9/11 and the World it Created

WEBVTT
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So I'm going to start off by asking the same question to each of you.
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And I'll start with you, Paul, if you don't mind.
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Where were you on 9-11 and how did it shape the trajectory of the last 25 years for you?
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Oh, by the way, also for some of you in the audience, let me not be so presumptuous, 11-9 for you to find it in the British calendar.
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Sometimes you have to know where you are.
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I was at work at the university.
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It was just after lunch, coming up to 2 o'clock, one of my colleagues in a research group came in and said it's the World Trade Center.
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He said that because we were part of a small group, the Global Security Research Unit, rather grandiose, but in fact it was looking at the changing nature of warfare.
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And one of our concerns was that it looked likely that relatively weak groups would have the capability to cause huge damage.
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And we cited the World Trade Center attack in 1993, which was aiming to cause the collapse of both buildings and could have killed 30,000 people.
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And it seemed to us that if something like that was happening.
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We thought it would be a chemical weapons attack, we were wrong on that, but of course it was the World Trade Centre.
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And the rest of the day was wild.
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There were only three of us in the group, and we were taking about 30 calls an hour from the press.
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We'd published a book, Losing Control the Previous Year, which predicted an attack on the World Trade Center.
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It sank like a stone academically, people said this is nonsense.
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But of course, it took off afterwards sadly and went through some international translations.
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So in one way it was an accurate prediction, but in another way it was a terrible thing to happen.
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We realized from the start this is going to have a huge impact right across the world.
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And as far as since 9-11, 11-9, um, your own work seemed already to be centered on this, while initially uh it seemed as though there wasn't much uh receptivity for it.
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How did things change from uh the 12th of September onwards?
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Well, as far as we were concerned, it was extremely busy.
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We published a lot more.
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In terms of the international result, well, we argued and actually got this message through to Downing Street that the last thing Britain should do would be to be involved in any kind of warfare.
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That essentially, at least one of the motives from the Al-Qaeda group was actually to get Western forces into Afghanistan, given what had happened in Afghanistan in previous generations.
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And that failed, and nobody took any notice of it.
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And it was probably a year or two before we could even suggest that it should have been a transnational legal route taken rather than warfare.
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And we we came to the same conclusion when we were building up to the war in Iraq, and that we published a piece there saying this would be a 30-year war.
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We're about two-thirds of the way through that.
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Um, so in a sense, I think 9-11 had a huge impact.
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And if we got time, it'd be worth just looking at the way in which we had a whole series of what you could call failed wars since then, uh, which have changed things in many different ways.
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Well, well, you had, I think, in 10 Downing Street at the time, Prime Minister call me Tony Blair, who uh seemed rather interested in following in the uh in the footsteps of Prime Minister George W.
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Bush at the time.
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Yes, I think the problem was that as far as the British government was concerned, Blair was really at the height of his period, that we had to go in with the United States in every way.
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And uh many people remember there's one occasion where he was visiting Washington, and there was George Bush from Tony Blair.
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Both of them looked like sort of lone ranger tackles, almost ready to draw.
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And it seemed to us that you know we were into a period in which the United States would be taking the war route, it had no option in its view, and Britain would be very heavily involved in all sorts of ways, as indeed we were.
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I think instead of being two lone rangers, I think they turned out to be two tantos uh more accurately.
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They're September the 11th, 2001.
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Where were you and how did it shape things for you?
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So I was in high school.
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Uh in the you asked the question.
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I was in high school, uh, geography class, uh preparing for my baccalaureate exam.
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Uh I'm French, so uh that was in uh southern France.
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And uh it was the end of the day when we get the news.
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I think it was around uh 3:30, 4 p.m.
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ish.
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I mean, that's the memories I have.
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And a friend of mine uh in another class actually, um, who often used to go like to America because he loved skating whatsoever, came into our classroom and yelled the WordPress Center blue.
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And I'm like, what on earth is he talking about?
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And I mean, there was no cell phones, like I mean, smartphones or internet and so forth, so I had no idea what he was talking about.
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And I'm like, okay, the guy is going crazy.
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And I went home and my parents had the news on, and I saw two towels blown, and the comments on television were quite wild, and mind you, we did not know yet what was going on.
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My first reaction, and again, I'm I'm I'm French Algerian of Muslim background.
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My first reaction was they are going to blame us.
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And I was terrified.
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And I'm like, what is going on in here?
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Why did they do that?
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What and and again, we we had no idea what was going on.
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It's like the world, and the next day in high school, we had a minute of silence, we had, you know, um the whole like process of trying to understand in what situation we were.
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And again, we were teenagers, okay?
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And I remember as like a personal fact, um, I was going on a holiday in Algeria, like I like we used to do, uh like I still do like every year, and one of my professors in high school, who is supposed to remain neutral, like we have a principle of neutrality towards civil servants in France, told me, I hope they are not going to slaughter you or you're not coming back as a terrorist.
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And that's where I knew that things were going to get worse.
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Because to answer your second question, I think, and I'm talking from a French perspective here, okay?
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So things might be different depending on where you are, uh, what is your culture, like if you're a multicultural country, how you deal with diversity, and so on and so forth.
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Um I think a country like mine, France, already had the ingredients for illiberalism.
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I mean, um, terrorist attacks are not something new, right?
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We had terrorist attack with Corsica, right?
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I don't know if those who remember, or the best country, etc.
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But we also have we have a post-colonial nation as well.
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And we have a history, especially with Algeria, regarding colonialism, the brutality, how terror was used on Muslims, like to control them, to steal their country, to rape their women.
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Um and at that moment, all of those elements gathered together to justify going further in being illiberal.
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So I think that's what happened.
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We think, we believe that we are a liberal country, but 9-11 just proved that maybe we never were.
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And are we a liberal democracy?
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I'm not that sure.
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I want to get back to this uh a little bit later on, Ray Sarah, about the fact about whether 9-11 uh served to catalyze a movement toward the post-liberal uh era.
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Uh Shahid, you and I were actually in the United States uh when it happened.
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What were things like for you?
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So I was working as an engineer in the San Francisco area.
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Um up until that point, I had spent a good part of my adult life trying to reconcile my identity.
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Both within my community, my American Muslim community, and society at large.
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So a lot of the work I'd done until then had to do with building bridges, had to do with um creating um uh a sense of identity within our communities.
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And so I felt like this is going to be my like lifelong kind of journey, and it was something I was very proud of and something that I was hoping would carry me for the rest of my life, and that would have an impact.
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And of course, when 9-11 happened, um obviously it it both interrupted that and accelerated it at the same time.
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Um, 9-11 hit me on multiple levels.
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First of all, it hit me on the identity level.
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What does this mean for Muslims in America?
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What does this mean for our journey to be included and to uh contribute to the society?
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Um it hit me on uh on a work level because uh I went from being an engineer uh in the dot-com days of Silicon Valley within 10 years, uh was a senior advisor in the Obama administration, uh working on many of the policies that affect uh affect both Muslim communities in America and abroad.
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Um and so uh and and then on a personal level, um, you know, uh our our mother worked in Washington DC at the State Department, and so for several hours we couldn't get a hold of her, and I mean I wasn't sure if plane number four was gonna hit another federal building where my mother worked.
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Um, and so you know, I I think it's safe to say that at every facet of my life it galvanized um my work.
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And it also, but I will, you know, my I don't want to, it's easy to talk about this in a real downer way.
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I do want to say it really galvanized in me the need to be positive about the reaction.
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How do we how do we build bridges?
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How do we create uh freedom and liberty for people?
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How do we um how do we tackle hate in a way that doesn't marginalize people, doesn't securitize people, things like that.
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And so, you know, whether that had its desired effect, I'm sure we'll talk about in the rest of the hour.
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But I mean, it's just no other way to put it.
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I mean, it it it was a it was a very pitiful moment in everything that I was doing at the time.
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Yeah, I don't see it as a as a as a as a downward description.
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I mean, to me it seems like, and for for those of you who are old school like I am, um, when Lego didn't come all nicely packaged like IKEA, where you put something together but you just had uh an array of blocks, you were given a bunch of pieces and you had to reconstitute that into something.
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And maybe that's one of the assets that Gen X has is that we can we can go ahead and do that.
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And it was a challenge we relished.
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Exactly.
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When you said that you were building bridges, was that as an engineer or were you being metaphoric?
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Both.
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Just just just checking.
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Okay, Ambassador Rasul, Ibrahim, 9 September 11th for you.
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So I was at that moment the Western Cape provincial leader of the African National Congress.
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It was the one province that voted against Nelson Mandela, and I was campaigning to regain the province from those who had ruled during the apartheid era.
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So I remember exactly I was about a hundred, two hundred kilometers outside of Cape Town in a very dry, hot, rural area campaigning.
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And then the news came to say something's happening.
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We took the whole campaign team to a local garage, and it was unreal on the television.
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And I think for me it was fairly vivid because we had just by 2001 completed a major campaign against a local extremist group who operated in the name of Islam and Muslims.
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It was ironically the first reaction, not white right supremacists reacting against Nelson Mandela.
