TED Talks Task 2

Manil Desai

AP English

January 9, 2014

Ted Talk Assignment

Mohamed Ali: The link between unemployment and terrorism

Task # 2:

Mohamed Ali presents, “The link between unemployment and terrorism.” Ali starts of the talk with an anecdote about a young boy from Somalia. The boy had recently moved to Mogadishu after drought led his family to poverty. After looking for a job for weeks he was not able to find anything and forced to stay in poverty. Then one day he is feed properly, given some money to buy new clothes and send home by a group of people. Then after a while he becomes a suicide bomber and blows up a bomb in the city. The men who helped him were a terrorist group. Ali thinks that unemployment is the reason why many youths get driven into joining a terrorist group. When Ali visited Mogadishu, he raised awareness about beginning new businesses among youths in Mogadishu who are unemployed. At this meeting he meets two you youths who have successfully used their creativeness to create successful businesses. The first one, who is a college graduate, has ten bikes that he rents out to people who cannot afford them. As Mogadishu has very terrible roads the best way to transport is on a bike. The next young men has opened up the florist shop in Mogadishu in almost over twenty years. Before his florist shop people barely saw a real flower and now this young men is about to open the first public park in Mogadishu, Somalia. These two young youths at the meeting encouraged many young people at the meeting to come up with ideas to change the outlook of the city. Mohamed Ali is a human rights advocate and fights terrorism with entrepreneurship. Ali has a law degree from Boston College Law School and a founding member of End Famine, a campaign founded in 2011 aimed at promoting food security and eradicating famine worldwide, starting with the Horn of Africa. The main points of the talk were that unemployment in youths is a big part why the go and join terrorist groups. Ali also argues that entrepreneurship is the way we can change the world and stop terrorism from taking youth after youth. The thing that made me pick this talk was that terrorism is a big part of society today and I was curious how it can be formed from unemployment. The presenter made me feel stronger about helping these young people and stopping them from going into the hands of death. One image that stuck out to me from the talk was the image of the car that young men who suicide bombed Mogadishu after being unemployed for months.