Latifa Ibn Ziaten was jointly awarded the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity on Wednesday.
The Moroccan-French activist is dedicated to raising awareness about extremism after losing her son, Imad, in a terrorist attack in 2012.
Imad Ibn Ziaten was shot by extremist Mohamed Merah after he refused to lie down on the ground.
Merah, born in Toulouse to Algerian parents, murdered seven people and filmed each killing, an episode that shocked France. He was killed in a police siege.
I'm not going to lie face down... I'm staying here. You're going to shoot? Go on then, shoot
“I’m not going to lie face down ... I’m staying here. You’re going to shoot? Go on then, shoot,” Ibn Ziaten, 30, was heard in a transcript of the killing.
Ms Ibn Ziaten later told media she wanted people to know how her son died.
“This is not Islam,” she said. “And my son, though he was a soldier, had never killed anyone.”
French security services had been monitoring Merah after he made trips to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Ms Ibn Ziaten also paid a visit to her son's killer's home city to understand the path of violence the man embarked on.
Her experience led her to launch a foundation that aims to stop young French Muslims turning to extremism.
During the visit, in 2012, Ms Ibn Ziaten was shocked to find people regarded Merah as “a martyr, a hero of Islam”.
She felt “another Mohamed Merah” would happen unless more efforts were made to reach out to disaffected young people of Maghrebin origin.
Only when Ms Ibn Ziaten told the young men she encountered that she, a Muslim like them, was the mother of Merah’s first victim, an off-duty soldier, did their defiance give way to signs of contrition.
“They changed immediately and kept saying ‘sorry, madame’,” Ms Ibn Ziaten, 52, said in an emotional account of her visit, shown during a France 2 television debate on Islam.
Ms Ibn Ziaten, born in Morocco but a resident of France since her late teens, decided to create the Imad Association “for youth and peace” as a way of ensuring some good came from her son’s death.
Now she has been honoured for her efforts and on Thursday she will jointly receive the prize, and $1 million to invest in her initiative.
COMPANY PROFILE
Initial investment: Undisclosed
Investment stage: Series A
Investors: Core42
Current number of staff: 47
Europe’s rearming plan
- Suspend strict budget rules to allow member countries to step up defence spending
- Create new "instrument" providing €150 billion of loans to member countries for defence investment
- Use the existing EU budget to direct more funds towards defence-related investment
- Engage the bloc's European Investment Bank to drop limits on lending to defence firms
- Create a savings and investments union to help companies access capital
The years Ramadan fell in May
Killing of Qassem Suleimani
KILLING OF QASSEM SULEIMANI
Background: Chemical Weapons
Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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