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It was actually from within the Muslim community that this group grew ostensibly to fight crime and drugs, but bombed anything that was American, including the planet Hollywood, which had major fatalities.
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And so as leader of the ANC, I in a sense had to take responsibility, and we had just about perfected what I call a five-spacer strategy against them that by 2001 was defeating them.
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And then, in the midst of all of this 911 erupts, and the mainstream of the Muslim community, like uh Rim Sarah, was hoping, please God, let this not be the small minority who had prosecuted this were praising Allah that at last we could pierce the armory of the superpower.
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And so Cape Town was a very contested space between those who praised and those who prayed.
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And we carried that through, and by 2005, Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Alistair Campbell were all in South Africa at the Progressive Governance Forums where center-left parties all came together, and President Tabumbek, who led the South African delegation, invited me along to share the idea of how there are other ways of defeating uh extremism and terrorism using the Cape Town example.
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And I remember him calling me over to the table with sat with Tony Blair, and he said, if you want to have a sensible, sustainable way of fighting uh extremism, speak to Ibrahim.
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A year later, John Prescott invited me uh to London, and uh we were able to share this kind of strategy.
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So I think that for me it was a moment in the middle of fighting uh something as a self-conscious Muslim leader of the ANC.
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And then after um 7-7.
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Is it 7-7?
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You know, uh shockingly it's the same in both countries at 7-7.
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7-7.
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So after 7-7, I found myself in Down Street trying to share that because they didn't take up the invitation uh for a few years.
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And then they remembered let us um do this.
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So so so so so for me, the things were practical in South African terms, uh, but theoretical in terms of having to make sense of what we did that was different, rather than the lashing out of the counter-extremism that followed a very dustardly extremism.
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And so we needed a way out of this, but I think we came to Britain a little bit too late after the at the 7-7, but I think that um but that explains where I found myself in the midst of 9-1-1.
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And and it is about finding oneself.
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I mean, not only uh spatially where you were, but I mean, Shahid, as you said, I mean, you found yourself uh and and how it uh uh tracked a course for uh and a path uh for for your for yourself.
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I imagine that you it was probably about before 6 a.m.
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in San Francisco, so you may not have seen it live?
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No, uh I I was watching it pretty early, so not the very first one, but um the second one for sure.
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The second one that hit, yeah.
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Uh I mean I remember it was uh it was early on in the uh um in September, I think it was shortly after the Labor Day bank holiday weekend, and I just returned from ironically um the largest gathering of Muslim Americans at the Islamic Society of North America conference, um, where I I clearly was not uh uh I was not dialed in.
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Uh but I remember the feeling there of the solidarity that Muslims felt, uh, maybe even a bit of complacency that here we are in numbers, there's strength in numbers, and uh, and dare I say security in numbers.
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Uh and I remember uh my usual ritual was to wake up, make a cup of tea, and uh I remember sitting down on uh on the on the uh couch with my at the time eldest daughter, uh who was about three and a half, sitting on the knee and on the other hand balancing my my cup of tea.
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And as they broke from uh just I think coming back from an advertisement break, they showed uh some smoldering coming out of the the first tower.
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And my first reaction was um that oh, maybe a traffic helicopter or a small plane hit the uh had the uh the twin tower because it didn't look like a conventional fire.
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Uh and then 17 minutes later at three past nine um Eastern time, the second tower hit.
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And I remember feeling that jolt, and luckily, in case you're worried, neither the cup of tea nor the child was jettisoned from from from my lap.
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But I remember you remember these interesting details about the day.
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The one that I remember is that I used to have one of those uh cordless phones, which you put on the jack.
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I mean, now with mobile phones.
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Does anyone still have one of those phones?
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Yes.
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Okay, so we still have some traditional phones?
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Okay.
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Um I remember it was the first time in the history of owning that phone that the battery died.
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Because it was off its cradle the entire day, because phone calls were coming both from uh family and friends locally, nationally, uh, roommates from university that I hadn't spoken to in probably years calling to check in, are you okay?
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I think because everybody intuitively knew and dreaded the same thing that we dreaded, please don't let this be.
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And this is a terrible word to use, us.
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The fact that the framing of so much regarding the Muslim community up to that point had already made it as an us or them to demonize the Muslim community as either terrorists or potential terrorists.
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And this went back into the 1990s, the Oklahoma City bombing.
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Did Jose Padilla, who was Hispanic, was he Muslim?
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Uh, or if now that they found out he was Hispanic, uh, maybe he converted.
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There was always an effort to try to link this to uh to uh to Muslims, in part maybe because of 1993, as you said, Paul, uh the first attack.
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And as the cliche goes, I don't think anything was really ever the same.
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And there's nothing more powerful than looking at an image on screen with that sense of dread and looking at a three and a half-year-old child and wondering what's the future going to uh fold here, because we just didn't know.
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And every time someone called me, they asked, What's gonna happen?
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And to say I don't know was probably more frightening than to say that there was something that I could analyze out of this.
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And this is before I became an academic.
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I was a lawyer, uh, and as far as how 9-11 changed it, it changed everything.
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Uh, I started getting invited to give talks very in a in a very informal way, and someone gave me some very sage advice, uh, and uh but before they gave that advice, uh I started to think about the distortions in the narrative.
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And I said the only way that we can correct this is to have better data.
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And so, not knowing anything from anything, I decided we need a think tank.
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And so I came up with the idea for a think tank that looked at the Muslim American experience, didn't really care about number one, what was happening in foreign policy.
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This was not going to solve the issue of Palestine or Kashmir.
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It was also on the domestic front not going to make a determination about whether McDonald's was halal.
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This was going to focus on the social and domestic um policies uh regarding Muslim Americans.
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And so the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding came together with$500, and uh myself and two friends, we didn't know what we were doing.
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And fortunately, 25 years on ISPU.
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Is still there as the leading voice on providing resources and data about the Muslim American community so people can disagree with them uh with the data, but they cannot challenge the methodology because it's it's it's sound.
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Uh and someone gave me the advice I said you either are going to be a lawyer full-time or you're gonna do this full-time, you cannot do both.
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And so I took the plunge into academics uh because I felt that was more closely aligned to the work that I sought to do.
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And yeah, I mean, September 11th in that sense really changed uh changed everything.
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And perhaps included in that, and I'd like to ask the question uh to you as well, it also signaled the end of innocence in a very explicit way.
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Paul, I mean, did did you find that with the world, uh I know sometimes this is this this seems almost hyperbole, but did the world shift on its access on September the 11th, and how did you uh how did you feel that, if so?
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I suppose it shook on its access.
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Okay.
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I mean, the Bradford situation I think is significant.
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Bradford had had some major problems, including riots, uh essentially roast riots.
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And when you had the Otoshi attack in uh Madrid, which I think had killed over a hundred people and caused huge damage, there was a real concern among local politicians, but particularly local faith leaders, that we might get the same sort of thing in Britain and what would be the impact on Brantford.
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But one of the things that did happen, which turned out to be quite positive, was that the basically the mosque leadership and the bishop came together and basically convened a group of specialists to discuss this.
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And I went along, they wanted to know was a Tosh and Margaret and what might happen in Britain?
00:23:48.640 --> 00:23:50.240
I said, yes, you must pursue that.
00:23:50.319 --> 00:23:52.240
So a few months between them.
00:23:52.480 --> 00:24:00.720
And essentially what they tried to do, working with the youth communities, with the police and the rest, was to, in a way, be prepared for it.
00:24:00.880 --> 00:24:08.559
Uh and so the police actually, people will disagree a bit on this, but they tried to ensure that the mosques were secure, they weren't attacked.
00:24:08.799 --> 00:24:16.400
Um, given the state of tension within Bradford, um, people here may differ on this because most people here are from the Bradford area.
00:24:16.640 --> 00:24:19.279
Bradford came through it relatively well.
00:24:19.599 --> 00:24:24.799
Um that was basically far-sighted thinking by faith leaders, which I think was useful.
00:24:24.960 --> 00:24:29.759
Um, more generally, it's such it's so difficult to say.
00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:37.680
Um, I mean, I think the the grim thing was that it was so easy uh to build up a new threat, a new menace.
00:24:37.839 --> 00:24:43.759
And I would say that the late 1990s have been a pretty poor time for military-industrial complexes.
00:24:43.920 --> 00:24:46.160
They're even losing some of their money.
00:24:46.319 --> 00:24:57.119
And I think to that extent, although 9-11 was a particularly different sort of attack, um, it was it was in a way, I have to say this rather crudely, welcome because here was a real enemy again.
00:24:57.279 --> 00:25:00.640
Um I think that had a big effect under the surface.
00:25:00.799 --> 00:25:07.599
It's not something you would say in public, but the reality was it gave a new lease of life to military-industrial complexes in the West.
00:25:08.079 --> 00:25:08.799
Very much so.
00:25:08.960 --> 00:25:29.119
Um Reem, uh you were at an age where uh you're making that transition into adulthood, and the the notion of a transition of a sense of innocence uh is is made crystallized by by something like September 11th.
