charities -- children's charities. thank you for joining us. i'm richelle carey. i'll be back with another news later. "consider this" is next. keep it here. . >> the nightmare hostage stand off in australia raises questions about the threat of lone wolf attacks. the world reacts to the pakistani taliban massacre of 130 schoolchildren and a religion persecuted by i.s.i.l. we hear from a woman whose emotional plea for help gained worldwide attention. i'm antonio mora, welcome to "consider this". those stories and more ahead.

>> united states of america is changing its relationship with the people of cuba. >> we hope in the normalization process people of cuba will challenge. >> in the words of raul castro - cuba agreed to nothing. >> the children were slaughtered in the school by the taliban. >> one of worst attacks in pakistan for years. >> pakistan needs a strategy against all jihadi groups. >> the nature of terrorism has been shifting. >> taking advantage of social media, the own form of propaganda. >> thousands of yazidi trapped in the yazidi mountains in need of aid. >> they are cold and hungry, desperate to get off the mountain. >> the pilgrimage is a response to that. >> i feel a sense of relief we begin with a debate over the historic decision to restore diplomatic ties with cuba, after 50 years of hostility.

>> the president has had the leaders of burma and china to the united states. and for that reason i would not rule out a visit from president castro. >> in havana, many cubans were cautiously optimistic as they celebrated the news. >> i am happy. i hope this will be the beginning of the end of illogical things shown to be obsolete. >> the president obama's administration move divided the cuban community in miami. >> i think the deal was day. the cubans didn't get anything. anything that shows change and brings countries together is a good day. >> the majority favoured relations. a poll found 68" of americans do

as well. older cuban americans with longer memories say the deal with only benefit the cuban government, not the people. >> it's sad seeing a president that is doing some negotiation without getting anything in return. >> senator marco rubio went further. >> the implications of the decision goes further than cuba. it has an effect on democracy and freedom in the area. >> the former chief of mission at the united states in havana, 2002, she was director of cuban affairs at the state department from 1989 to 1993, and during the clinton administration led a brookings institution project on cuba resulting in the book called "learning the salsa" - good to see you. i know you believe the opening to cuba was long overdue, was it

a good deal. in the days of dealing with cuba, the u.s. approached negotiations requiring reforms from the cuban government on human rights and democracies, and we got none here. >> this is what should have been done 10 years ago, even 20 years ago. because what this does, what the obama bold moves on diplomatic relations, on removing the communications and financial parts of the embargo, on taking cuba off the terrorist lists that will probably happen within six months. it is a chance tore cuban civil society to build a democratic cuba and a prosperous cuba. we don't need to negotiate it away.

we need the information and the opportunity for cubans to make the changes. what do you say to "the washington post." they called the president naive saying a 58-year-old had a new lease on life and any process towards democracy has been arrested. are you concerned that this could be a gift of the regime, a bailout that is not catalyzing human performance like cuba? >> absolutely not. let me give you an example. when i was in cuba, i passed out amfm hand-held radios. fidel castro threatened to throw me out of cuba. he had a rally of 20,000 people to denounce this activity. there's nothing that the cuban government feared more than free communications interaction and

now with the new maimers, there can be sales, risks of radios. thumb drives, computers. this is going to provide the equipment and interaction that will allow not just cubans, but cuban civil society to connect with people around the world. electronic sophistication cas not at that level. you heard chris talk about the economy, how it was struggling, how they are facing difficult times. likely it is on the ropes. they probably won't be able to

subsidise the economy. are you not concerned it could be a bailout. those are the words of the wall street journal? >> not at all. i remember in the early '90s, i had a conversation with fidel castro, and at that point the soviet union was breaking up, cuban was losing $4 billion subsidy, and people in miami. cuban americans were siing christmas in havana. things could not be wrs. here was the moment cuba was on the reals and they made it through. to believe that cuba was going to fail because of an economic

crisis prolongs getting the support and information into cuba that is good. it grows the economy and gives cuban young people an opportunity for a future. fully normalizing relations means lifting the embargo. this is the beginning of the trade 'em barringo. there's a -- embargo, there's a lot of opposition in washington, and it will be a majority republican senate and congress. as the cubans like to say. obama is the hard part. he took the historic, the bold move. it's up to the cuban and the american people to deepen, broaden this and make it work. not allow is to be rolled back.

