Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani education advocate and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has condemned Donald Trump's plan to bar foreign Muslims from the U.S., adding her name to a growing, bipartisan list of those opposed.
"Well, that’s really tragic that you hear these comments which are full of hatred, full of this ideology of being discriminative towards others," the 18-year-old
told AFP in a Tuesday interview.
Trump called for a temporary ban on allowing foreign Muslims into the country following the Dec. 2 massacre in San Bernardino.
The attack was carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook, an American citizen of Pakistani decent, and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, who was born in Pakistan, spent time in Saudi Arabia, and entered the U.S. on a fiancée visa in 2014.
Yousafazai became famous in 2012 after she was shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating that young girls attend school.
Malala's father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, also criticized Trump during a ceremony to remember 134 children killed in a Taliban attack on a Pakistani school a year ago.
"It will be very unfair, very unjust that we associate 1.6 billion [Muslims around the world] with a few terrorist organizations," he told a gathered crowd in the city of Birmingham, central England.
"There are these terrorist attacks happening, for example what happened in Paris or what happened in Peshawar a year ago," Malala said, alluding to the Islamic State attack in Paris that killed 130 people in November.
"It's not just needed in Pakistan but across the world. If we want to end terrorism we need to bring quality education so we defeat the mindset of terrorism mentality and of hatred."
Also on Tuesday, Trump's Republican rival Sen. Ted Cruz said that Trump's proposal was wrong.
"There are millions of peaceful Muslims across the world, in countries like India, where there is not the problems we are seeing in nations that are controlled," he said,
according to The New York Times.
"It’s not a war on a faith; it’s a war on a political and theocratic ideology that seeks to murder us."
Recent polls show a majority of Republican voters oppose Trump's proposed ban.
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