00:25:29.279 --> 00:25:31.279
Did it serve as a catalyst for you?
00:25:31.440 --> 00:25:43.200
Because I mean, after all, given your demographics, there are challenges that I imagine you're already having to experience uh regarding Islamophobia, bigotry in uh in France.
00:25:43.440 --> 00:25:55.920
How did uh uh September 11th uh then affect your sense of maybe the innocence of youth is no longer uh uh a luxury to have or a burden to have?
00:25:56.079 --> 00:25:57.440
Is this an opportunity?
00:25:57.599 --> 00:26:03.359
Is this um is this now having to switch gears uh maybe prematurely?
00:26:04.480 --> 00:26:17.680
It's a very interesting question because I think innocence is a luxury that I and again I'm talking about my personal experience, that I never truly experienced.
00:26:17.839 --> 00:26:37.279
I I wish I had really, but um I think for the case of France and my experience, uh what changed like before and after 9-11 was before it was more basic anti-Arab racism.
00:26:38.000 --> 00:26:38.640
Right?
00:26:39.119 --> 00:26:45.200
Uh one of the first racist remarks I had was in primary school, and of course I don't blame the kid who said that to me.
00:26:45.279 --> 00:26:46.559
It's the parents, right?
00:26:47.359 --> 00:26:51.119
Um you are disgusting, not enough white.
00:26:51.200 --> 00:26:56.000
Uh we need to put you in a laundry machine to get you whiter.
00:26:57.519 --> 00:26:59.200
It's a basic comment.
00:26:59.920 --> 00:27:04.640
Um, and again, I'm not complaining, it's part of the experience, it may be who I am today.
00:27:04.720 --> 00:27:07.519
I don't blame anyone, that's the way it was.
00:27:07.839 --> 00:27:10.960
Uh it was harder when it came from adults.
00:27:11.279 --> 00:27:13.440
But again, I'm I'm kind of a rebel.
00:27:13.759 --> 00:27:17.039
Um, that's probably the covet side of my personality.
00:27:17.920 --> 00:27:23.200
But um it was more anti-racist, uh anti-Arab racism.
00:27:23.440 --> 00:27:27.599
After 9-11, it sounds that we discovered the Muslims.
00:27:27.920 --> 00:27:36.000
And it switched immediately to you as a person with a certain religion might be a threat.
00:27:36.240 --> 00:27:41.279
So the kind of remarks I had was you're not really French, which I am.
00:27:41.440 --> 00:27:43.119
I was born and raised there, right?
00:27:43.279 --> 00:27:44.240
It's my country.
00:27:44.480 --> 00:27:45.440
It's my country.
00:27:45.599 --> 00:27:47.839
Nobody is going to take that away from me.
00:27:48.000 --> 00:27:49.119
I'm French.
00:27:49.599 --> 00:27:59.839
And uh the exhaustion of having to prove every time that you are part of this country, which I don't do anymore.
00:27:59.920 --> 00:28:01.759
Actually, I can be whoever I am.
00:28:01.839 --> 00:28:03.440
And I'm proud of who I am.
00:28:03.680 --> 00:28:11.599
And clearly, I mean, I think, and obviously I'm doing some basic psychology here, and I'm not a psychologist, okay?
00:28:11.759 --> 00:28:17.759
Um, but I think it clearly shaped my path as an academic leader.
00:28:17.920 --> 00:28:24.000
I mean, do I regret to not go to business law instead of human rights law?
00:28:24.160 --> 00:28:25.680
Maybe, but actually not.
00:28:26.000 --> 00:28:34.319
Because in the end, maybe that experience allowed me to try to find solution for today's world, and that's okay.
00:28:34.480 --> 00:28:35.839
It should not happen to anyone.
00:28:35.920 --> 00:28:39.359
And I hope that future generations won't have to face this.
00:28:40.079 --> 00:28:43.440
It will get worse before it gets better, unfortunately.
00:28:43.680 --> 00:28:44.720
But you know what?
00:28:44.880 --> 00:28:53.920
The very fact that I am in front of you today means that things are slowly changing.
00:28:54.559 --> 00:29:09.359
And uh regarding the the past, clearly, like the narrative has been switched in a way to make you um guilty until proven innocent.
00:29:09.599 --> 00:29:14.160
And even when you are innocent, you're still guilty just because.
00:29:14.720 --> 00:29:23.119
Because the state decided so, because the media decided so, because pundits, I mean now pundits, decided so.
00:29:23.440 --> 00:29:25.279
Today social media decided so.
00:29:25.359 --> 00:29:29.519
The algorithm decided decide now that you are guilty.
00:29:30.160 --> 00:29:37.359
And the exertion of always having to prove that you are innocent, and and I don't do that anymore.
00:29:37.519 --> 00:29:39.519
If you think I'm guilty, fair enough.
00:29:39.680 --> 00:29:40.480
Have fun.
00:29:41.599 --> 00:29:54.000
But I believe that we are lucky enough to have the, and I'm talking as a legal scholar now, to have the legal tools to find that.
00:29:54.400 --> 00:29:56.400
I truly believe in human rights.
00:29:56.559 --> 00:30:00.720
The difference is that I believe that human rights should apply to everyone.
00:30:00.880 --> 00:30:05.359
With a distinction, whether you're white, Asian, whatsoever.
00:30:05.440 --> 00:30:07.119
Like I honestly don't care.
00:30:07.440 --> 00:30:17.680
But selective, like choosing to apply human rights when convenient, when it's glamorous and sexy because fans can heal the human rights, yeah, it's cool on paper.
00:30:17.920 --> 00:30:20.799
The reality is like we don't apply what we preach for.
00:30:21.359 --> 00:30:24.960
And that has been my compass ever since.
00:30:25.119 --> 00:30:30.319
And I will fight for it until my last day on this earth.
00:30:37.920 --> 00:31:00.240
Shahid, I mean, I I know so many Muslim Americans that for them the sense of innocence was shattered because they would find themselves in the line at the grocery store, at work, in school, and all of a sudden they were being called upon to become an expert in Islamic law, theology, philosophy, anthropology, history, politics, culture.
00:31:01.119 --> 00:31:14.480
Everything was now being refracted through this lens of Islam, and they were expected to give answers, which of course suggests that uh the questions weren't being answered properly in other spaces.
00:31:14.640 --> 00:31:15.759
How did you find out time?
00:31:16.400 --> 00:31:22.880
So, um, first of all, I agree with everything that my colleague here said, but I also think I want to take it a step further.
00:31:23.039 --> 00:31:24.640
You said loss of innocence.
00:31:24.880 --> 00:31:27.680
Um I prefer it as a loss of complacency.
00:31:28.480 --> 00:31:40.000
Um and part of the reason is this um this binary that you're talking about, where you're constantly asked a question that you can never answer satisfactorily, so you're asked it again and again and again, we have to break out of this binary.
00:31:40.079 --> 00:31:44.559
And this is something that I was trying to do from day one uh after this happened.
00:31:44.720 --> 00:31:52.400
Um, first of all, within the Muslim community, if you consistently see yourself as a victim, you rob yourself of agency, right?
00:31:52.960 --> 00:31:59.680
And unless we look at the situation and say, what can we do collectively?
00:32:00.000 --> 00:32:03.039
Um, then all we're doing is pointing fingers at each other.
00:32:03.119 --> 00:32:07.440
And that happened a lot, that happened all the way until when I finally entered government, right?
00:32:07.599 --> 00:32:11.599
I had a pretty much a clean slate to work on this issue, right?
00:32:12.000 --> 00:32:23.519
Um, and very quickly I told uh the people that I worked with, um, and I reported to, I was two levels down from the sec from Secretary Clinton.
00:32:23.680 --> 00:32:31.039
And so I would regularly brief her, I would regularly brief the president, and the the points that I would make is are are as follows.
00:32:31.359 --> 00:32:52.240
One is if you continue to securitize this group of people in the hope that you're going to make yourself safer, all you're doing is reinforcing that divide, and you're not giving them a chance to have their own agency to work on whatever issues they have in their communities as a peer, not as someone to look down on, not as someone to lecture, but as a peer.
00:32:52.480 --> 00:33:08.319
And then the bigger lesson, which frankly nobody in government got when I was there and still hasn't gotten, is there is a direct correlation between a people's freedom and their propensity to take on violence as a means to express their political will.
00:33:08.480 --> 00:33:09.839
A direct correlation.
00:33:10.000 --> 00:33:14.799
So if you want a population to be non-violent, give them freedom.
00:33:15.119 --> 00:33:17.599
Facilitate that freedom, facilitate liberty.
00:33:17.759 --> 00:33:22.319
It's a direct correlation, and no one can deny it, yet no one did anything about it.
00:33:22.480 --> 00:33:33.279
And so I prefer, uh both within government service and outside of government, to try to create a dialogue or a conversation where what are we collectively going to do about this?
00:33:33.440 --> 00:33:38.799
None of neither of us are led off the hook, but neither of us are solely to blame.
