Nobel Peace Prize winner and education advocate Malala Yousafzai condemned Donald Trump’s proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. as “tragic” and “full of hatred.”
Malala, now 18, was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012 in Pakistan after defying the group by demanding girls be allowed to receive an education. She survived, and has become an advocate for girls’ education. In 2014, she became the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.
“Well, that’s really tragic that you hear these comments which are full of hatred, full of this ideology of being discriminative towards others,” Yousafzai said at an event in Birmingham, England remembering the more than 130 children killed in a Taliban attack on a school in Pakistan last year, according to AFP.
Trump recently called for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. the government “can figure out what is going on,” a days after a deadly terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., was carried out by a Muslim couple.
Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, a Pakistani diplomat who works with Malala on advocacy, also slammed the Republican presidential frontrunner and billionaire business tycoon during the event.
“It will be very unfair, very unjust that we associate 1.6 billion with a few terrorist organizations,” he said.
“There are these terrorist attacks happening, for example what happened in Paris or what happened in Peshawar a year ago,” Malala said, referring to last month’s terror attack in Paris that killed 130 people. “If we want to end terrorism we need to bring quality education so we defeat the mindset of the terrorism mentality and of hatred.”
On Dec. 16, 2014, an army-run school in the Pakistani city of Peshawar was attacked by nine extremists, leaving 141, including 132 school children, dead and more than 100 injured.
Malala now lives in the UK.
