Malala Yousafzai Responds To Donald Trump
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Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has condemned presidential candidate Donald Trump's recent call to ban Muslims in America. At a ceremony dedicated to the hundreds of children killed in a Taliban attack at a school in 2014, Yousafzai said Trump's remarks are "full of hatred."
"Well, that's really tragic that you hear these comments which are full of hatred, full of this ideology of being discriminative towards others," the 18-year-old told Agence France-Presse.
Trump made news earlier this month when he sent out a press release that called for "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on." These remarks came shortly after the San Bernardino mass shooting, which President Barack Obama went on to describe as "an act of terrorism."
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At the ceremony, however, Malala's father Ziauddin Yousafzai said it's unfair of Trump to assume the majority of Muslims are like the extremists committing terrorist acts.
"It will be very unfair, very unjust that we associate 1.6 billion with a few terrorist organizations," he said.
Malala Yousafzai concluded by saying there are terrorists attacks all over and that education—for which she famously took a bullet in 2012—will ultimately defeat terrorism.
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"It's not just needed in Pakistan but across the world," she said. "If we want to end terrorism we need to bring quality education so we defeat the mindset of terrorism mentality and of hatred."
In a Tuesday interview with Channel 4 News, Yousafzai said that anti-Muslim sentiment could ultimately feed terrorism.
“I can just highlight one thing," she said. "The more you speak about Islam and against all Muslims, the more terrorists we create. So it’s important that whatever politicians say, whatever the media say, they should be really, really careful about it. If your intention is to stop terrorism, do not try to blame the whole population of Muslims for it because it cannot stop terrorism. It will radicalize more terrorists.”
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Since the Paris attacks and San Bernardino shooting, there has been a rise in Islamophobia across the globe. Hashtags like #NotInMyName and #YouAintNoMuslimBruv started trending in response to the Islamophobia and to publicly condemn the acts of the Islamic State (also known as IS, ISIS, ISIL, and Daesh), which doesn't represent the mass majority of Muslims.