00:33:38.960 --> 00:33:39.279
Right?
00:33:39.440 --> 00:33:49.519
There's a collective, you know, this is the thing, is like every action, 9-11 proved to everyone that everyone has the ability to influence to kind of influence everyone else.
00:33:49.680 --> 00:33:52.000
We are interconnected in ways we never imagined.
00:33:52.079 --> 00:33:56.880
And of course, that's only increased in the last 25 years with social media, et cetera.
00:33:57.200 --> 00:34:05.599
And so that means that we cannot, you know, if if one side is hurting, the other side is gonna feel a ramification of that, and vice versa.
00:34:05.839 --> 00:34:12.400
So, how do we create a global community where we acknowledge each other's pain, we acknowledge each other's trauma?
00:34:12.559 --> 00:34:13.039
What do they say?
00:34:13.119 --> 00:34:24.000
Like traumatized people, traumatized people, which is exactly, you know, you had traumatized people doing 9-11, then you had traumatized people from 9-11 going to Iraq and so forth.
00:34:24.159 --> 00:34:25.360
And it and it creates a cycle.
00:34:25.440 --> 00:34:28.000
And that cycle in many ways is still continuing to this day.
00:34:28.079 --> 00:34:29.599
And we see we see it, we see it now.
00:34:29.679 --> 00:34:31.440
So, how are we gonna break that cycle?
00:34:31.599 --> 00:34:40.880
And the only way we're gonna do it is to talk to each other as equals uh uh and value each other as equals and break beyond the cycle.
00:34:41.199 --> 00:34:47.199
And you saw these these kinds of oversimplified uh rhetorical statements being made.
00:34:47.280 --> 00:34:52.239
I mean, uh Bush says they hate us for our freedoms, uh completely obnoxious.
00:34:52.320 --> 00:35:04.800
And then you see responses coming from, well, Islam is a religion of peace, uh as as a as a defensive statement, which which was uh woefully inadequate, or trying to say, well, it was disrespectful, frankly.
00:35:05.039 --> 00:35:05.519
It was disrespectful.
00:35:05.679 --> 00:35:09.440
I mean, you can't look at an audience and say Islam is peace when they're seeing burning towers behind you.
00:35:09.679 --> 00:35:10.960
You're insulting their intelligence.
00:35:11.280 --> 00:35:14.880
Or or worse, trying to uh externalize them saying, well, they're not really Muslim.
00:35:14.960 --> 00:35:19.360
I mean, even though they're stating that they did this in in the in the name of uh of Islam.
00:35:19.599 --> 00:35:32.480
Uh Ibrahim, I mean, I'm not going to ask you about uh the loss of uh complacency because I mean you you come from an era of apartheid, and uh and so there really was no innocence uh that that could be there.
00:35:32.639 --> 00:35:40.000
But I'd like to I'd like to pick up on a point that um that that Shahid is alluding to, and that is when does history begin?
00:35:40.320 --> 00:35:55.280
Uh this this absence of contextuality, that you couldn't talk about what was America's involvement in the world that happened prior to September 11th from the standpoint of causation.
00:35:55.519 --> 00:36:06.159
Uh, that somehow the other Muslims were these actors who spontaneously decide one day that they're going to go ahead and attack America without anything that happened before.
00:36:06.400 --> 00:36:21.679
And you've had experience uh with, I uh assume, similarly on the narrative regarding Gaza, that you have probably had to experience people saying, don't talk about October 6th, don't talk about anything that happened before.
00:36:21.920 --> 00:36:35.199
How do you see 9-11, and I don't think 9-11 is alone in that, but framing this picture of causation having its uh its its limit on the on the start end?
00:36:35.760 --> 00:36:50.880
No, thanks very much um for that question, and I do want to speak about it in transitional terms as opposed to transition from innocence to uh quote William Blake experience or loss of innocence.
00:36:52.159 --> 00:36:57.199
I think, you know, the Canadian-born American economist Professor J.K.
00:36:57.280 --> 00:37:07.199
Galbraith has this really rich quotation in which he says, the more uncertain people are, the more dogmatic they become.
00:37:08.320 --> 00:37:16.960
I think it is the transition from an age of uncertainty to an age of extremism and counter-extremism.
00:37:17.280 --> 00:37:25.360
911, as Professor Rogers have said, is not the first in that transition, but it is the most spectacular.
00:37:26.719 --> 00:37:31.679
And so to understand the age of uncertainty, you've got to contextualize it.
00:37:31.840 --> 00:37:41.440
You've got to ask what were the 50 years before 911 that created the age of uncertainty?
00:37:41.760 --> 00:37:59.199
And I've looked at the last 70 years, and I have a theory called 70 by 70, that the last 70 years may have involved Muslims either by virtue of what they've done or what was done unto them in 70% of the conflicts since World War II.
00:37:59.440 --> 00:38:07.760
And we just have to look at 1947, the establishment of the state of Israel, and everything right up to a genocide.
00:38:08.000 --> 00:38:19.599
You've then got to look 1948, uh 1947, the partition, the independence of India, and the partition and the bloody partitions, Pakistan and then Pakistan and Bangladesh.
00:38:20.400 --> 00:38:28.480
1948, the establishment of the State of Israel, right up till today, Intifadas, Arab-Israeli wars, genocide.
00:38:29.039 --> 00:38:43.360
Then you've got to look 1953, the coup d'etat against Mussaddeg, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and the current war that we are in today.
00:38:43.599 --> 00:39:03.199
We can go to 1962 and the process of decolonization in Algeria and the installation of the colonization of strong men that rule by the Muhabharat and Diktat and the conditions in the Arab world that lead to this.
00:39:03.760 --> 00:39:35.920
Then you've got to look at Afghanistan 1, 2, 3, with the Soviet Union and the arming of the Mujahideen, the influx of 40,000 Arab volunteers into the fight against the Soviet Union, the Charlie Wilson arming of those Mujahideen, the fundraising for them in the United States, and then the withdrawal of the United States, and what do you do with those 40,000 people, and they become Al-Qaeda?
00:39:38.159 --> 00:39:39.920
Armed by the West.
00:39:42.000 --> 00:39:45.840
And suddenly, Aman, what's his name?
00:39:46.079 --> 00:39:51.039
Al-Zawahiri al-Zawahiri now declares we've been abandoned.
00:39:51.760 --> 00:39:56.559
We're here in the Toro Boro Mountains, let's concentrate on the far enemy.
00:39:57.840 --> 00:40:01.840
And Project One of the Far Enemy is 911.
00:40:02.480 --> 00:40:09.679
Let's no longer attack around us, let's attack the far enemy, and that leads us to 911.
00:40:10.800 --> 00:40:22.880
Um Cook, the former Foreign Secretary of the USS, we made a monumental miscalculation in the arming of that 40,000 people.
00:40:23.199 --> 00:40:24.480
He admits it.
00:40:25.119 --> 00:40:30.000
Almost to the day, 10th of July 2005.
00:40:30.719 --> 00:40:31.920
He admits that.
00:40:32.239 --> 00:40:37.039
So that is the context that produces 911.
00:40:38.000 --> 00:40:40.320
We understand it, we don't condone it.
00:40:41.440 --> 00:40:45.119
Because any loss of life needs to be condemned.
00:40:47.119 --> 00:40:57.119
But understanding it allows us the ability to deal with it in a way that doesn't now invite a counter-extremism, because that's what happens.
00:40:57.199 --> 00:41:03.519
You've got the informal ragtag extremism from the Toro Bora Mountains, from the Raqqa Desert, etc.
00:41:03.920 --> 00:41:16.719
And then you've got the mainstreamed extremism from Ten Downing Street, from the White House, in parties all over Europe and so forth.
00:41:17.039 --> 00:41:20.400
And in the Arab heartlands.
00:41:21.440 --> 00:41:23.920
And so that's what creates this.
00:41:24.079 --> 00:41:31.199
And so we're dealing with a blowback of all of that.
00:41:31.519 --> 00:41:36.159
That comes, and this really, and and then we don't have an adult in the room.
00:41:36.880 --> 00:41:43.840
And so instead, Europeans and Americans are asked to trade liberty for security.
00:41:44.480 --> 00:41:48.800
And so we now agree, okay, let's get the CIA to watch all of us.
00:41:49.679 --> 00:41:51.199
As long as we're secure.
00:41:51.840 --> 00:42:00.719
Let's incarcerate, let's surveil every mosque every Friday and put the imams under pressure to report any suspicious behavior.
00:42:00.880 --> 00:42:02.960
That's what 911 produced.
00:42:04.079 --> 00:42:10.079
Let's proscribe certain activities from happening.
00:42:10.239 --> 00:42:12.880
So we trade liberty for security.
00:42:13.760 --> 00:42:20.000
And so before you securitize and give weapons and all of those, you make that trade-off.
00:42:20.239 --> 00:42:22.639
And that's the reality of what we live in.
00:42:22.719 --> 00:42:33.920
And once you trade off a liberty, it's very difficult to get it back unless you have an anti-apartheid striker like we had, where we took, we were able to take it back in South Africa imperfectly, but we took it back.
