1 00:00:11,675 --> 00:00:17,505 When I was a child, I knew I had superpowers. 2 00:00:17,505 --> 00:00:20,154 That’s right. 3 00:00:20,154 --> 00:00:24,653 I thought I was absolutely amazing because I could understand and relate to 4 00:00:24,653 --> 00:00:29,725 the feelings of brown people like my grandfather, a conservative Muslim guy, 5 00:00:29,725 --> 00:00:34,563 and also I could understand my Afghan mother and Pakistani father, 6 00:00:34,563 --> 00:00:39,297 not so religious but laid back, fairly liberal. 7 00:00:39,297 --> 00:00:43,391 And of course I could understand and relate to the feelings of white people, 8 00:00:43,391 --> 00:00:46,136 the white Norwegians of my country. 9 00:00:46,136 --> 00:00:50,704 You know white, brown, whatever, I loved them all. 10 00:00:50,704 --> 00:00:54,493 I understood them all even if they didn’t always understand each other 11 00:00:54,493 --> 00:00:56,345 They were all my people. 12 00:00:56,345 --> 00:00:59,331 My father though was always really worried. 13 00:00:59,331 --> 00:01:02,925 He kept saying that, even with the best education 14 00:01:02,925 --> 00:01:08,543 I was not going to get a fair shake, I would face discrimination, 15 00:01:08,543 --> 00:01:12,096 according to him, and the only way to be accepted by white people 16 00:01:12,096 --> 00:01:14,475 would be to become famous. 17 00:01:14,475 --> 00:01:19,176 Now mind you, he had this conversation with me when I was seven years old. 18 00:01:19,176 --> 00:01:22,538 So, while I’m seven years old he said 19 00:01:22,538 --> 00:01:25,895 'Look, so its either got to be sports or its got to be music.' 20 00:01:25,895 --> 00:01:29,795 He didn’t know anything about sports, bless him, so it was music. 21 00:01:29,795 --> 00:01:34,453 So when I was seven years old he gathered al my toys, all my dolls, 22 00:01:34,453 --> 00:01:37,223 and he threw them all away. 23 00:01:37,223 --> 00:01:43,993 In exchange he gave me a crappy little Casio keyboard, and singing lessons, 24 00:01:43,993 --> 00:01:49,031 and forced me to practice for hours and hours every single day. 25 00:01:49,031 --> 00:01:53,032 Very quickly he also had me performing for larger and larger audiences, 26 00:01:53,032 --> 00:01:59,500 and bizarrely I became almost a poster child for Norwegian multiculturalism. 27 00:01:59,500 --> 00:02:04,722 I felt very proud of course because even the newspapers at this point 28 00:02:04,722 --> 00:02:07,373 were starting to write nice things about brown people, 29 00:02:07,373 --> 00:02:11,351 so I could feel that my superpower was growing. 30 00:02:11,351 --> 00:02:16,301 So when I was 12 years old walking home from school I took a little detour 31 00:02:16,301 --> 00:02:19,374 because I wanted to buy my favourite sweets called 'salty feet'. 32 00:02:19,374 --> 00:02:21,173 I absolutely loved them. 33 00:02:21,174 --> 00:02:26,202 On my way into the store, there was this grown white guy in the doorway 34 00:02:26,202 --> 00:02:33,991 blocking my way, so I tried to walk around him, and as I did that he stopped me, 35 00:02:33,991 --> 00:02:38,746 and he was staring at me, and he spit in my face and he said 36 00:02:38,746 --> 00:02:42,725 ‘Get out of my way you little black bitch, you little Paki bitch, get out of my - 37 00:02:42,725 --> 00:02:49,381 go back home where you came from.’ I was absolutely horrified. 