Translator: daniele carrieri Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hello TEDxExeter.
A year ago, I told stories from my book "Your Fatwa does not apply here"
about my fellow people of Muslim heritage challenging extremism.
The TED community generously helped me share the stories,
stories about my father Mahfoud Bennoune
who risked his life to publicly condemn the Armed Islamic Group terrorists
that plagued his home country of Algeria in the 1990s.
Stories about the first and only woman chief prosecutor in Afghanistan
Maria Bashir, who persists in her work today despite Taliban attacks,
and about other heroes.
I never dreamed that a year later, people like them around the world
would be fighting an even tougher battle
against an even more widespread terrorism and pernicious ideas that foster it.
I learned from them all that in the West, we have to flip our paradigm.
There has been a sense that it is the West that has understood
that Muslim fundamentalism is a bad thing
and that it must convince Muslims to join them in opposing it.
In fact, many Muslims and people of Muslim heritage have been out front on this issue
and have risked their lives to take it on.
Has the West stood with them?
Many liberal, secular, moderate, left-wing, and feminist advocates
in Muslim majority countries have for decades been calling on the world
to understand the danger they were facing
from rising tides of Muslim fundamentalism
their society's version of the extreme right.
Instead, they watched
the United States and Britain support the archaic Gulf monarchies
that exported Wahhabism
to all Muslim majority regions of the world with their petrodollars.
While there are both important internal and external causes
of the rise of fundamentalism,
- as my father always stressed, inside Algeria -
for us here, acknowledging the West's own portion of responsibility is critical.
Remember that Britain has become an exporter of jihadist terrorists.
The year since my last TED talk
was a difficult one for those who have taken on the extremists,
and here is some updated news about a few of them.
Somali-American activist Abdirizak Bihi
whose 17 year old nephew Burhan was recruited then killed by Al Shabaab,
organized a picnic in the food court of Mall of America
along with other Somali-Americans
to show support for the shops and employees there
after Al Shabaab threatened to bomb the mall in February of 2015.
As he told the local media, "The only weapon they have
is to create a fear and we are here to deny them that."
After years of working against Al Shabaab recruitment,
today Mr. Bihi also has to work against recruitment
by the so-called Islamic State in his home city of Minneapolis.
Cherifa Kheddar who told me
that you can never succeed if you just fight jihadist terrorism,
you also have to fight
the fundamentalist ideology that gives rise to it,
continued her work with victims this year.
On International Women's Day, Kheddar,
the President of the Algerian Association of Victims of Islamist Terrorism,
or Djazairouna,
tried to stand on the streets of downtown Algiers,
carrying a banner as she was shown doing in my last TED talk.
The banner simply carried
a list of women who have been killed by the Islamist Armed Groups
including her sister Leila, in the 1990s.
As Cherifa wrote to me the next day, "Instead, I was arrested, I was beaten,
insulted, and called every possible vulgar and rude name in the police station,
all this, simply for having displayed
a banner showing the list of women victims."
She was told by policemen not to use the word "Islamist terrorist" anymore.
As she said, "The authorities are now denying even the right to memory."
Such silencing is terribly dangerous now, because, my friends, this jihad,
this jihad that has brought the horrors of 90s Algeria to so many countries today
has got to stop, and the only way to ensure that, is to raise our voices.
To speak the words Islamist Terrorist.
Cherifa Kheddar and other victims' families counted
the number of views of my TED talk - the talk containing their stories -
as those views accumulated.
And I did not realize how much it would mean to them
that hundreds of thousands of people around the world would listen,
so please keep sharing that talk and this one
as a sign of your support not of me but of them.
After a year of bad news,
2014 ended especially sadly for one of the families in my last talk.
The mother of Amel Zenoune-Zouani died.
Amel was the law student murdered for continuing her studies
by Algeria's 90s version of Islamic State known as the Armed Islamic Group.
