Malala Responds to Trump's Muslim Comments

She says his comments 'full of hatred' will just 'radicalize more terrorists'
By Jenn Gidman,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 16, 2015 1:31 PM CST
Malala Responds to Trump's Muslim Comments
Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai wipes away tears on Tuesday as she listens to eyewitness accounts in Birmingham, England, of last year's Taliban attack on school in Pakistan.   (Joe Giddens/PA via AP)

Donald Trump's call for a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims" coming into the US has prompted heated reaction from the Muslim community, the media, and politicians from both sides of the fence. Now a prominent teen is adding her own two cents, and plenty of people are sure to be curious about her take. Speaking in the UK Tuesday to commemorate the first anniversary of a Taliban attack that left more than 150 dead at a school in Peshawar, Pakistan, Malala told AFP that Trump's comments were "full of hatred, full of this ideology of being discriminative towards others," the BBC reports. "The more you speak about Islam and against all Muslims, the more terrorists we create," the 18-year-old told Channel 4 at the Birmingham event. "So it's important that whatever politicians say, whatever the media say, they should be really, really careful about it."

The main reason for such caution is that pushing a whole demographic away could only lead to one thing, added Malala, who herself was shot in the face by the Taliban in 2012. "If your intention is to stop terrorism, do not try to blame the whole population of Muslims for it, because it cannot stop terrorism," she noted. "It will radicalize more terrorists." Malala's father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a Pakistani diplomat, also spoke at the event and noted that it's "very unfair, very unjust that we associate 1.6 billion [Muslims] with a few terrorist organizations," per the Guardian. So what does the Nobel Prize-winning wunderkind think should be used in the fight against terror? "A gun can kill a terrorist, but it will not kill his thinking," she told the BBC. "The only thing that will change his mindset is education." (Sarah Palin doesn't have a problem with Trump's call to ban Muslims.)

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