>> what about the regime, raul castro, when he announced this, appeared in military fatigues, he it some usual rettorics saying that cuba agreed to restore diplomatic negotiations without arousing a single one in our principals. will they dig in their heels and resist change? >> they may well. their one interest is to stay in power. it has always been that. the embargo helps them to stay in power. isolation helps them to stay in power. what will weaken the cuban government is when their young people have the opportunity to get on the internet and find out what is going on. >> ambassador vicky huddlestone, former head of the u.s. intersection in havana, it's a pleasure to get your perspective. >> thank you very much.

>> turning to the barbaric massacre of 140 people, including 132 children at a public military school. survivors described how seven pakistani taliban gunmen stormed the school. joining us from islamabad is a former advisor to pakistan's foreign ministry, and he advised the united nations, the european union and the world bank on several policy issues. he is currently a columnist and political analyst for the news, one of the largest english panel newspapers published in pakistan. good to have you with us. it's been a horrible 24 hours for you and pakistan. this savagery is beyond any comprehension. children, muslim children,

massacred by islamic extremists. pakistan launched air strikes against the pakistani taliban. do you think the horror will lead the government, the intelligence establishment and the military who had their kids slaughtered to unite and fight terrorism? >> you know recollects i think we all want to be positive, we want to express a sense of resolve and unity in pakistan. but, we have a track record here. peshawar is not new to barbarity. there was a - in september 2013 there were three attacks in one week. one killed 120 people during a church service. one that killed 40 people in the biggest factor in the city. and another that killed 20

people in a bomb explosion on a bus, taking people to work. there has been other terrorist attacks in peshawar constantly over the last decade. peshawar has been made unlivable by constant terrorist attacks. and there was no, you know, the sort of - i think the military coming together to conduct strikes against terrorists is one very small part of a larger raping of actions that we have to take as a society. and not just - you know, not just put everything - the government, as a representative, as a tax collector has to do a bunch of things, and the military is the sharp end of those things. there's a raining of other things that need to happen in our society. we - in the last 12 whatever it is, 18 hours, we have not seen, i think, the kind of clarity

that we do see i wanted to ask you about the pakistani people. i asked you about the institution, the government institutions. the people have given support to the pakistani taliban in the past. given what you have seen over the past 24 hours, do you think it could be a transformative tragedy where the pakistani people reject the extremists or are the divisions too deeply rooted among muslims and an islamic republic. if you don't mind. keep calling the pakistani taliban. the first thing the pakistanis need to do take back our name. they are the ttp, located in pakistan. they do not represent who we are, what we are about, and god willing, they have no future in this country. that's what i prefer to call them. i love it if everyone sort of made that choice. we don't want that stain on our

identity. there's 200 million of us. you mentioned that some pakistanis supported the d.c. p in the past, i don't think there has been explicit support. i think there has been confusion in our society and across the muslim world. since 9/11, we haven't created a coherent narrative about the rejection within our faith of this kind of behaviour. and pakistan is one representative of a larger problem that plagues the entire muslim world. so no, we are not where we need to be. i think these kind of attacks make the lines more clearer and i think that the vast majority of pakistanis are sickened and would like this to end. as i said... >> do you think the group is getting powerful or is it getting more horribly daring.

you mentioned the attacks last year. they launched a major attack on the karachi airport in june. >> getting more and more desperate. over the last couple of years in pakistan. the government, at least, you know, there was a whole - about a year worth of at least trying to engage in some kind of a dialogue with the taliban. it was a ridiculous notion. especially in the way that it was pursued, but what those - what that process did was help to split up the original ttp into a number of factions. so i think there's both disunity in the ranks, and desperation and clearly what happened was desperate and unfortunately we were bracing for more desperation, because the tighter we are squeezed the more desperate they become. the larger question is how much space we leave in the discourse for that kind of thing, and for

a lot of us in pakistan, this is about shutting down the oxygen in terms of a discourse. there can't be room for confusion or dooup lifty in our national discourse. >> let's hope they unit and figure out a way of fighting this. a tragedy like this is, again, as i said, inconceivable. good of you to join us. we wish you the best. >> keep us in your prayers, thanks "consider this" will be right

is waterboarding torture. in the wake of a release of the senate committee's report on the c.i.a.'s detention and interrogation programme a poll found 69% of americans believe it is. even sow, 49% think aggressive tactics are justified. only 36% say they are never

justified. meanwhile former vice president dick cheney remained defiant defending the harsh interaction techniques employed by the c.i.a. and john yu, the attorney that authored the torture used for many enhanced interrogation techniques admitted some integrators wept beyond what was authorised. constitutional law expert and author bruce spine joins us, serving as attorney-general under rawingan. i want to talk about dick cheney on "meet the press." >> for 13 years we avoided a mass casualty attack. we able to osama bin laden and other senior guys. >> essentially he's saying the ends justify the means. what is the reaction to that?