00:42:34.159 --> 00:42:40.400
Others, when they incrementally give it away, there's no incremental or sudden return of those liberties.
00:42:40.559 --> 00:42:42.639
You just become used to it.
00:42:42.960 --> 00:42:45.440
And then you live with impunity.
00:42:45.920 --> 00:43:10.880
And so, in a very real sense, and I end on this, in a very real sense, the transition that 911 spectacularly announced to the world was the transition when uncertainty in the breasts of millions of Muslims were exploited by a few thousand who were able to unleash in our name.
00:43:12.239 --> 00:43:14.480
And sometimes with our silence.
00:43:15.199 --> 00:43:18.800
And our mealy-mouth protestations.
00:43:20.159 --> 00:43:26.559
And the protestations are mealy-mouthed precisely because we all understand the pain.
00:43:27.360 --> 00:43:29.519
We are like the deer caught in the headline.
00:43:30.800 --> 00:43:44.960
I understand the pain, I understand what was done unto us, but do I have the definition of justice that makes me stand up against my own as well?
00:43:45.119 --> 00:43:48.639
And that I think is the transition in the Muslim community.
00:43:49.039 --> 00:43:52.639
So you have that kind of self surveillance, self restraint.
00:43:52.880 --> 00:43:59.760
I mean the fact that Imams uh cannot talk about anything political uh in their Friday sermon less than.
00:44:00.159 --> 00:44:02.559
They come under a certain level of scrutiny.
00:44:02.800 --> 00:44:12.880
And for those who believe that these measures were either temporary or only focused on one community, it has metastasized, and we're all under this.
00:44:12.960 --> 00:44:20.960
I mean, saying see it, say it sorted has become sort of a mantra every time I'm in uh in the UK.
00:44:21.039 --> 00:44:23.199
And similarly, we have those things in the US.
00:44:23.280 --> 00:44:27.840
I don't think we've ever gone below orange level of threat in the US.
00:44:27.920 --> 00:44:30.559
We we have just simply become accustomed to it.
00:44:30.719 --> 00:44:39.199
Or if they draw back now 20 years on from Richard Reed and his uh shoes, now we can keep our shoes on at the airport.
00:44:39.360 --> 00:44:43.280
Somehow or the other we feel uh a sense of victory that this has happened.
00:44:43.360 --> 00:45:02.960
But Ibrahim, you know, you mentioned 1979, and something else uh that happens in 1979 is of course the start of uh American intervention in Afghanistan with the uh the supplying of weapons to the Mujahideen, a term which actually the Americans coined uh to describe the Afghan freedom fighters against the Soviet army that was there.
00:45:03.119 --> 00:45:14.079
And it was frustrating when uh in 2001, when the US withdrew, to hear American media saying, oh, well, the the US has been there now for 20 years.
00:45:14.239 --> 00:45:17.039
I said, no, mate, they've been there for 42 years.
00:45:17.280 --> 00:45:20.639
So there needs to be a bit more accuracy that's provided.
00:45:20.800 --> 00:45:44.079
But there is then, Paul, this this idea that there were wars of opportunism when it came to uh the closing overs of the Soviet uh of the Cold War, uh, to what may be arguably said, at least going after the right enemy that was in uh in Afghanistan with Al-Qaeda, albeit going after the Taliban was uh seemed to be uh extra.
00:45:44.800 --> 00:45:59.519
But then we find after 9-11 there are still these wars of folly, these wars of choice, whether it is Iraq in uh in 2003, uh, whether it is Iran as of February the 28th.
00:45:59.760 --> 00:46:03.360
Have we really learned anything from uh 9-11?
00:46:03.440 --> 00:46:19.599
Uh, and and especially the the the early period after that, when it came to the idea of power, when it came to the idea of how do we see ourselves, uh, whether from a standpoint of confidence uh and security, and how do we project these things outwardly?
00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:23.199
I don't think we've really learned so very much at all.
00:46:23.440 --> 00:46:33.360
Uh certainly if you look at all the other conflicts that have carried on, and the way so many of them continue in different forms that often aren't even reported.
00:46:33.519 --> 00:46:44.239
If you take obviously Iraq, one of the major aims of the Iraq War was to help the process of really controlling Iran.
00:46:44.639 --> 00:46:57.119
Uh, you know, with all the American bases in Afghanistan and the bases in the Western Gulf states and Iraq as well, then essentially you wouldn't have to worry about Iran because it would behave itself.
00:46:57.280 --> 00:47:02.000
And instead, of course, Iran came out of the first few years of the Iraq War much stronger.
00:47:02.079 --> 00:47:03.679
It increased its influence.
00:47:04.000 --> 00:47:07.119
And I don't think this was even recognized at the time.
00:47:07.360 --> 00:47:23.039
Part of the reason for the failure, I think, is one has to remember that within the United States, you have the project on the New American Century at the end of the previous century, and essentially that was really going to be, if you look, moving into the golden age for the United States.
00:47:23.199 --> 00:47:39.679
And this is why, in many ways, the first few months of the Bush administration, with all the neoconservatives coming in and the assertive realists coming in positions of real power, then essentially it was almost like sort of heading at a huge rate and then suddenly being whipped from under you.
00:47:39.840 --> 00:47:46.960
And 9-11 was a much bigger impact among that settlers society, than I think we realize.
00:47:47.360 --> 00:47:53.519
And of course, this is one of the reasons why the whole idea of responding with force is the way to do it.
00:47:53.679 --> 00:48:04.719
Now, the fact that the kind of responses that was done obviously in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Libya, and many other places, you use the term lidism.
00:48:04.880 --> 00:48:10.400
You're keeping the lid on things really by the use of force and not looking at the underlying problems.
00:48:10.559 --> 00:48:12.639
But the underlying problems are still there.
00:48:13.119 --> 00:48:18.559
For this reason, we've made very little progress in terms of the underlying reasons.
00:48:18.639 --> 00:48:25.119
We're much more now in an era of revolts from the margins in many different ways, in many different forms.
00:48:25.440 --> 00:48:27.119
We've not learned very much at all.
00:48:27.280 --> 00:48:30.960
I think that's also a failure of people like me and peace researchers.
00:48:31.119 --> 00:48:34.400
We've not really pushed it hard enough, what we were thinking.
00:48:34.639 --> 00:48:37.920
And as a result of that, I think you know what you do pay a cost.
00:48:38.239 --> 00:48:41.199
Because as we look now, that may be changing.
00:48:41.280 --> 00:49:01.599
Uh, you look at the, I know we're trespassing on other areas of the festival, but if you look at the beginnings of collapse of support for Israel in the United States and other things like that, I think people are in a sense waking up to the way the system as a whole isn't working as expected.
00:49:01.760 --> 00:49:07.920
Uh so we're in an era where in some ways there's considerable possibilities to think things new.
00:49:08.159 --> 00:49:20.400
But against that, very strong pressures uh from, we use the term establishment, call it what you will, very much stronger pressures to actually maintain the way we're going and not think things out.
00:49:20.559 --> 00:49:26.480
And it seems to me that that's going to be the intellectual battle, which is going to be crucial in the next five years or so.
00:49:27.599 --> 00:49:32.159
Reem Sarah, you just heard, I mean, this idea about the system not working.
00:49:32.400 --> 00:49:37.119
From a legal perspective, it seems as though after 9-11 there were two possibilities.
00:49:37.440 --> 00:49:57.440
One is to uh pass legislation, which many countries did, uh, France, the UK, US, and so many others, uh, leading to greater securitization, greater surveillance, legitimizing it, and somehow the other finding constitutional uh impramatter for it.
00:49:57.760 --> 00:50:04.960
And then there's the other approach, which is just simply ignore and circumvent the laws.
00:50:05.280 --> 00:50:15.920
Which do you think defines the way that countries see themselves when it comes to their relationship to the legal and the judicial now after 9-11?
00:50:16.159 --> 00:50:26.960
Because I I mean I I have I have an understanding in America, and maybe it's just because of this president, as far as what what he chooses to follow and what he doesn't, but how do you see this through the legal lens?
00:50:29.679 --> 00:50:35.679
I think Ibrahim is starting to talk about it, about the securitization basically of freedom.
00:50:35.840 --> 00:50:41.519
I I think indeed we haven't learned anything from 9-11.
00:50:41.679 --> 00:50:44.960
If anything, but faith is okay.
00:50:45.760 --> 00:50:47.360
I think we can be digging.
00:50:48.400 --> 00:50:50.480
I think we hate freedoms actually.
00:50:51.039 --> 00:51:02.239
Because if you want to fight what terrorist, whoever the terrorist is, mindset, you would defend freedom.
00:51:02.480 --> 00:51:09.519
You would make sure that freedom, civil liberties are overprotected.
00:51:09.840 --> 00:51:31.599
What we did in Europe especially, I'm talking about France, but it's not just my country, we secretated, we we made, we we made freedoms, freedom should be the principle, and the exception to freedom, like public order, like the restriction to freedom should be the exception.