38 00:02:49,381 --> 00:02:53,784 I was staring at him, I was too afraid to wipe the spit off my face, 39 00:02:53,784 --> 00:02:57,827 even as it was mixing with my tears. I remember looking around, 40 00:02:57,827 --> 00:03:03,623 hoping any minute now a grownup was going to come and make this guy stop. 41 00:03:03,623 --> 00:03:08,842 But instead people kept hurrying past me and pretending not to see me. 42 00:03:08,842 --> 00:03:11,807 I was very confused because I was thinking 43 00:03:11,807 --> 00:03:16,402 ‘Well, my white people come on, where are they? What’s going on? 44 00:03:16,402 --> 00:03:19,098 How come they’re not coming and rescuing me?’ 45 00:03:19,098 --> 00:03:24,062 So needless to say I didn’t buy the sweets I just ran home as fast as I could. 46 00:03:24,062 --> 00:03:26,620 Things were still ok though, I thought. 47 00:03:26,620 --> 00:03:29,681 As time went on, the more successful I became, 48 00:03:29,681 --> 00:03:34,876 I eventually started attracting harassment from brown people. 49 00:03:35,876 --> 00:03:41,068 Some men in my parents community felt that it was unacceptable and dishonorable 50 00:03:41,068 --> 00:03:46,534 for a woman to be involved in music, and to be so present in the media. 51 00:03:47,584 --> 00:03:53,513 So very quickly I was starting to become attacked at my own concerts. 52 00:03:53,513 --> 00:03:57,955 I remember one of the concerts, I was on stage, I lean in to the audience, 53 00:03:57,955 --> 00:04:01,085 and the last thing I see is a young brown face, 54 00:04:01,085 --> 00:04:05,691 and the next thing I know is some sort of chemical is thrown in my eyes. 55 00:04:05,691 --> 00:04:08,951 And I remember I couldn’t really see, and my eyes were watering, 56 00:04:08,951 --> 00:04:11,251 but I kept singing anyway. 57 00:04:11,251 --> 00:04:16,753 I was spit in the face in the streets of Oslo, this time by brown men. 58 00:04:16,753 --> 00:04:22,189 They even tried to kidnap me at one point. The death threats were endless. 59 00:04:22,189 --> 00:04:26,079 I remember one older bearded guy stopped me in the street one time and said 60 00:04:26,079 --> 00:04:29,809 ‘The reason I hate you so much is because you make our daughters think 61 00:04:29,809 --> 00:04:32,679 they can do whatever they want.’ 62 00:04:32,679 --> 00:04:36,449 A younger guy warned me to watch my back, he said 63 00:04:36,449 --> 00:04:38,878 ‘Music is un-Islamic and the job of whores, 64 00:04:38,878 --> 00:04:43,824 and if you keep this up you are going to be raped and your stomach will be cut out, 65 00:04:43,824 --> 00:04:47,698 so that another whore like you will not be born.’ 66 00:04:47,698 --> 00:04:51,685 Again I was so confused. I couldn’t understand what was going on, 67 00:04:51,685 --> 00:04:54,683 my brown people now starting to treat me like this. 68 00:04:54,683 --> 00:04:58,943 How come? Instead of bridging the two worlds, 69 00:04:58,943 --> 00:05:02,180 I felt like I was falling between the my worlds. 70 00:05:02,180 --> 00:05:06,075 I suppose for me, spit was kryptonite. 71 00:05:07,108 --> 00:05:10,429 So by the time I was 17 years old the death threats were endless, 72 00:05:10,429 --> 00:05:12,203 and the harassment was constant. 73 00:05:12,203 --> 00:05:14,991 It got so bad at one point my mother sat me down and said 74 00:05:14,991 --> 00:05:18,397 ‘Look, we can no longer protect you, we can no longer keep you safe, 75 00:05:18,397 --> 00:05:20,153 so you’re going to have to go.’ 76 00:05:20,153 --> 00:05:26,120 So I bought a one-way ticket to London. I packed my suitcase, and I left. 77 00:05:26,120 --> 00:05:30,691 My biggest heartbreak at that point was that nobody said anything. 78 00:05:30,691 --> 00:05:33,139 I had a very public exit from Norway. 79 00:05:33,139 --> 00:05:37,151 My brown people, my white people, nobody said anything. 80 00:05:37,151 --> 00:05:40,095 Nobody said ‘Hold on, this is wrong. 