>> there's two reactions. it's no justification for committing crimes and torture, that maybe you had a pleasant result. the fact is there's certain prohibitions that we under take because of who we are as a people. the torture convention that we ratified makes no exceptions, no ticking time bombs with regard to torture or slavery. if we enslaved some al qaeda people and we thought enslaving them would te ter others, it wouldn't make it legal, it would becriminal. the second observation is mr dick cheney seems to thing the reason why we haven't had a terrorist attack here is because we flouted the war, violated the prohibitions on torture. there's no reason to believe it's true. our constitution is not a suicide pact. there's ample ground and tools with probable cause and due process to thwart and prevent

terrorism and that prevented terrorism attacks, not committing torture, which, if anything, serves as a recruiting tool, making the problem more diff, not less. >> dick cheney is not alone, three former c.i.a. directors agree with him, saying what was done was not torture, it produced actionable intelligence. last week we had another cua director on the show, defending waterboarding by saying this? >> if you want to call on waterboarding torture, which some do, some do not. most u.s. law would not call it torture you know, he went on to say if there's no long-term health impact of the person, like pulling someone's nails out. legally does he have a point - that that is not torture? >> no, for example, on waterboarding the statute prohibits or defines mental

torture simulated death. the purpose of waterboarding is to make the victim, the perp who is subject to waterboarding fear that death from drowning, the specific express terms in the torture prohibition. and when it comes to the idea that it's questionable about whether waterboarding is torture, we prosecuted japanese troops as war criminals for waterboarding americans. how can you say it's torture if the japanese do it, but it's not if we do it. this is an observation... >> the art is that our waterboarding was different, the japanese - it was a safer version. let's go beyond the water boarding, some interrogation methods were more brutal. including harsh sleep depravation, forced to stand on broken lums. -- limbs. when they were described to the man that wrote the memos

authorising the interrogation techniques, he said the people that did this are at risk legally, because they acted outside their orders. could those people - are they at risk legally, could they be prosecuted? >> upped the statute everybody is at risk. each those who got some kind of approval from the justice department under the statute that john mccain authored. that's a partial justification. the reliance upon the legal memo has to be reasonable, and something that an objective person would believe is plausible. then, if we go beyond that and say where, if they hadn't got legal approval from the justice det. could they be prosecuted. the answer is yes. the law doesn't say they have to get approval. certainly they are in greater vulnerability. the problem in most cases at this point is the statute of

limitations which typically is five years. maybe with regard to torture, you want to lift the statute of limitations. i don't think there would be a problem. they are are certainly vulnerable for beak% cuted abroad. it's a universal crime and any nation wanting to assert universal jurisdiction could do so. they are vulnerable if they travel. >> the obama administration said the noise that they made is that they will not prosecute. the supreme court justice jumped into the middle of all this. he defended torture in some cases in an interview with swiss national radio. he says we have laws against torture. the constitution says nothing whatsoever about torture, and he continued saying:

that's the extreme case in a situation like that. >> that case shows how ridiculous the argument is. that extreme case never occurred, and not during the enhanced interrogation techniques. we stopped them for seven years and haven't had a disaster. no one said since 2007 when we stopped them, we have lost vital intelligence. if you have to make up an extreme case that has never happened ever in the history of the world, it shows you on what thin ice you are skating. the last observation i make... >> in the - in the philippines case, torture about foiling that plot. i want to get a final question

into you. alan, who you know, a fellow harvard law school perp, he said while he's against torture, in some case it is could be warranted and we could develop a system called torture warrants. if there was an extreme case, that you would go to a judge and ask for permission. >> well, then he needs to change the law, because right now the law that the united states ratified, that the convention against torture to make zero exceptions for it. he needs to convince people the law needs to be changed. you don't decide that the law is not a good idea and flood it. the way in which you have civilized government you need to change the law and son vince the majority -- convince the majority of people and legislators. that is what i find ridiculous. it's unambiguous. no exceptions, no ticking time

