:

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the brown men with beards.

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The same men, or similar men, to the ones
that have hounded me for most of my life.

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Men that I've been afraid of
most of my life.

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Men that I've also deeply disliked,
for many, many years.

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So I spent the next two years
interviewing convicted terrorists,

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jihadis and former extremists.

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What I already knew,
what was very obvious already,

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was that religion, politics,
Europe's colonial baggage, also

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Western foreign policy
failures of recent years,

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were all a part of the picture.

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But what I was more interested
in finding out was what are the human,

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what are the personal
reasons why some of

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our young people are
susceptible to groups like this.

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And what really surprised me
was that I found wounded human beings.

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Instead of the monsters that I was
looking for, that I was hoping to find --

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quite frankly because it 
would have been very satisfying --

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I found broken people.

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Just like Banaz, I found that these
young men were torn apart from trying

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to bridge the gaps between their families
and the countries that they were born in.

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And what I also learned is that
extremist groups, terrorist groups

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are taking advantage of these
feelings of our young people

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and channeling that cynically,
channeling that toward violence.

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Come to us, they say. "Reject both sides,
your family and your country

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because they reject you.

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For your family, their honor is more
important than you and for your country,

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a real Norwegian, Brit, or a French person
will always be white and never you."

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They're also promising our young people
the things that they crave:

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significance, heroism,
a sense of belonging and purpose,

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a community that loves
and accepts them.

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They make the powerless feel powerful.

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The invisible and the silent
are finally seen and heard.

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This is what they're doing
for our young people.

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Why are these groups doing this
for our young people and not us?

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The thing is, I'm not trying to justify
or excuse any of the violence.

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What I am trying to say is that
we have to understand

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why some of our young people
are attracted to this.

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I would like to also show you, actually,
these are childhood photos

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of some of the guys in the film.

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What really struck me is
that so many of them

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-- I never would have thought this --

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but so many of them have
absent or abusive fathers.

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And several of these young guys ended up
finding caring and compassionate

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father figures within
these extremist groups.

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I also found men brutalized
by racist violence, but who found a way

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to stop feeling like victims
by becoming violent themselves.

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In fact, I found something,
to my horror, that I recognized.

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I found the same feelings that I felt
as a 17-year-old as I fled from Norway.

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The same confusion, the same sorrow,
the same feeling of being betrayed

00:15:35.039 --> 00:15:37.033
and not belonging to anyone.

00:15:38.836 --> 00:15:41.668
The same feeling of being lost
and torn between cultures.


00:15:42.941 --> 00:15:45.643
Having said that,
I did not choose destruction,

00:15:45.643 --> 00:15:47.756
I chose to pick up a camera
instead of a gun.

00:15:48.202 --> 00:15:51.300
And the reason I did that
is because of my superpower.

00:15:51.759 --> 00:15:55.937
I could see that understanding
is the answer, instead of violence.

00:15:56.731 --> 00:16:01.274
Seeing human beings with all
their virtues and all their flaws

00:16:01.914 --> 00:16:03.804
instead of continuing the caricatures:

00:16:04.047 --> 00:16:06.209
the us and them,
the villains and victims.

00:16:06.535 --> 00:16:10.526
I'd also finally come to terms with
the fact that my two cultures

00:16:10.659 --> 00:16:12.549
didn't have to be on a collision course

00:16:12.549 --> 00:16:15.549
but instead became a space
where I found my own voice.

00:16:16.039 --> 00:16:20.576
I stopped feeling like I had to pick
a side, but this took me many, many years.

00:16:21.718 --> 00:16:24.424
There are so many of our young people
today who are struggling

00:16:24.424 --> 00:16:27.531
with these same issues and
they're struggling with this alone.

00:16:29.537 --> 00:16:32.003
And this leaves them
open like wounds.

00:16:32.879 --> 00:16:37.767
And for some, the worldview of radical
Islam becomes the infection that festers

00:16:38.074 --> 00:16:40.153
in these open wounds.

00:16:41.332 --> 00:16:43.999
There's an African proverb that says,

00:16:45.877 --> 00:16:48.742
if the young are not initiated
into the village,

00:16:49.309 --> 00:16:52.403
they will burn it down
just to feel its warmth.

