Najat Vallaud-Belkacem Quotes

The Muslim community here does feel under siege.

We've always had anti-Muslim bigots, but they've always been at the fringes of society.

I didn't get targeted in high school for being a Muslim - it wasn't that - but I always felt like an outsider in that sense.

Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.

Bahai Iranians are barred from holding government jobs, their children are excluded from the nation's university system, their marriages are not recognized and their cemeteries and holy places have been desecrated. It is government policy to incite hatred of Bahais in the official media.

I usually play disenfranchised youth.

Christians were regarded as separated from society and therefore destructive of the Greco-Roman way of life.

Jews have never, ever, ever wished to be separate, unless they were forced to be.

No corner of the world is free from group scorn.

Economic distress, political pressure, and social obloquy already drive us from our homes and from our graves. The Jews are already constantly shifting from place to place.

Ever since I became a Muslim, I've had to deal with attempts to damage my reputation and countless insinuations seeking to cast doubt on my character and trying to connect me to causes which I do not subscribe to.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe.

Today, with the war between Muslims and the West escalating, you cannot count on the message of solidarity you may get from a civic group or a political party, or the word of support you hear from a kind neighbor or a nice co-worker. The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.

I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.

'Mulk' is a story of a Muslim family whose one member turns out to be a terrorist. How that family gets cornered and persecuted after that in our society is what it is all about. I have tried to deal with some of the burning issues of our times.

The proliferation of bans fuels stereotypes and discriminates against a community.

All the time, even before we had mainstreamed, it was like we were never really Christians because of the way we looked. Or, you know, we were never Christian enough, or we're too Christian at times. You can't please people.

Muslims remain the most convenient target for prejudice in a city like Delhi, which is far more ghettoized than Bombay or Bangalore, for example.

If a big number of young pupils felt secularism was an attack on them, it was because the term had been misused and deformed in the public debate for years by the extreme-right and the right as an attack on Islam. The term had often been misused to point out how Muslims were different to others, and that is clearly problematic.

I think that Muslims are criticised all around the world.

The thing with mutants is, they've always stood in for the disenfranchised and downtrodden. And no matter how hard they fight, how hard they work to live among humans, the humans always push back with new laws and new ways of hurting mutants.

I don't think it's different to be a black girl in England than it is to be a black girl from America. We all collectively share in a pain of displacement and not feeling like we quite belong in places.

I have a chip on my shoulder I pet every morning, a constant feeling like I have something to prove. Hearing that the canon can't be diversified, there's no room for more brown faces - that fueled my fire.

At that moment in time when we feel like the other, we were not the person embraced, not one of the cool kids, not in the club - when you're that person, it makes you feel smaller, and when they persecute you as a result, that's a difficult position to be in.