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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(Laughter)

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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

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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 the 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,

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"Look, so it's either got to be sports,
or it's 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 and --

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(Laughter)

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Yeah. And singing lessons.

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And 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 multiculturalism.

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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

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because I wanted to buy
my favorite sweets called "salty feet."

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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,

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and he spit in my face, and he said,

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"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 OK, though, I thought.

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As time went on,
the more successful I became,

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I eventually started also
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 falling
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,

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the death threats were endless,
and the harassment was constant.

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

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"Look, 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

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and that I was going to be raped
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.

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I kind of fell apart.

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But I decided that what I wanted to do

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is spend the next
however many years of my life

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supporting young people

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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

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that were working
with young Muslims inside of Europe.

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And, to my surprise, what I found was

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so many of these young people
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 lives 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

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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

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who are lost to all of us,

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who are invisible to all of us

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but who are suffering,
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 it's 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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And 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,

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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

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is that she had gone to the police
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.

NOTE Paragraph

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And the problem with this

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is that not only are so many of our kids
facing these problems

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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,

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we lose them.

NOTE Paragraph

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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

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and we can't really interfere."

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I can assure you
being murdered is not my culture.

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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?

NOTE Paragraph

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

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why some of our young
Muslim kids in Europe

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are drawn to extremism and violence.

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But with that topic,

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I also recognized that 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,

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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,

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for many, many years.

NOTE Paragraph

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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,

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also 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

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why some of 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,

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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,

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I found that these young men
were torn apart

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from trying to bridge the gaps

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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.

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"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

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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?

NOTE Paragraph

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The thing is,

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I'm not trying to justify

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or excuse any of the violence.

00:14:31.480 --> 00:14:35.056
What I am trying to say
is that we have to understand

00:14:35.080 --> 00:14:38.240
why some of our young people
are attracted to this.

00:14:39.680 --> 00:14:42.016
I would like to also show you, actually --

00:14:42.040 --> 00:14:45.320
these are childhood photos
of some of the guys in the film.

00:14:47.240 --> 00:14:50.200
What really struck me
is that so many of them --

00:14:50.960 --> 00:14:52.616
I never would have thought this --

00:14:52.640 --> 00:14:55.960
but so many of them
have absent or abusive fathers.

00:14:56.800 --> 00:14:58.736
And several of these young guys

00:14:58.760 --> 00:15:02.896
ended up finding caring
and compassionate father figures

00:15:02.920 --> 00:15:04.520
within these extremist groups.

00:15:05.920 --> 00:15:09.080
I also found men
brutalized by racist violence,

00:15:09.800 --> 00:15:12.056
but who found a way
to stop feeling like victims

00:15:12.080 --> 00:15:13.576
by becoming violent themselves.

00:15:13.600 --> 00:15:18.896
In fact, I found something,
to my horror, that I recognized.

00:15:18.920 --> 00:15:25.240
I found the same feelings that I felt
as a 17-year-old as I fled from Norway.

00:15:26.160 --> 00:15:29.536
The same confusion, the same sorrow,

00:15:29.560 --> 00:15:33.040
the same feeling of being betrayed

00:15:34.760 --> 00:15:36.360
and not belonging to anyone.

00:15:38.560 --> 00:15:41.680
The same feeling of being lost
and torn between cultures.

NOTE Paragraph

00:15:42.760 --> 00:15:45.296
Having said that,
I did not choose destruction,

00:15:45.320 --> 00:15:48.056
I chose to pick up a camera
instead of a gun.

00:15:48.080 --> 00:15:51.416
And the reason I did that
is because of my superpower.

00:15:51.440 --> 00:15:56.336
I could see that understanding
is the answer, instead of violence.

00:15:56.360 --> 00:15:58.056
Seeing human beings

00:15:58.080 --> 00:16:01.816
with all their virtues and all their flaws

00:16:01.840 --> 00:16:03.696
instead of continuing the caricatures:

00:16:03.720 --> 00:16:06.376
the us and them, the villains and victims.

00:16:06.400 --> 00:16:08.496
I'd also finally
come to terms with the fact

00:16:08.520 --> 00:16:12.176
that my two cultures
didn't have to be on a collision course

00:16:12.200 --> 00:16:15.320
but instead became a space
where I found my own voice.

00:16:15.840 --> 00:16:18.576
I stopped feeling
like I had to pick a side,

00:16:18.600 --> 00:16:20.680
but this took me many, many years.

00:16:21.640 --> 00:16:23.656
There are so many
of our young people today

00:16:23.680 --> 00:16:25.696
who are struggling with these same issues,

00:16:25.720 --> 00:16:27.720
and they're struggling with this alone.

00:16:29.440 --> 00:16:32.080
And this leaves them open like wounds.

