Deeyah Khan - What We Don’t Know About Europe’s Muslim Kids and Why We Should Care

I'm a sort of liberal but I was really surprised by this. I expected Deeyah Khan to say how Muslims and Europeans can get along easily if we stop being prejudiced. I thought it would be a warm, nice lecture but I got a big surprise when it turned out to be the absolute opposite.

Deeyah Khan has a Muslim father and a Norwegian mother and her father told her she that even as an academic the white people won't properly accept her so she would have to become a top musician or sportsman instead, and so she learnt music. One day when she was young, she went to get her favourite sweets at a shop and a Norwegian man blocked her entrance and when she tried to get by he spat in her face and told her to go back to her own country. She was devastated and totally scared and she looked around the shop for people to help her but no one did. After that she run home crying.

So, she grew up to become a top singer and musician but Muslim men started coming up to her saying she was a disgrace because women should be at home serving their husbands. Then they started giving her death threats, and then, after that, the hate mail started arriving where they said she would be raped hundreds of times and her stomach cut out so she could never have children.

Eventually, she left Norway feeling deeply sad and went to the UK but the same thing started happening again, young radicalMuslim men started threatening her.

 Deeyah Khan talks about young Muslim girls who don't want an arranged marriage will run away only to be hunted down and beaten, or even killed in an honour killing. She says how the British police don't want get involved with inter Muslim disputers even when these young girls plead with them to give them safety. One young girl who repeatably told police that her family was going to kill her was found dead, strangled and thrown under the floorboards of her home.

Deeyah Khan gave up music and went to America, but eventually she camet back to Europe to become a charity worker helping young Muslims who are having problems. When she first started interviewing young radicalised Muslim men she though she would find monsters, but instead she found broken, wounded, young men who felt alone and scared. Like the young Muslim women, they didn't fit in with their families but they didn't fit in with white society either, so extremist Muslim clerics would take them in and offer them companionship, love, and acceptance, but then go on to radicalise them into becoming Jihadists or suicide bombers.

Deeyah Khan helps to bring these young men back into mainstream society and also helps them to obtain better relationships with their families. She warns them about the extremist Muslim clerics and how they are really using them for their own gain.

I will have to put a link in the comments section to Nafezz Ahmed's article I just put out here.