bombs. we ratified it. we can't just decide to disregard it because the president or dick cheney wants to disregard it. >> it is clear, if you read it. bruce spine, pleasure to have you with us. thank you turning to the 16 hour hostage standoff in monday in sydney, australia. for 16 hours 17 hostages could be seep through a window with -- seen through a window with arms raised or showing a black flag. a handful escaped the throughout the day. after tuesday 2am police heard a loud bang and stormed in as hostages fled. two of the hostages and the gunman were killed. the suspect, man haron monis, appears to have acted alone. he had a big presence on social media. for more i'm joined by david ibb son, executive director of the counterextremism project, a

group that works to combat extremism by combatting their narrative and exposing their means of financial support. >> you said recently that we are only starting to recollection how far ahead the extremists are in their use of social media. we invented this stuff. why are we having trouble dealing with the threat they pose. >> it's the application. ideology to the technology. extremism has been around for a long time. and so have counterextremism efforts. extremists are ahead using left rimming, or social media platt norms. -- platforms. >> why are they effective, do you think they are playing a major role in inspiring people like this in australia, to do what he did? >> i think they are having a huge role. the level of organization and sophistication has been brought. particularly i.s.i.l. and their

affiliates that we have not seen before. for example, they developed clearing houses, where individuals can go to report accounts suspended or tape off line. the clearing houses put up a new account and organise counter attacks against groups like us. >> why can't we get rid of the clearing houses. >> they are telling people where to go. if u.s. company has taken town the account. >> exactly. >> and telling them how to counter attack groups. part of the problem is social media platforms, like twitter, google. facebook have not developed strategies and are not responsive to experts coming to them saying "look, this is a problem, you have to do more", what would you like them to do. there's complaints to twitter and facebook about accounts of all sorts that people think they should pull down. are they not paying enough

attention? >> that's a big problem. all complaints are not the same. all objectionable material is not the same. if you have people inciting violence, and someone flags that information. it should be dealt with differently in a different manner. >> your group has action from w twitter, to take action to stop them doing this. >> this guy was active on social media, and on twitter. he wrote things like shame on the racist and terrorist australians who support the governments of america and allies, including australia, and from western perspective god and his profits are terrorists. why doesn't twitter and facebook - why don't they put you guys at the top of the line, given they can insight violence. you. >> this is something we want to do.

too often we look at activity on social media as recruitment. i.s.i.s. saying, "come to syria and fight", it's also a souping board, echo chamber to feed his animosity and hate. the outcomes are as bad. >> you think it makes the individual, the lone wolf extreme, because of the fact they can post this. >> it reinforces themselves. they gain followers and seem important. >> this guy had a lot of followers. facebook had been taken down. not before it had more than 14,700 likes again, it would seem that something like that would come to the attention of american companies, so why was it not happening, there's too much out there? >> it may be there there's certainly a lot of propaganda out there. i think they haven't prioritised this, and there hasn't been an

acknowledgment of the problem. there's an argument on the other side that we need to track the individuals and not report them. that gives them valuable intelligence. there's a point, there's a critical mass where people are engaging in viability acts, until we take that step, we need to intervene and get them off the internet. >> what do you think about that argument. it has been made, that this is a way of tracking some of these guys, and it could help to prevent violence, because it gives us an entry into the way they are thinking or planning to do. >> i think there is validity to the argument that there's imperative and tracking. we can't let it be an excuse. at some point the individuals who are violent will commit violent acts and we have to engage and interrupt the cycle where it goes from rhetoric to violence. one individual tape off of social media reinforces our argument. a number of affiliated accounts

came off line because individuals were scared to be exposed. >> he was one that served as a recruiting tool for i.s.i.s. >> that's correct. he was a seed account. he was effective. his online tactics - there were other cells that grew and proliferated. >> that gets a lot of foreign fighters to go to the middle east to take up arms in this terrible struggle. great to have you with us. thank you for bringing light to this. it's an important topic. >> thank you for having me. >> we'll be back with more of "consider this".

iraq's government is taking the fight to i.s.i.l. and iraqi forces celebrated when they captured a town north of baghdad. whatever success iraq has had lately has not touched the yazidi. an shaint religious rock ancient religious group persecuted by

i.s.i.l. hundreds suffer in kurdistan. there's no chance they can return to the homes that i.s.i.l. overran, killing thousands, and selling girls and women as slaves. my guest, the is sole yazidi in iraq's parliament gained international attention as she made a plea for help as the events unfolded. >> translation: we are being slaughtered under the banner of there is no god but allah. 500 yazidi men have been slaughtered. our women have been taken as slaves, sold into slavery for more i'm joined by the only yazidi member of the iraq's parliament. she sustained injuries when an aid helicopter crashed in august whilst delivering supplies to yazidi refugees. she's in the u.s. to get congress and the white house to do more to help the yazidi.