00:51:31.840 --> 00:51:33.519
Today it's the other way around.
00:51:33.840 --> 00:51:38.159
Restrictions to freedom are the principle.
00:51:38.960 --> 00:51:43.920
Freedom seems to be, I mean, not seems to be, are the exception.
00:51:44.320 --> 00:51:45.760
So take France.
00:51:46.800 --> 00:51:50.800
Since 1918, it started before 9-11.
00:51:51.679 --> 00:52:01.519
I won't go through history, uh, limitation on the wearing of the headscarf for school girls in public schools, a low pass, 2004.
00:52:02.320 --> 00:52:08.480
Then we had uh fast forward, 9-11 happened.
00:52:08.880 --> 00:52:15.039
All of a sudden, in no time, a whole security apparatus was created.
00:52:15.679 --> 00:52:20.960
And by the way, we already had the ingredients, we just didn't make the recipe just yet.
00:52:21.440 --> 00:52:26.559
State of emergency laws, for example, which again are supposed to be exceptional.
00:52:26.880 --> 00:52:30.719
9-11 did not lead France to create emergency laws.
00:52:30.800 --> 00:52:35.360
You know when French emergency laws were made, emerged from?
00:52:36.000 --> 00:52:36.880
Algeria.
00:52:40.480 --> 00:52:44.719
Then it was applied in New Caledonia during the first riots.
00:52:46.320 --> 00:52:59.760
And these laws, so France basically kept all the ingredients it had, and 9-11 was the key to open the doors to go freestyle.
00:53:01.360 --> 00:53:08.639
Surveillance on everyone justified by public order that nobody defines, by the way.
00:53:08.719 --> 00:53:14.480
I mean, we have an idea in law what is public order, but public order includes dignity in French law.
00:53:15.840 --> 00:53:17.920
Define me that legally, what is dignity?
00:53:18.079 --> 00:53:22.639
Living together is a matter of public order now, right?
00:53:23.519 --> 00:53:30.960
So, what we did is that we took the freedom, transformed them into a security issue.
00:53:31.760 --> 00:53:36.639
So Muslim women's bodies became a matter of security.
00:53:36.880 --> 00:53:38.960
We are going to free women.
00:53:41.920 --> 00:53:43.199
But be careful.
00:53:44.079 --> 00:53:46.880
Muslims might be the guinea pigs, right?
00:53:47.440 --> 00:53:48.880
But those are tests.
00:53:49.119 --> 00:54:13.440
And right now, what we are witnessing in the past decades, those tests made, like this lab where everything was created, like the civilian state, the securitization of the state, um, identity politics becoming a security issue, national identity becoming a security issue, sovereignty becoming a security issue, immigration becoming a security issue.
00:54:14.559 --> 00:54:16.239
It now applied to everyone.
00:54:17.840 --> 00:54:20.719
They go after one group, you show you next.
00:54:22.639 --> 00:54:23.599
You next.
00:54:23.840 --> 00:54:25.760
And we are witnessing that now.
00:54:25.920 --> 00:54:27.760
Look at protest, for example.
00:54:28.320 --> 00:54:28.880
Right?
00:54:29.199 --> 00:54:31.440
We are talking about surveillance of mosques.
00:54:31.519 --> 00:54:35.599
Um, every single mosque in France isn't a civilian, okay?
00:54:35.920 --> 00:54:37.280
Every single one of them.
00:54:37.599 --> 00:54:39.920
It's actually a joke at this moment.
00:54:42.000 --> 00:54:44.239
But you know who else isn't there civilians?
00:54:45.119 --> 00:54:46.159
We are all men.
00:54:47.760 --> 00:54:48.960
I mean, I'm sorry.
00:54:49.119 --> 00:54:51.679
Uh your passport is a way to survey you as well.
00:54:51.760 --> 00:54:52.880
Every time you cross a border.
00:54:52.960 --> 00:54:54.719
And yes, I mean, of course we need security.
00:54:54.800 --> 00:54:59.760
Don't get me wrong, I'm not about like I mean, security is a serious issue.
00:54:59.840 --> 00:55:04.800
I'm not taking I'm not talking about removing security and that's it's it's silly.
00:55:05.119 --> 00:55:06.960
There are issues that need to be addressed.
00:55:07.119 --> 00:55:09.440
Of course, terrorism needs to be addressed.
00:55:09.760 --> 00:55:15.199
But if you take it seriously, you take it by abiding by the rule of law and its principles.
00:55:15.360 --> 00:55:21.599
And if we pretend to be liberal democracies, maybe in the first place we need to abide by its core principles.
00:55:22.320 --> 00:55:25.039
Liberal democracies like freedom.
00:55:26.159 --> 00:55:37.280
And there is one thing that maybe terrorists won is how the people they accept, so us did exactly what they wanted us to do.
00:55:37.760 --> 00:55:39.760
We fell into that trap.
00:55:39.920 --> 00:55:44.239
And we keep digging and look at the state we are going through now.
00:55:45.119 --> 00:55:51.519
We I mean, I'm not exaggerating when I say, and of course, I'm not comparing to the bad comparison of so on.
00:55:51.679 --> 00:55:54.639
Of course, every situation is different.
00:55:54.800 --> 00:56:03.280
But how is it, how the tools we are using are that different from the very authoritarian states we are invading?
00:56:04.159 --> 00:56:05.519
So I think that's a that's a great point.
00:56:05.599 --> 00:56:06.960
Actually, um, before I come to you, Shah.
00:56:07.440 --> 00:56:07.519
Yeah.
00:56:07.840 --> 00:56:20.559
No, I just want to actually link up to what um Rim Sara is saying, because that urban terror that I described unfolding in South Africa in the era of Nelson Mandela.
00:56:21.599 --> 00:56:35.840
We went to Nelson Mandela and said, should we invoke a state of emergency and should we mobilize the military to defend this because it's affecting tourism, it's affecting security, all of those kind of things?
00:56:36.159 --> 00:56:37.760
His reply was very simple.
00:56:39.519 --> 00:56:47.199
He said we need to invoke the state of emergency and we need to bring in the army.
00:56:48.079 --> 00:56:50.719
The constitution that we celebrate has failed.
00:56:53.519 --> 00:57:00.079
If we can't find constitutional means to deal with this, we have failed as a nation.
00:57:01.519 --> 00:57:05.280
And therefore, come back to me with a new solution.
00:57:06.639 --> 00:57:17.360
And we went back and we said, Madiba, we suggest the closing of five spaces for these urban terror because we really had to be creative.
00:57:18.320 --> 00:57:19.280
He said, What are they?
00:57:20.239 --> 00:57:24.239
I said the first one is let's close the theological spaces.
00:57:24.719 --> 00:57:27.920
Let's take theological permission away from them.
00:57:28.239 --> 00:57:41.760
And we had one Friday sermon across the country read out that declared such extremism, Kamiya Kaljahiliya, the extremism from the age of ignorance, it is forbidden.
00:57:43.039 --> 00:57:45.840
That changed the mass mobilization aspect.
00:57:47.679 --> 00:57:49.679
The second one is the social space.
00:57:50.480 --> 00:57:54.000
What are the concerns of people and how do we show?
00:57:54.079 --> 00:58:02.159
And so if drugs and gangs were the concern, the ostensible concerns, how did we mobilize the police against the gangs and the drugs?
00:58:02.960 --> 00:58:05.280
The third one was the financial space.
00:58:05.440 --> 00:58:06.880
Where do they get their money from?
00:58:07.119 --> 00:58:21.920
We went to the vice president of Iran, where foundations were giving money to foundations there, and we said, this is what you are funding, and they stopped it, and suddenly the maneuvering space reduced.
00:58:22.960 --> 00:58:25.440
The fourth one was the operational space.
00:58:25.679 --> 00:58:28.320
So if you wanted to march, you can march.
00:58:28.400 --> 00:58:36.719
It's your right to march, we will not stop it, but you don't have the right to bear arms and cover your faces with a scarf so that you can get away with impunity.
00:58:36.880 --> 00:58:39.679
And so we dealt with those kind of things.
00:58:39.840 --> 00:58:46.800
That when people's faces are in the in the floodlights, they are more inhibited from doing things that are wrong.
00:58:46.960 --> 00:58:49.280
And then the legal judicial space.
00:59:12.079 --> 00:59:29.679
But he was sure that the people in whose name these people were acting would recoil if they heard exactly the details of how they killed that child, how they defined collateral damage, how they stood up to theological scrutiny.
00:59:30.239 --> 00:59:40.719
And the moment we were able to do that, we suddenly found that this was the beginning of the death of an extremist movement in Cape Town.
00:59:40.880 --> 00:59:48.639
I share that because I'm saying in response to Professor Rogers' assertion that we haven't learned.
00:59:48.960 --> 00:59:53.920
I'm just putting it in there that there are different ways of dealing with it in case we want to learn.
00:59:54.800 --> 01:00:00.079
Reem Sarah, you mentioned uh the the idea of the guinea pig, the Muslim being the guinea pig.