Khalti Houria, or Auntie Houria as everyone called Amel's mother,
campaigned tirelessly for justice for victims of terrorism.
17 years after her daughter's throat was cut in the street,
she told her surviving daughters
that she was tired of the pain and the loss,
and she was ready to go and meet Amel again.
There is no healing from such wounds,
especially when there has been no justice and so little remembrance.
Amel Zenoune's watch shattered at 5:17, the moment she fell in the street,
and its hands are forever frozen at that time.
Just as I said last year, 5:17 continues to come to too many new Amel Zenoune's
in places like Kenya's Garissa University
where jihadists still deliberately target students,
or in Nigeria where the girls have not been brought back,
but the world has forgotten anyway.
The best way to honor Amel and Khalti Houria
is to do all we can to change that.
Amel's name means hope in Arabic,
and her hope lives on when we share her story.
One woman in Venezuela tweeted the TED talk writing "Somos Amel."
"We are Amel."
We are hope.
And we must be.
My father Mahfoud grew up in a mountainous North African village,
and went to Qur'anic school.
He watched jihadist terrorists torture his entire society,
killing as many as 200,000 in the 1990s.
But he never ever gave up.
He once wrote an open letter to a terrorist spokesman named Anouar Haddam
who was by the way, allowed to stay in the United States
while claiming responsibility
for murderous bombings and assassinations on the streets of Algiers.
In the 1995 open letter, which at the time I feared would get my father killed,
he wrote angry, but hopeful words
to the jihadist terrorists of Algeria,
words that I am sorry, remain all too relevant 30 years later, in 2015.
He wrote: "Your movement is the negation of reason, of democracy, of common sense,
and of both Islamic and universal values.
It is doomed to fail."
He was right, but of course, achieving that outcome my father predicted
across the many affected countries now
depends on all of us working together to make it so as my dad knew,
which was why he took the risk to write that letter.
I have felt, as so many have, across the regions, as my dad did in the 90s,
so much anger this year,
anger as Somali singers like Saado Ali Warsame
have been gunned down by Al Shabaab in a global silence.
Anger as Iraqi lawyers like Samira Saleh Al Naimi
have been tortured and executed by ISIS for condemning their crimes,
but have not appeared on our TV screens.
Anger as the human rights activist Salwa Bughaigis was cut down
in her own home in Benghazi on June 25th,
and then the world forgot both her and the Libya she died for.
Anger as the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered
and then smeared in death, even by some bon pensant Western intellectuals.
Anger as thousands have been massacred in places like Afghanistan
by groups claiming to fight in defense of an Islam
that these same groups have themselves entirely caricatured.
Anger as Rupert Murdoch dared to tweet
that as he wrote "all Moslems" should be held responsible for all this.
I wanted to end with a poem that I wrote about that anger.
I have no pretensions to be a poet.
This is just a cri de coeur, an expression of anger,
but I share it because I want the world to know how many of us,
people of Muslim heritage and Muslims,
feel this anger and share the determination to stop this jihad.
"Why I hate Islamic State"
"For Jim and Steven, Alan and Peter,
Haruna and Kenji, Kayla and Mu'ath
For thousands of Syrians, of Kurds, of Assyrians, who met the same fate,
but whose names we will never know.
For slain Iraqis like Samira Saleh Al Naimi who stood and who fell, in Mosul.
For the Yazidi girls sold into slavery at 10 dollars a piece.
For the tarnished name of Islam, my grandfather's Islam,
that they have dragged through mud and blood in the name of a state.
For the way they represent Arab failures and American blunders.
Because Jihadi John is not human, but one of our sons is just the same.
Because there is no word but hate for him, for all he is and does.
Because I can have no hope even for his redemption.
Because he makes people hate Muslims and fear Islam.
Because he makes Muslims fear for Islam.
Because no Paradise he could dream of could ever be anything but hell.
My unbrotherly brothers, we will stand against you.
We will stand with those who defy you.
God is Great, but you are not."
(Applause)