81 00:05:40,095 --> 00:05:44,260 Support this girl, protect this girl because she is one of us.’ 82 00:05:44,260 --> 00:05:47,565 Nobody said that. Instead I felt like, 83 00:05:47,565 --> 00:05:50,904 you know at the airport, on the baggage carousel, 84 00:05:50,904 --> 00:05:53,709 you have these different suitcases going round and round, 85 00:05:53,709 --> 00:05:56,191 and there’s always that one suitcase left at the end. 86 00:05:56,191 --> 00:05:59,439 The one that nobody wants. The one that nobody comes to claim. 87 00:05:59,439 --> 00:06:06,150 I felt like that. I’d never felt so alone. I’d never felt so lost. 88 00:06:06,150 --> 00:06:11,100 So, after coming to London, I did eventually resume my music career. 89 00:06:11,100 --> 00:06:15,456 Different place, but unfortunately the same old story. 90 00:06:15,456 --> 00:06:19,170 I remember a message sent to me saying that I was going to be killed, 91 00:06:19,170 --> 00:06:22,492 and that rivers of blood were going to flow, 92 00:06:22,492 --> 00:06:25,831 and that I was going to be raped many times before I died. 93 00:06:25,840 --> 00:06:29,574 By this point I has to say I was actually getting used to messages like this. 94 00:06:29,574 --> 00:06:34,960 But what became different was that now they started threatening my family. 95 00:06:34,960 --> 00:06:41,069 So once again, I packed my suitcase, I left music, and I moved to the US. 96 00:06:41,069 --> 00:06:44,501 I’d had enough. I didn’t want to have anything to do with this anymore. 97 00:06:44,501 --> 00:06:48,684 And I was certainly not going to be killed for something that wasn’t even my dream, 98 00:06:48,684 --> 00:06:51,678 it was my father’s choice. 99 00:06:51,678 --> 00:06:57,629 So I kind of got lost, I kind of fell apart, 100 00:06:57,629 --> 00:06:59,817 but I decided that what I wanted to do is 101 00:06:59,817 --> 00:07:04,842 to spend the next however many years of my life supporting young people, 102 00:07:04,842 --> 00:07:09,427 and to try to be there in some small way, whatever way that I could. 103 00:07:09,427 --> 00:07:13,668 So I started volunteering for various organisations that were working 104 00:07:13,668 --> 00:07:18,250 with young Muslims inside of Europe. 105 00:07:18,250 --> 00:07:23,643 And, to my surprise what I found, was so many of these young people 106 00:07:23,643 --> 00:07:26,402 were suffering and struggling. 107 00:07:26,402 --> 00:07:30,373 They were facing so many problems with their families and their communities, 108 00:07:30,373 --> 00:07:33,868 who seemed to care more about their honour and their reputation 109 00:07:33,868 --> 00:07:37,809 than the happiness and the lives of their own kids. 110 00:07:37,809 --> 00:07:42,470 I started feeling like maybe I wasn’t so alone, maybe I wasn’t so weird. 111 00:07:42,470 --> 00:07:45,656 Maybe there are more of my people out there. 112 00:07:45,656 --> 00:07:48,107 The thing is what most people don’t understand, 113 00:07:48,107 --> 00:07:52,355 is that there are so many of us growing up in Europe 114 00:07:52,355 --> 00:07:57,474 who are not free to be ourselves. We are not allowed to be who we are. 115 00:07:57,474 --> 00:08:05,051 We are not free to marry, or to be in relationships with, people we choose, 116 00:08:05,051 --> 00:08:06,898 we can’t even pick our own career. 117 00:08:06,898 --> 00:08:10,417 This is the norm in the Muslim heartlands of Europe. 118 00:08:10,417 --> 00:08:13,921 Even in the freest societies in the world, we are not free. 119 00:08:13,921 --> 00:08:18,102 Our lives, our dreams, our future, does not belong to us, 120 00:08:18,102 --> 00:08:21,448 it belongs to our parents, and their community. 121 00:08:21,448 --> 00:08:28,009 I found endless stories of young people, who are lost to all of us, 122 00:08:28,009 --> 00:08:30,134 Who are invisible to all of us, 123 00:08:30,134 --> 00:08:33,506 but who are suffering and they are suffering alone. 