01:00:00.400 --> 01:00:01.679
Which is an aktimoron, eh?
01:00:02.079 --> 01:00:03.679
A Muslim guinea pig.
01:00:05.440 --> 01:00:06.480
He's not wrong.
01:00:08.480 --> 01:00:14.000
You know, this is the this is the the the point in the uh in the program where the dad jokes start coming up.
01:00:16.079 --> 01:00:20.880
Shahid, I I would like to maybe use the metaphor of the canaries in the coal mine.
01:00:21.840 --> 01:00:24.800
Also because I'm a big fan of the band the police, right?
01:00:25.280 --> 01:00:30.320
But Reem Sarah mentioned the rule of law.
01:00:30.559 --> 01:00:35.920
In the last 25 years since 9-11, the rule of law is not exactly being upheld by Western democracies.
01:00:36.159 --> 01:00:40.320
Neither is democracy itself, which was becoming more illiberal.
01:00:40.559 --> 01:00:46.000
Market economies are now more regulated than ever before, especially with tariff kings.
01:00:46.239 --> 01:00:51.519
Uh, secular space is starting to yield to religious extremism, not just Muslims.
01:00:51.840 --> 01:00:57.360
And the open and uh discursive public space is now highly regulated.
01:00:58.000 --> 01:01:09.039
Do you think 9-11 is the canary in the coal mine of the liberal project, in fact, being, as Paul said before, shaking at its axis?
01:01:09.440 --> 01:01:15.280
So I tend to be an optimist when it comes to the discourse of what happened since 9-11.
01:01:15.360 --> 01:01:19.199
Um, sometimes maybe naively so, but I don't think so.
01:01:19.440 --> 01:01:25.280
Um this assertion that we haven't learned anything is partially true.
01:01:25.519 --> 01:01:29.440
Um as you go up toward the top of the pyramid, it's absolutely true.
01:01:29.679 --> 01:01:38.000
Um the one thing I learned by being in government is that the higher you go, these people are no smarter or dumber than you are, and frankly, sometimes they're dumber.
01:01:38.159 --> 01:01:40.880
And I've seen it with my own eyes in every single place.
01:01:41.119 --> 01:01:44.480
So whatever laws you have on the and this is being optimistic.
01:01:45.599 --> 01:01:47.199
I'm getting to the optimistic way.
01:01:47.280 --> 01:01:48.480
I'm getting to the optimistic way.
01:01:48.800 --> 01:01:51.519
Um because here's here's where the optimism comes in.
01:01:51.760 --> 01:02:01.599
When you finally realize that whatever rules you have on the books, they only make sense if there are the people who are in charge of those laws are applying them.
01:02:01.840 --> 01:02:15.840
You go, you go to the top and you see this old guard that's you know influenced by politics of several decades ago, influenced by these grandiose dreams, Project of New American Century, all that stuff.
01:02:16.800 --> 01:02:20.480
And then and you realize that, yes, they haven't learned anything.
01:02:20.639 --> 01:02:24.800
But what's the one big thing that's happened between 9-11 and now?
01:02:25.039 --> 01:02:35.360
It has been the democratization of the media, the democratization of business, the democratization of political power and how it's represented.
01:02:35.599 --> 01:02:37.119
All of these things have happened.
01:02:37.199 --> 01:02:41.280
And it and what's really interesting about that is you see this in the last couple of years.
01:02:41.519 --> 01:02:52.079
The traditional structures of power that reinforce these dumb decisions of keeping the cycle going are finally starting to realize that they don't have the power they thought they did.
01:02:52.639 --> 01:02:58.559
That owning a media company and trying to control what it says, guess what?
01:02:58.719 --> 01:03:00.480
The people route around you.
01:03:00.719 --> 01:03:01.199
Right?
01:03:01.519 --> 01:03:04.000
Trying to control elections, guess what?
01:03:04.159 --> 01:03:06.239
The people find a way to go around you.
01:03:06.400 --> 01:03:09.519
And we're seeing this happen in America in very big ways.
01:03:09.840 --> 01:03:18.000
Trying to control the narrative with these prepared talking points which reinforce that power structure, the public isn't buying it anymore.
01:03:18.639 --> 01:03:30.480
And and the the the the the structures of power that are so used to that old system and are not bothered by unlimited bloodshed and unlimited exertion of power, don't know what else to do.
01:03:30.719 --> 01:03:34.480
You know, when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and they don't know what to do.
01:03:34.719 --> 01:03:37.280
And so this is why I'm optimistic, right?
01:03:37.519 --> 01:03:40.079
It doesn't matter how in America, it doesn't matter.
01:03:40.159 --> 01:03:44.719
You can throw$50 million against Mamdani and he will still win.
01:03:44.880 --> 01:03:57.199
You can throw$30 million against, you know, uh uh uh all these uh politicians that have been elected that are bucking that trend, political money means nothing anymore.
01:03:57.440 --> 01:03:57.840
Why?
01:03:58.159 --> 01:04:01.760
Because the people are not receptive to that anymore.
01:04:01.920 --> 01:04:06.960
They they understand what media uh to trust and what media not to trust.
01:04:07.119 --> 01:04:13.199
They're perfectly willing to follow a Twitch streamer versus a talking head on CNN.
01:04:13.440 --> 01:04:32.079
And so this is a unique moment in time where people can overturn this old system, go back to a values-based system, go back to uh a human rights-based system, and start proving by example because the last refuge of these people in power is don't trust them, they're gonna ruin everything.
01:04:32.239 --> 01:04:38.480
And the minute one or two of them get into power and they prove the other otherwise, the whole House of Cards collapses.
01:04:38.800 --> 01:04:41.840
And and this is just the way systems work.
01:04:42.079 --> 01:04:44.880
When people wake up and they have agency.
01:04:44.960 --> 01:04:46.800
And I believe that's happening everywhere now.
01:04:46.960 --> 01:04:51.360
It should have happened 10 years ago, it should have happened 20 years ago, whatever, it's here now.
01:04:51.519 --> 01:04:53.519
And we have to make sure that it continues.
01:04:53.679 --> 01:05:04.320
And what you're seeing is the is the is the last dying gasp of an attempt of a group of people who are so used to being in power uh to hold on to that power.
01:05:04.480 --> 01:05:07.119
And they are losing by any metric.
01:05:07.440 --> 01:05:10.559
And so this is why I think I continue to be optimistic.
01:05:10.880 --> 01:05:12.880
And I think that's a great place to end.
01:05:13.039 --> 01:05:21.679
I mean, I think the takeaway then from what you're saying and all of you're saying is that the end of complacency means the beginning of agency.
01:05:22.000 --> 01:05:31.119
So uh whether it's in in Britain, I mean in America with people like Mamdani or even here in the UK with Count Binface, uh, we all have a future.
01:05:31.360 --> 01:05:35.599
Um I could I'm so sorry uh because of how engaging this conversation was.
01:05:35.760 --> 01:05:37.760
I think we have time for two questions.
01:05:38.000 --> 01:05:49.119
So uh Lauren's got the mic, we've got yes, one question up there, um uh young lady, and uh one more question if anyone wants to or just want to ask two questions by yourself.
01:05:50.880 --> 01:05:52.559
Hi, can you hear me?
01:05:53.039 --> 01:05:53.679
Can you hear me?
01:05:53.840 --> 01:05:54.079
Yep.
01:05:54.960 --> 01:05:59.599
Okay, so as an educator of young people.
01:06:02.400 --> 01:06:15.599
I I agree with everything you said, and actually before this we were in the I think UNA run and Kerbal Ancy Algebraism talk, which we we attended, and actually a lot of this came up in our discussions.
01:06:16.960 --> 01:06:23.760
But what you haven't mentioned is where education falls into all of this.
01:06:24.880 --> 01:06:30.719
You're all right, and I suppose you're all looking at it through the lens of being an adult.
01:06:33.840 --> 01:06:36.960
How do you approach this through the lens of a child?
01:06:37.920 --> 01:06:52.159
How do you educate and create unapologetic young people who also have to manage the trauma of the past and the present?
01:06:54.960 --> 01:06:56.719
Okay, thank you for the question.
01:06:56.880 --> 01:06:59.280
Um let's go ahead and we'll go around.
01:06:59.360 --> 01:07:01.519
Um Ibrahim, did you want a good story?
01:07:03.360 --> 01:07:16.559
I think I think that I'd love to bring my children up as unapologetic set of identities.
01:07:17.119 --> 01:07:31.280
So I'd like my children to be South African, I'd like them to be Muslim, I'd like them to be of Malay origin, and I'd love them to support Liverpool.
01:07:33.440 --> 01:07:34.559
Check, please.
01:07:37.280 --> 01:07:41.840
So those are the identities I'd love them to be unapologetic about.
01:07:42.960 --> 01:07:54.320
And in inculcating that, I need to show them how they are the best that South Africa has produced, not the worst.
01:07:55.199 --> 01:08:13.920
I'd like them to be the finest example of what it means to be Muslim and to embody the full array of the intents of Islam, not the details, not get lost in the subtext and the pretexts of Islam, but to live in the context with the text.
