Maajid Nawaz: A global culture to fight extremism

http://www.ted.com Why do transnational extremist organizations succeed where democratic movements have a harder time taking hold? Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist extremist, asks for new grassroots stories and global social activism to spread democracy in the face of nationalism and xenophobia. A powerful talk from TEDGlobal 2011.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate.

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[MrBeumel]

The Dalai Lama is a democratic figure? since when do you vote a Lama? He is still a religious figure with a religious world view.

[Claire Moelis]

The hatred for Islam in these comments makes me sick. Extremism exists in nearly all major religions and while Islamist extremists have been most effective at taking advantage of communication systems to strike against people they perceive as enemies, it does not make Islam as a religion some sort of cult, virus, or terrorist organization. It shares values with both Christianity and Judaism and there are many peaceful practitioners around the world. An entire group cannot be judged by a few.

[ExistancisRessistanc]

The amount of crap that comes out his mouth, all for a fat pay check at the end of the month from the Government. talk about selling out.

[personaldove]

maajid nawaz is a secularist guys.muslims absolutely do not support him

[tonyillahiwarren]

TeratoRonin,

I know hundreds of Muslims, none of them would kill anyone.

Accusing all Muslims of this extreme behaviour is like accusing all Christians of being like Breivik in Sweden.

Evil people will use religion, ideology, racial prejudice etc as useful tools.

It's important not to generalise or make broad sweeping assumptions about people because of religion/race/culture. To do so helps create hatred & plays into the hands of the extremists.

[TeratoRonin]

Only Muslims kill innocent people for a fucking picture of Muhammad

And hundreds of thousands were those who asked for blood in the streets by the fucking drawing.

[Abuamina001]

The late Alija Izetbegovic was a Muslim democrat and the West ignored him.

[Lazar Puhalo]

We Christians have plenty of extremism ourselves. We need to form a movement to outstrip extremism, regardless of our religions.

[eyespelegode]

I honestly feel bad for some of the people who are commenting. Leave it to Youtube to show you that ignorance has no limit.

[RouX Renard]

Well, he is a democratic leader because all around the world people follow him voluntarily, I guess.

[c4p0ne]

Indeed, religion is noxious to the mind, Of course, all religions have no choice but to take a back seat to the RAW, unshackled savagery of islamic fascism. Problem is that religion can't just "be removed". Since religion/faith is analogous to illogical, unreasonable thinking, the only way it can be dismantled is through logical, critical thinking. Specifically, teaching this to our children and NOT allowing the exquisitely preposterous notions of god/afterlife to infect and poison their minds.

[eternaltruth45]

Ok Majid Nawaz, you need to dumb your language down for all citizens of the world to understand. The extremists are both educated and uneducated. Some are educated but in different languages. So please put your message across with simple short sentences. Thank you.