124 00:08:33,506 --> 00:08:36,379 Kids that we are losing to forced marriages, 125 00:08:36,379 --> 00:08:38,929 to honour based violence, and abuse. 126 00:08:38,929 --> 00:08:43,381 So eventually I realised, after several years of working with these young people, 127 00:08:43,381 --> 00:08:45,524 that I will not be able to keep running, 128 00:08:45,524 --> 00:08:50,115 I can’t spend the rest of my life being scared and hiding, 129 00:08:50,115 --> 00:08:53,279 and that I’m actually going to have to do something. 130 00:08:53,929 --> 00:08:57,138 And I also realised that my silence, our silence, 131 00:08:57,138 --> 00:09:00,174 allows abuse like this to continue. 132 00:09:00,174 --> 00:09:04,599 So I decided that I wanted to put my childhood superpower to some use, 133 00:09:04,599 --> 00:09:08,956 by trying to make people on the different sides of these issues 134 00:09:08,956 --> 00:09:12,634 understand what it's like to be a young person stuck 135 00:09:12,634 --> 00:09:15,489 between your family and your country. 136 00:09:15,489 --> 00:09:19,270 So I started making films, and I started telling these stories. 137 00:09:19,270 --> 00:09:21,367 And I also wanted people to understand 138 00:09:21,367 --> 00:09:26,057 the deadly consequences of us not taking these problems seriously. 139 00:09:26,057 --> 00:09:29,385 So the first film I made was about Banaz. 140 00:09:29,385 --> 00:09:33,290 She was a 17 year old Kurdish girl in London. 141 00:09:33,290 --> 00:09:36,757 She was obedient, she did whatever her parents wanted. 142 00:09:36,757 --> 00:09:39,687 She tried to do everything right. 143 00:09:39,687 --> 00:09:42,337 She married some guy that her parent’s chose for her, 144 00:09:42,337 --> 00:09:45,772 even though he beat and raped her constantly. 145 00:09:45,772 --> 00:09:48,475 And when she tried to go to her family for help they said 146 00:09:48,475 --> 00:09:51,049 ‘Well, you’ve got to go back and be a better wife.’ 147 00:09:51,049 --> 00:09:53,900 Because they didn’t want a divorced daughter on their hands, 148 00:09:53,900 --> 00:09:57,469 because of course, that would bring dishonor on the family. 149 00:09:57,469 --> 00:10:00,794 She was beaten so badly her ears would bleed. 150 00:10:00,794 --> 00:10:06,487 And when she finally left, and she found a young man that she chose, 151 00:10:06,487 --> 00:10:10,311 and she fell in love with, the community and the family found out, 152 00:10:10,311 --> 00:10:15,857 and she disappeared. She was found three months later. 153 00:10:15,857 --> 00:10:21,826 She’d been stuffed into a suitcase, and buried underneath a house. 154 00:10:24,586 --> 00:10:28,995 She had been strangled, she had been beaten to death, 155 00:10:28,995 --> 00:10:35,109 by three men, three cousins, on the orders of her father and uncle. 156 00:10:35,109 --> 00:10:37,361 The added tragedy of Banaz’s story, 157 00:10:37,361 --> 00:10:43,356 story is that she had gone to the police in England five times asking for help. 158 00:10:43,356 --> 00:10:46,301 Telling them that she was going to be killed by her family. 159 00:10:46,301 --> 00:10:49,999 The police didn’t believe her, so they didn’t do anything. 160 00:10:49,999 --> 00:10:51,555 And the problem with this, 161 00:10:51,555 --> 00:10:55,465 is that not only are so many of our kids facing these problems, 162 00:10:55,465 --> 00:10:59,240 within their families and within their families' communities, 163 00:10:59,240 --> 00:11:05,144 but they are also meeting misunderstandings and apathy 164 00:11:05,144 --> 00:11:08,582 in the countries they grow up in. 165 00:11:08,582 --> 00:11:13,259 When their own families betray them, they look to the rest of us. 166 00:11:13,259 --> 00:11:18,042 And when we don’t understand, we lose them. 167 00:11:18,042 --> 00:11:21,395 So while I was making this film, several people said to me 168 00:11:21,395 --> 00:11:24,180 'Well, Deeyah, you know this is just their culture, 169 00:11:24,180 --> 00:11:28,263 this is just what those people do to their kids and we can’t really interfere.’ 