00:16:53.420 --> 00:16:57.699
I would like to ask to Muslim
parents and Muslim communities,

00:16:58.440 --> 00:17:01.915
will you love and care for
your children without forcing them

00:17:01.915 --> 00:17:03.541
to meet your expectations?

00:17:03.541 --> 00:17:06.035
Can you choose them instead of your honor?

00:17:06.617 --> 00:17:10.576
Can you understand why they're so angry
and alienated when you put your honor

00:17:10.576 --> 00:17:12.818
before their happiness?

00:17:12.936 --> 00:17:16.427
Can you try to be a friend to your child
so that they can trust you

00:17:17.059 --> 00:17:19.366
and want to share with you
their experiences,

00:17:19.455 --> 00:17:21.796
rather than having
to seek it somewhere else?

00:17:22.607 --> 00:17:25.739
And to our young people,
tempted by extremism,

00:17:26.845 --> 00:17:30.523
can you acknowledge that
your rage is fueled by pain?

00:17:31.791 --> 00:17:35.115
Will you find the strength to resist
those cynical old men

00:17:35.314 --> 00:17:38.275
who want to use your blood
for their own profits?

00:17:39.290 --> 00:17:41.918
Can you find a way to live?

00:17:42.164 --> 00:17:44.417
Can you see that the sweetest revenge

00:17:44.417 --> 00:17:47.254
is for you to live a happy,
full and free life?

00:17:47.929 --> 00:17:50.669
A life defined by you and nobody else.

00:17:50.871 --> 00:17:53.878
Why do you want to become
just another dead Muslim kid?

00:17:55.331 --> 00:17:59.164
And for the rest of us, when will we start
listening to our young people?

00:18:00.743 --> 00:18:03.759
How can we support them
in re-directing their pain

00:18:03.899 --> 00:18:06.211
into something more constructive?

00:18:06.937 --> 00:18:08.406
They think we don't like them.

00:18:08.406 --> 00:18:10.678
They think we don't care
what happens to them.

00:18:11.212 --> 00:18:12.756
They think we don't accept them.

00:18:13.086 --> 00:18:15.374
Can we find a way to make
them feel differently?

00:18:17.591 --> 00:18:21.540
What will it take for us to see them
and notice them before they become

00:18:21.840 --> 00:18:24.768
either the victims or
the perpetrators of violence?

00:18:25.187 --> 00:18:28.560
Can we make ourselves care about them
and consider them to be our own?

00:18:29.094 --> 00:18:33.251
And not just be outraged when the victims
of violence look like ourselves?

00:18:33.690 --> 00:18:38.675
Can we find a way to reject hatred
and heal the divisions between us?

00:18:39.157 --> 00:18:42.714
The thing is, we cannot afford to give up
on each other or on our kids,

00:18:42.941 --> 00:18:45.010
even if they've given up on us.

00:18:45.370 --> 00:18:47.460
We are all in this together.

00:18:47.460 --> 00:18:52.113
And in the long term, revenge and violence
will not work against extremists.

00:18:53.795 --> 00:18:59.222
Terrorists want us to huddle in our houses
in fear, closing our doors and our hearts.

00:18:59.794 --> 00:19:03.353
They want us to tear open
more wounds in our societies

00:19:03.429 --> 00:19:06.833
so that they can use them to spread
their infection more widely.

00:19:07.148 --> 00:19:12.729
They want us to become like them:
intolerant, hateful and cruel.

00:19:14.364 --> 00:19:20.053
The day after the Paris attacks, a friend
of mine sent this photo of her daughter.

00:19:20.995 --> 00:19:23.383
This is a white girl and an Arab girl.

00:19:23.383 --> 00:19:24.974
They're best friends.

00:19:25.567 --> 00:19:28.611
This image is the kryptonite
for extremists.

00:19:31.486 --> 00:19:35.298
These two little girls with
their superpowers are showing

00:19:35.298 --> 00:19:39.013
the way forward towards a society
that we need to build together,

00:19:40.231 --> 00:19:46.677
a society that includes and supports,
rather than rejects our kids.

00:19:48.245 --> 00:19:50.099
Thank you for listening.

00:19:50.629 --> 00:19:52.184
(Applause)