Along this process, I was thinking a lot about why we are working on hate speech, and why we are tackling these hateful narratives that most of the time aren’t so visible.
Now I ask myself, why aren’t they so visible!?
I think because human beings have this need to believe in something, to hold on to life, to forget their own problems. So often, they hate themselves, since it’s easier to blame others and to criticize others instead of working on one’s self-improvement.
I realized that for a project like this one, with a topic as difficult as hate speech, it is essential to have people who believe in the process and in the success of it, even if the expected impact is as small as a raindrop. In my case, I faced different kinds of obstacles, by being one of these people as well as trying to find the ones for the various steps.
Firstly, me as a facilitator of future phases, I found it quite hard to work with this topic as it involves many different aspects that we can’t see at first sight and because it was difficult to choose one case in between so many. When it comes to finding the right participants, or should I say, “disadvantaged youth”, it took me a long time since the people I had targeted to bring to the next event of the project couldn’t really go.

Why?
Well, because they were disadvantaged, not only through social obstacles they had and continued to face but as well as economical obstacles. So when you want to create these kinds of projects and feel like the best people that should be the ‘solution makers’ you have to think twice and be prepared to adapt the process according to their and everyone’s needs. When I chose them, I wanted them to feel like they have the power to do something good for society.
Like Ibn Rush (1126-1198) said once: “Ignorance leads to fear, fear leads to hate, and hate leads to violence. This is the equation,” so I wanted them to have the opportunity to get the different elements that would lead to the opposite feeling of hate; peace. Peace with oneself, peace with others, and peace with society. In a society that is built on respect and on the progression of multiculturalism.