170 00:11:28,833 --> 00:11:33,080 I can assure you, being murdered is not my culture. 171 00:11:33,080 --> 00:11:37,121 And surely people who look like me, young women who come 172 00:11:37,121 --> 00:11:41,002 from backgrounds like mine, should be subject to the same rights, 173 00:11:41,002 --> 00:11:44,955 the same protections, as anybody else in our country. 174 00:11:44,955 --> 00:11:47,268 Why not? 175 00:11:47,268 --> 00:11:52,706 So, for my next film, I wanted to try and understand why 176 00:11:52,706 --> 00:11:57,377 some of our young Muslim kids in Europe are drawn to extremism and violence. 177 00:11:57,377 --> 00:12:00,285 But with that topic, also recognised 178 00:12:00,285 --> 00:12:03,073 that I was going to have to face my worst fear. 179 00:12:04,213 --> 00:12:07,350 The brown men with beards. 180 00:12:07,350 --> 00:12:12,293 Similar men, to the ones that have hounded me for most of my life. 181 00:12:12,293 --> 00:12:15,915 Men that I’ve been afraid of most of my life. 182 00:12:15,915 --> 00:12:20,552 Men that I’ve also deeply disliked for many, many years. 183 00:12:20,552 --> 00:12:24,551 So I spent the next two years interviewing convicted terrorists, 184 00:12:24,551 --> 00:12:26,938 jihadis and former extremists. 185 00:12:26,938 --> 00:12:30,970 What I already knew, what was very obvious already, 186 00:12:30,970 --> 00:12:35,531 was that religion, politics, Europe’s colonial baggage, 187 00:12:35,535 --> 00:12:39,775 also Western foreign policy failures of recent years, 188 00:12:39,775 --> 00:12:41,937 were all a part of the picture. 189 00:12:41,937 --> 00:12:45,332 But what I was more interested in finding out, was what are the human, 190 00:12:45,332 --> 00:12:49,409 what are the personal reasons why some of our young people 191 00:12:49,409 --> 00:12:52,443 are susceptible to groups like this. 192 00:12:52,443 --> 00:12:57,732 And what really surprised me, was that I found wounded human beings. 193 00:12:58,912 --> 00:13:02,899 Instead of the monsters that I was looking for, that I was hoping to find 194 00:13:02,901 --> 00:13:08,899 quite frankly because it would have been very satisfying, I found broken people. 195 00:13:08,899 --> 00:13:13,952 Just like Banaz, I found that these young men were torn apart 196 00:13:13,952 --> 00:13:17,826 from trying to bridge the gaps between their families, 197 00:13:17,826 --> 00:13:21,029 and the countries that they were born in. 198 00:13:21,029 --> 00:13:24,473 And what I also learnt is that extremist groups, terrorist groups, 199 00:13:24,473 --> 00:13:27,799 are taking advantage of these feelings of our young people, 200 00:13:27,799 --> 00:13:31,977 and channeling that cynically, channeling that towards violence. 201 00:13:31,977 --> 00:13:33,769 ‘Come to us!’, they say. 202 00:13:33,769 --> 00:13:37,952 ‘Reject both sides, your family and your country, because they reject you. 203 00:13:37,952 --> 00:13:41,077 For your family, their honour is more important than you, 204 00:13:41,077 --> 00:13:45,392 and for your country, a real Norwegian, Brit or a French person 205 00:13:45,392 --> 00:13:49,260 will always be white and never you.’ 206 00:13:49,260 --> 00:13:52,839 They are also promising our young people the things that they crave, 207 00:13:52,839 --> 00:13:57,349 significance, heroism, a sense of belonging and purpose. 