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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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(She laughs)
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I thought I was absolutely amazing because
I could understand and relate to
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the feelings of brown people like
my grandfather, a conservative Muslim guy,
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and also I could understand
my Afghan mother and 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, I loved them all.
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I understood them all 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,
I would still face discrimination,
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according to him, 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 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 al 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, 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
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a kind of poster child
for Norwegian multiculturalism.
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I felt very proud of course 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 I took a little detour
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because I wanted to buy
my favourite sweets called 'salty feet'.
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I absolutely loved them.
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On my way into the store, there was this
grown white guy in the doorway,
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blocking my way, 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 and he said;
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"Get out of my way you little black bitch,
you little Paki bitch, get out of my -
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go back home where you came from."
I was absolutely horrified.
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I was staring at him, I was too afraid
to wipe the spit off my face,
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even as it was mixing with my tears.
I remember looking around,
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hoping that any minute now a grownup
was going to come and make this guy stop.
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But instead people kept hurrying past me
and pretending not to see me.
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I was very confused because I was thinking;
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"Well, my white people come on.
Where are they? What’s going on?
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How come they’re not
coming 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 parents community felt that
it was unacceptable and dishonorable
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for a woman to be involved in music,
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
on stage, I lean in to 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.
The death threats were endless.
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I remember one older bearded guy
stopped me in the street one time and said;
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"The reason I hate you so much 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, he said:
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"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 and your stomach will be cut out,
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so that another whore
like you will not be born."
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Again I was so confused.
I couldn’t understand what was going on,
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my brown people now
starting to treat me like this.
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How come? 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
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:
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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. Instead I felt like,
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you know at the airport,
on the baggage carousel,
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you have these different suitcases
going round and round,
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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. 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 tell I was actually
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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. 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 that wasn’t even my dream,
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it was my father’s choice.
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So I... I kind of got lost,
I kind of fell apart,
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but I decided that what I wanted to do is
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to spend the next however many years
of my life supporting young people,
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and to try to be there in some small way,
whatever way that I could.
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So I started volunteering for various
organisations 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 honour 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.
We are 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,
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 that we are losing
to forced marriages,
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to honour based violence, and abuse.
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So eventually I realised, 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 realised 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
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understand what
it's like to be a young person
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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
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the deadly consequences of us
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 parent’s 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’ve 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 a 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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story 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.
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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 are also meeting
misunderstandings and apathy
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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 you know 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.
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And surely people who look like me,
young women who come
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from backgrounds like me,
should be subject to the same rights,
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the same protections,
as anybody else in our country.
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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 recognised
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that I was going to have
to face my worst fear.
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The brown men with beards.
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Similar men, to the ones
that 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,
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also, you know, 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 our young people
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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, I found broken people.
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Just like Banaz, I found that
these young men were torn apart
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from trying to bridge
the gaps between their families,
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and the countries that they were born in.
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And what I also learnt 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 towards violence.
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"Come to us!", they say.
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"Reject both sides, your family and
your country, because they reject you.
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For your family, their honour
is more important than you,
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and for your country, a real Norwegian,
Brit or a French person
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will always be white and never you."
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They are 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.
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 are 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,
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these are childhood photos
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 of abusive fathers.
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And several of these young guys ended up
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finding caring and compassionate father
figures within these extremist groups.
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I also found men brutalized
by racist violence,
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but who found a way to stop feeling like
victims by becoming violent themselves.
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In fact, I found something
to my horror that I recognised.
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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.
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And not belonging to anyone.
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The same feeling of being lost
and torn between cultures.
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Having said that,
I did not choose destruction,
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I chose to pick up a camera,
instead of a gun.
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And the reason I did that,
is because of my superpower,
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I could see that understanding
is the answer, instead of violence.
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Seeing human beings,
with all their virtues,
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and all their flaws,
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instead of continuing the caricatures
of us and them, the villains and victims.
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I had also finally come to terms
with the fact that my two cultures
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didn’t have to be on a collision course,
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but instead became a space
where I found my own voice.
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I stopped feeling
like I had to pick a side.
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But this took me many, many years.
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There are so many
of our young people today
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who are struggling with these same issues,
and they are struggling with this alone.
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And this leaves them open like wounds.
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And for some, the world view
of radical Islam
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becomes the infection that festers
in these open wounds.
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There’s an African proverb that says;
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"If the young are not
initiated into the village,
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they will burn it down
just to feel its warmth."
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I would like to ask to Muslim parents
and Muslim communities,
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will you love and care for your children,
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without forcing them
to meet your expectations?
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Can you choose them
instead of your honour?
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00:17:05,660 --> 00:17:09,230
Can you understand why
they’re so angry and alienated,
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when you put your honour
before their happiness?
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00:17:11,889 --> 00:17:16,514
Can you try to be a friend to your child
so that they can trust you,
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and want to share with you
their experiences,
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rather than having to seek it
somewhere else?
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And to our young people,
tempted by extremism,
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can you acknowledge that
your rage is fuelled by pain?
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Will you find the strength to resist
those cynical old men,
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who want to use your blood
for their own profits?
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Can you find a way to live?
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Can you see that the sweetest revenge
is for you to live a happy,
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full and free life, a life defined
by you and nobody else?
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00:17:50,461 --> 00:17:55,047
Why do you want to become
just another dead Muslim kid?
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00:17:55,047 --> 00:17:59,733
And for the rest of us, when will we
start listening to our young people?
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How can we support them
in redirecting their pain
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into something more constructive?
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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.
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They think we don’t accept them.
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Can we find a way to
make them feel differently?
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00:18:16,289 --> 00:18:19,657
What will it take for us
to see them, and notice them,
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before they become either the victims
or the perpetrators of violence?
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00:18:24,989 --> 00:18:28,366
Can we make ourselves care about them,
and consider them to be our own,
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00:18:28,366 --> 00:18:33,641
and not just be outraged when the victims
of violence look like ourselves?
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00:18:33,641 --> 00:18:38,531
Can we find a way to reject hatred,
and heal the divisions between us?
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The thing, is we cannot afford
to give up on each other, or on our kids,
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even if they’ve given up on us.
We are all in this together.
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And in the long term, revenge and violence
will not work against extremists.
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00:18:52,865 --> 00:18:57,288
Terrorists want us to huddle
in our houses and fear,
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closing our doors and our hearts.
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00:18:58,993 --> 00:19:02,837
They want us to tear open
more wounds in our societies,
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00:19:02,837 --> 00:19:06,901
so that they can use them
to spread their infection more widely.
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00:19:06,901 --> 00:19:12,563
They want us to become like them,
intolerant, hateful and cruel.
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The day after the Paris attacks, a friend
of mine sent this photo of her daughter.
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This is a white girl and an Arab girl.
They’re best friends.
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This image is the kryptonite
for extremists.
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These two little girls,
with their superpowers,
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are showing the way forward towards
a society that we need to build together.
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A society that includes, and supports,
rather than rejects our kids.
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Thank you for listening.
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(Applause)