01:08:15.199 --> 01:08:25.760
I'd love them to have the finest cuisine that comes from their culture and to enjoy their football as long as Liverpool wins.
01:08:26.239 --> 01:08:31.119
The point of the matter is I also need to understand that there's a shadow side.
01:08:31.600 --> 01:08:38.159
I need to prepare them for a hostile world that is not going to take their credentials at face value.
01:08:38.560 --> 01:08:50.319
I need to prepare them in the same way that African Americans have adult conversations with their young boys in their rites of passage to say, this is what you do when the police confronts you.
01:08:50.640 --> 01:08:52.880
Keep your hands on the steering wheel.
01:08:53.039 --> 01:08:55.600
Don't reach for anything until they ask you.
01:08:55.840 --> 01:08:58.319
Ask permission to take out your license.
01:08:58.720 --> 01:09:08.159
We need to find the equivalence of that because we want to have wholesome children, but we also want our children to be street-wise.
01:09:09.279 --> 01:09:12.479
It's the kind of upbringing I had under apartheid.
01:09:12.560 --> 01:09:25.760
I was proudly who I was, but I was always aware that I was the black other, the Muslim other in South Africa, and I needed to carry the shadow and the light with me.
01:09:25.920 --> 01:09:26.800
Let me leave it there.
01:09:26.960 --> 01:09:27.279
Thank you.
01:09:31.119 --> 01:09:38.479
For better or for worse, young people today are exposed to the ills of the world way earlier than my generation.
01:09:39.039 --> 01:09:49.520
Like I was a happy-go-lucky teenager until I went my first day at University of California, Berkeley, and I saw the shanty towns built to protest apartheid, and I was like, what's this apartheid?
01:09:49.920 --> 01:09:52.000
And then, of course, that began.
01:09:52.319 --> 01:09:59.119
My children have been politicized by what they see on their phones from the minute they got phones.
01:09:59.439 --> 01:10:12.159
And and I think the challenge for education is we have to we have to ramp up earlier the uh teaching people to be critical thinkers, teaching people how to sort through information.
01:10:12.319 --> 01:10:17.920
You know, each successive generation gets more skeptical about what they read online, and that's good.
01:10:18.159 --> 01:10:20.399
My generation was like, oh, I won a lottery.
01:10:20.479 --> 01:10:21.279
This is great.
01:10:21.439 --> 01:10:28.960
Um but my kids' generation is very, very, they understand that people are trying to game them, and they're navigating that really well.
01:10:29.119 --> 01:10:31.359
I think future generations will be becoming even better than that.
01:10:31.520 --> 01:10:54.880
But but in terms of education, it's the skill to be able to process the flood of information they're getting, um, teach them that they do have a moral core and moral agency, and that it is okay for them to have opinions about that, and discuss it and debate it with their parents, and develop that way earlier than maybe I would have liked, but this is the world that they're in now, and that's how we have to prepare them for this world.
01:10:55.359 --> 01:10:55.680
Thank you.
01:10:55.760 --> 01:10:56.960
Uh Sarah.
01:10:57.600 --> 01:10:58.560
I won't do any.
01:10:58.800 --> 01:11:00.000
Uh can you hear me?
01:11:00.319 --> 01:11:00.479
Okay.
01:11:00.880 --> 01:11:06.960
I won't do any football metaphors because I'm from Toulouse, the kingdom of rugby, and we beat England so many times.
01:11:07.199 --> 01:11:08.159
But I see that.
01:11:09.760 --> 01:11:15.039
No, um kids need like to be like rugby players.
01:11:15.439 --> 01:11:31.199
Uh my point being, it's not going to be easy, but contrary maybe to my generation, and maybe the one after as well, we are far more interconnected globally than we used to be.
01:11:31.920 --> 01:11:33.760
And I think that's key.
01:11:34.319 --> 01:11:38.319
Make sure, I mean, not you personally, right?
01:11:38.560 --> 01:11:48.239
I mean global view, general view, that your kids have a taste of every single taste of diversity it exists.
01:11:48.479 --> 01:11:50.800
Critical thinking for me is key.
01:11:51.199 --> 01:11:57.279
Like we need to teach critical thinking from kindergarten, if I may exaggerate.
01:11:58.000 --> 01:11:58.880
Challenge.
01:11:59.279 --> 01:12:00.479
Challenge power.
01:12:00.720 --> 01:12:01.680
Question it.
01:12:02.319 --> 01:12:03.600
Ask questions.
01:12:04.239 --> 01:12:05.680
Never stop, yeah.
01:12:06.560 --> 01:12:09.680
Never stop a kid to ask questions.
01:12:09.920 --> 01:12:12.319
Even the most uncomfortable ones.
01:12:13.680 --> 01:12:17.520
And like I said, we are a globalized world now.
01:12:17.920 --> 01:12:30.800
And I think that's also what the um elite, whatever you think the elite is, fears is that they are losing this control.
01:12:31.439 --> 01:12:37.680
And I think kids now are not having it, so rugby player, just go for it, take it.
01:12:37.840 --> 01:12:39.199
And I I have faith.
01:12:39.359 --> 01:12:44.399
I want to have faith because I think this is the generation that you that is going to save us, really.
01:12:44.560 --> 01:12:45.840
And it's not gonna be easy.
01:12:45.920 --> 01:12:48.319
I don't want to be like Princess Unicorn, right?
01:12:48.880 --> 01:12:53.359
But focus on critical thinking from a very young age.
01:12:53.600 --> 01:12:56.399
That is what is going to save us, really.
01:12:57.039 --> 01:12:59.279
I may be wrong, but that's my take.
01:12:59.600 --> 01:13:01.760
Well, they're not gonna save us with their music taste.
01:13:01.920 --> 01:13:05.920
Um that was your dad's joke.
01:13:06.319 --> 01:13:08.000
No, I'm dead serious.
01:13:08.640 --> 01:13:09.760
There was no joke.
01:13:10.560 --> 01:13:22.800
I think just two things, very much to endorse the emphasis on critical thinking, and also it's not so much having confidence in your own abilities, but having confidence in your own potential.
01:13:23.039 --> 01:13:24.720
And that's the crucial thing.
01:13:24.960 --> 01:13:35.439
If you can people have the confidence in their own potential, recognize they can make mistakes in the rest, but they're capable of this, and I think that really parallels uh the critical thinking.
01:13:35.600 --> 01:13:41.760
Get those two together, and I think we're on the potential to be more optimistic, which we do need to be at present.
01:13:42.319 --> 01:13:47.600
I I'm an educator too, so if you'll permit me, uh, to me, I look at my own daughters.
01:13:47.760 --> 01:13:52.159
Two of them were alive but not really aware or conscious about 9-11.
01:13:52.399 --> 01:13:55.600
The youngest uh was born after uh 9-11.
01:13:56.000 --> 01:14:03.680
I constantly struggle with the gaps that are part of our formal education when it comes to what's on the curriculum.
01:14:03.920 --> 01:14:15.760
I know, for example, in the in the UK, partition and Indian independence is not on the on the curriculum, neither is uh that little war you lost to the uh you know us in 1776.
01:14:15.920 --> 01:14:16.800
But that's okay.
01:14:16.960 --> 01:14:19.199
Uh but then how is that filled up?
01:14:19.439 --> 01:14:31.199
Do you demand that the school put that on the curriculum, knowing possibly that there will be biases and prejudices and distortions, or do you just simply accept it and then go ahead and fill the role?
01:14:31.359 --> 01:14:41.119
You mentioned that this is about the kids, but it's really also about the adults and what kind of responsibility they have and what resources they can provide to the kids as well.
01:14:41.279 --> 01:14:50.399
I mean, I remember my youngest, uh, I don't know where she gets the snark, at the age of uh 10, she said, uh, hey Baba, do you have any books uh on Palestine?
01:14:50.560 --> 01:14:56.800
And my personal library at home is about 5,200 books, probably about 150 having to do with Palestine.
01:14:56.960 --> 01:14:58.640
I said, Yeah, go downstairs and grab it.
01:14:58.720 --> 01:15:00.960
She said, Yeah, it's easier to watch a TikTok.
01:15:01.119 --> 01:15:05.840
And I said, that explains everything, and it explains her.
01:15:05.920 --> 01:15:15.199
And so I met the challenge by going on TikTok and finding what I would call gateways for her to then please come down and look at the books.
01:15:15.520 --> 01:15:20.079
Thank you so much for being a part of such a robust and attentive audience.
01:15:20.159 --> 01:15:26.159
Thank you, Ibrahim Rasul, thank you, Shahidamanla, thank you, Reem Sarah Alowi, thank you, Paul Rogers.
01:15:26.319 --> 01:15:31.520
We hope you enjoy the rest of your time here at uh the Bradford Literature Festival today and tomorrow.
01:15:31.680 --> 01:15:32.960
Again, thank you for being here.
01:15:33.119 --> 01:15:34.239
And thank you, Sadiqan.
01:15:34.560 --> 01:15:35.199
Yeah, thank you.