208 00:13:57,349 --> 00:14:03,625 A community that loves and accepts them. They make the powerless feel powerful. 209 00:14:03,625 --> 00:14:09,428 The invisible and the silent are finally seen and heard. 210 00:14:11,208 --> 00:14:14,077 This is what they are doing for our young people. 211 00:14:14,077 --> 00:14:18,399 Why are these groups doing this for our young people and not us? 212 00:14:20,059 --> 00:14:28,828 The thing is, I’m not trying to justify or excuse any of the violence. 213 00:14:28,828 --> 00:14:32,314 What I am trying to say, is that we have to understand 214 00:14:32,314 --> 00:14:36,903 why some of our young people are attracted to this. 215 00:14:36,903 --> 00:14:38,904 I would like to also show you, 216 00:14:38,904 --> 00:14:43,796 these are childhood photos of some of the guys in the film. 217 00:14:44,776 --> 00:14:50,843 What really struck me is that so many of them - I never would have thought this, 218 00:14:50,843 --> 00:14:54,508 but so many of them have absent of abusive fathers. 219 00:14:54,508 --> 00:14:57,154 And several of these young guys ended up 220 00:14:57,154 --> 00:15:03,115 finding caring and compassionate father figures within these extremist groups. 221 00:15:04,525 --> 00:15:08,127 I also found men brutalized by racist violence, 222 00:15:08,127 --> 00:15:12,493 but who found a way to stop feeling like victims by becoming violent themselves. 223 00:15:12,493 --> 00:15:17,777 In fact, I found something to my horror that I recognised. 224 00:15:17,777 --> 00:15:24,837 I found the same feelings that I felt as a 17 year old, as I fled from Norway. 225 00:15:24,837 --> 00:15:33,318 The same confusion, the same sorrow, the same feeling of being betrayed. 226 00:15:33,318 --> 00:15:37,981 And not belonging to anyone. 227 00:15:37,981 --> 00:15:42,774 The same feeling of being lost and torn between cultures. 228 00:15:42,774 --> 00:15:45,179 Having said that, I did not choose destruction, 229 00:15:45,179 --> 00:15:47,996 I chose to pick up a camera, instead of a gun. 230 00:15:47,996 --> 00:15:51,291 And the reason I did that, is because of my superpower, 231 00:15:51,291 --> 00:15:56,192 I could see that understanding is the answer, instead of violence. 232 00:15:56,192 --> 00:16:01,554 Seeing human beings, with all their virtues, and all their flaws, 233 00:16:01,554 --> 00:16:05,843 instead of continuing the caricatures of us and them, the villains and victims. 234 00:16:05,843 --> 00:16:10,222 I had also finally come to terms with the fact that my two cultures 235 00:16:10,222 --> 00:16:12,216 didn’t have to be on a collision course, 236 00:16:12,216 --> 00:16:15,770 but instead became a space where I found my own voice. 237 00:16:15,770 --> 00:16:18,174 I stopped feeling like I had to pick a side. 238 00:16:18,174 --> 00:16:21,216 But this took me many, many years. 239 00:16:21,216 --> 00:16:23,279 There are so many of our young people today 240 00:16:23,279 --> 00:16:28,549 who are struggling with these same issues, and they are struggling with this alone. 241 00:16:28,549 --> 00:16:31,927 And this leaves them open like wounds. 242 00:16:31,927 --> 00:16:35,271 And for some, the world view of radical Islam 243 00:16:35,271 --> 00:16:39,587 becomes the infection that festers in these open wounds. 244 00:16:40,677 --> 00:16:44,367 There’s an African proverb that says 245 00:16:44,367 --> 00:16:48,880 ‘If the young are not initiated into the village, 246 00:16:48,880 --> 00:16:52,740 they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.’ 247 00:16:52,740 --> 00:16:57,571 I would like to ask to Muslim parents and Muslim communities, 248 00:16:57,571 --> 00:17:00,680 will you love and care for your children, 249 00:17:00,680 --> 00:17:03,275 without forcing them to meet your expectations? 