00:16:32.560 --> 00:16:35.616
And for some, the worldview
of radical Islam

00:16:35.640 --> 00:16:39.000
becomes the infection
that festers in these open wounds.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:41.160 --> 00:16:44.160
There's an African proverb that says,

00:16:45.960 --> 00:16:48.976
"If the young are not
initiated into the village,

00:16:49.000 --> 00:16:51.760
they will burn it down
just to feel its warmth."

00:16:53.240 --> 00:16:54.720
I would like to ask --

00:16:55.640 --> 00:16:58.176
to Muslim parents and Muslim communities,

00:16:58.200 --> 00:17:00.616
will you love and care for your children

00:17:00.640 --> 00:17:03.416
without forcing them
to meet your expectations?

00:17:03.440 --> 00:17:05.880
Can you choose them instead of your honor?

00:17:06.400 --> 00:17:09.415
Can you understand
why they're so angry and alienated

00:17:09.440 --> 00:17:11.760
when you put your honor
before their happiness?

00:17:12.520 --> 00:17:15.096
Can you try to be a friend to your child

00:17:15.119 --> 00:17:16.896
so that they can trust you

00:17:16.920 --> 00:17:19.215
and want to share with you
their experiences,

00:17:19.240 --> 00:17:21.480
rather than having
to seek it somewhere else?

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:22.359 --> 00:17:25.440
And to our young people
tempted by extremism,

00:17:26.680 --> 00:17:30.320
can you acknowledge
that your rage is fueled by pain?

00:17:31.640 --> 00:17:35.056
Will you find the strength
to resist those cynical old men

00:17:35.080 --> 00:17:38.280
who want to use your blood
for their own profits?

00:17:39.040 --> 00:17:40.960
Can you find a way to live?

00:17:41.880 --> 00:17:44.136
Can you see that the sweetest revenge

00:17:44.160 --> 00:17:47.616
is for you to live
a happy, full and free life?

00:17:47.640 --> 00:17:50.000
A life defined by you and nobody else.

00:17:50.560 --> 00:17:54.240
Why do you want to become
just another dead Muslim kid?

00:17:55.080 --> 00:17:59.240
And for the rest of us, when will we start
listening to our young people?

00:18:00.520 --> 00:18:01.776
How can we support them

00:18:01.800 --> 00:18:05.760
in redirecting their pain
into something more constructive?

00:18:06.760 --> 00:18:08.216
They think we don't like them.

00:18:08.240 --> 00:18:11.016
They think we don't care
what happens to them.

00:18:11.040 --> 00:18:12.816
They think we don't accept them.

00:18:12.840 --> 00:18:15.560
Can we find a way
to make them feel differently?

00:18:17.280 --> 00:18:20.216
What will it take for us
to see them and notice them

00:18:20.240 --> 00:18:25.176
before they become either the victims
or the perpetrators of violence?

00:18:25.200 --> 00:18:28.776
Can we make ourselves care about them
and consider them to be our own?

00:18:28.800 --> 00:18:33.656
And not just be outraged when the victims
of violence look like ourselves?

00:18:33.680 --> 00:18:38.696
Can we find a way to reject hatred
and heal the divisions between us?

00:18:38.720 --> 00:18:42.696
The thing is we cannot afford
to give up on each other or on our kids,

00:18:42.720 --> 00:18:44.856
even if they've given up on us.

NOTE Paragraph

00:18:44.880 --> 00:18:47.056
We are all in this together.

00:18:47.080 --> 00:18:52.560
And in the long term, revenge and violence
will not work against extremists.

00:18:53.480 --> 00:18:57.256
Terrorists want us
to huddle in our houses in fear,

00:18:57.280 --> 00:18:59.456
closing our doors and our hearts.

00:18:59.480 --> 00:19:03.296
They want us to tear open
more wounds in our societies

00:19:03.320 --> 00:19:06.856
so that they can use them
to spread their infection more widely.

00:19:06.880 --> 00:19:09.576
They want us to become like them:

00:19:09.600 --> 00:19:11.840
intolerant, hateful and cruel.

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:14.200 --> 00:19:16.656
The day after the Paris attacks,

00:19:16.680 --> 00:19:20.080
a friend of mine
sent this photo of her daughter.

00:19:20.800 --> 00:19:23.256
This is a white girl and an Arab girl.

00:19:23.280 --> 00:19:24.480
They're best friends.

00:19:25.120 --> 00:19:28.600
This image is the kryptonite
for extremists.

00:19:31.240 --> 00:19:34.296
These two little girls
with their superpowers

00:19:34.320 --> 00:19:35.816
are showing the way forward

00:19:35.840 --> 00:19:39.240
towards a society
that we need to build together,

00:19:40.120 --> 00:19:43.440
a society that includes and supports,

00:19:44.480 --> 00:19:46.680
rather than rejects our kids.

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:47.960 --> 00:19:49.296
Thank you for listening.

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:49.320 --> 00:19:55.532
(Applause)