250 00:17:03,275 --> 00:17:05,660 Can you choose them, Instead of your honour? 251 00:17:05,660 --> 00:17:09,230 Can you understand why they’re so angry and alienated, 252 00:17:09,230 --> 00:17:11,889 when you put your honour before their happiness? 253 00:17:11,889 --> 00:17:16,514 Can you try to be a friend to your child so that they can trust you, 254 00:17:16,514 --> 00:17:19,335 and want to share with you their experiences, 255 00:17:19,335 --> 00:17:22,014 rather than having to seek it somewhere else? 256 00:17:22,014 --> 00:17:25,881 And to our young people, tempted by extremism, 257 00:17:25,881 --> 00:17:30,552 can you acknowledge that your rage is fuelled by pain? 258 00:17:30,552 --> 00:17:34,892 Will you find the strength to resist those cynical old men, 259 00:17:34,892 --> 00:17:38,457 who want to use your blood for their own profits? 260 00:17:38,457 --> 00:17:41,626 Can you find a way to live? 261 00:17:41,626 --> 00:17:45,824 Can you see that the sweetest revenge is for you to live a happy, 262 00:17:45,824 --> 00:17:50,461 full and free life, a life defined by you and nobody else? 263 00:17:50,461 --> 00:17:55,047 Why do you want to become just another dead Muslim kid? 264 00:17:55,047 --> 00:17:59,733 And for the rest of us, when will we start listening to our young people? 265 00:17:59,733 --> 00:18:03,330 How can we support them in redirecting their pain 266 00:18:03,330 --> 00:18:06,330 into something more constructive? 267 00:18:06,330 --> 00:18:10,565 They think we don’t like them, they think we don’t care what happens to them. 268 00:18:10,565 --> 00:18:12,730 They think we don’t accept them. 269 00:18:12,730 --> 00:18:16,289 Can we find a way to make them feel differently? 270 00:18:16,289 --> 00:18:19,657 What will it take for us to see them, and notice them, 271 00:18:19,657 --> 00:18:24,989 before they become either the victims or the perpetrators of violence? 272 00:18:24,989 --> 00:18:28,366 Can we make ourselves care about them, and consider them to be our own, 273 00:18:28,366 --> 00:18:33,641 and not just be outraged when the victims of violence look like ourselves? 274 00:18:33,641 --> 00:18:38,531 Can we find a way to reject hatred, and heal the divisions between us? 275 00:18:38,531 --> 00:18:42,544 The thing, is we cannot afford to give up on each other, or on our kids, 276 00:18:42,544 --> 00:18:46,536 even if they’ve given up on us. We are all in this together. 277 00:18:46,536 --> 00:18:52,865 And in the long term, revenge and violence will not work against extremists. 278 00:18:52,865 --> 00:18:57,288 Terrorists want us to huddle in our houses and fear, 279 00:18:57,288 --> 00:18:58,993 closing our doors and our hearts. 280 00:18:58,993 --> 00:19:02,837 They want us to tear open more wounds in our societies, 281 00:19:02,837 --> 00:19:06,901 so that they can use them to spread their infection more widely. 282 00:19:06,901 --> 00:19:12,563 They want us to become like them, intolerant, hateful and cruel. 283 00:19:13,903 --> 00:19:20,665 The day after the Paris attacks, a friend of mine sent this photo of her daughter. 284 00:19:20,665 --> 00:19:24,738 This is a white girl and an Arab girl. They’re best friends. 285 00:19:24,738 --> 00:19:29,020 This image is the kryptonite for extremists. 286 00:19:30,490 --> 00:19:34,069 These two little girls, with their superpowers, 287 00:19:34,069 --> 00:19:39,683 are showing the way forward towards a society that we need to build together. 288 00:19:39,683 --> 00:19:47,624 A society that includes, and supports, rather than rejects our kids. 289 00:19:47,624 --> 00:19:49,959 Thank you for listening.