good to have you with us. i know you are struggling from your accident with the helicopter. you are walking with a gain. >> yes, yes. >> it was a terrible accident. i know you were there to help many people, and now you are here in the united states to try to get help for your people. you met with u.s. ambassador to the united nations, samantha power. >> we. >> what help do you hope to get. >> thank you for this interview. yes, i was meeting with samantha power today. and we are speaking about many things. especially now can the united states help the iraqi people, and the yazidi people sales. it's a good news to maybe samantha can't help us or maybe

the united states can't help the yazidi people. >> what kind of help do you need now. we need two kinds of help now. humanitarian aid and more military support. >> hard as the situation for the yazidi women, i know you spoke to some left behind. the reports are horrible of how they have been treated by capitol hill. >> yes. there are 5,000 girls and women kidnapped by i.s.i.s. and even now nobody do anything for the girls. the situation - it's a very, very bad with those women and girls and children. >> and there are thousands more yazidi still stuck on mt sinjar.

>> yes. near - 1,200 families, about 6,000 or 7,000 people. >> how are they living there in the winter time? i don't know because it's the winter time, cold weather without food without tents, blankets. only 20 person of that. eight are received until now. it's not just the ones on mt sinjar, we have half a million yazidi living as refugees mostly in kurdistan, how are they doing? >> when we spoke about the situation of the refugee. the yazidi re refugee in the

kurdistan region, is bad situation, we have the camps. but it's very bad camps, very bad camps. not waterproof, fireproof. it's - the tents - it's on the mud. and maybe can i show you some pictures today or tonight the situation of those refugee in the camp, in the sharia camp, it is very, very bad. this is one thing. another thing - the foods and waters and and other its - it is very little. and it's not enough for the people. another thing, it's very, very important thing, the health care. they don't know anything about health care for children, for women. >> terrible conditions.

>> do you feel like after the rescue on mt sinjar, that the world has forgotten the yazidi? i think that maybe not a lot of people are hearing about the yazidi before that - this happened. before this issue, the yazidi. i think a little people hearing about the yazidi. after this i.s.i.s. attack, i think most of the people in the people here about the genocide. i think when we go back to home. it's a complex issue, because - the problem, it's not only with i.s.i.s. this group of i.s.i.s. are

coming from outside. it is smaller group, maybe 200, 300, but the big problem, big issue is that those villages, arab sunni villages surrounding the sinjar are helping them to attack the yazidi. our problem is with our neighbour and friend. this is the big problem. how can we go back to live in sinjar with those neighbours. >> because you used to live in towns with many sunnis, and they ended up helping i.s.i.l., and that is a problem. and you have that in the future, as to where the yazidi will be able to live. i wish you the best in your efforts. it's a horrible tragedy that's fawn upon your people. i hope that something is down to help you. >> thank you.

>> thank you "consider this" will be right back. at us... emmy award winning investigative series... fault lines no refuge: children at the border only on al jazeera america and you have that in the future,

"consider this" will be ure, that is a problem. >> thank you back. expectations for china's economy are falling fast. it's that time of year when hopeful high school seniors are hearing from the early college

applications. many students apply to 10 or 20 schools, one 56, another 86. colleges are making it worse, advertising and dropping essay and testing requirements to attract applicants. some worry that this may cause america's young minds more harm than good. thomas frank, a politics and culture columnist wrote about education at salon, is an author also. good to see you as calls. for the longest time. the notion was that if a school advertised it was not a school you wanted to go to, the good ones diplomat need that. i have a high school senior going to college, we are showing here my emails, these are emails i've been flooded with, hundreds every week. yesterday, 5.5 hour, from the best colleges in the hour to some you have never heard of.

one prestigious school offered to fly her to the campus, why are they trying hard to recruit applicants? >> the first thing you have to keep in mind - it was interesting what you said if a school has to advertise you know it's no good. it wasn't long ago that we said the same thing about lawyers and other professions, right. what you see in this case with all the other cases is an institution that you once regarded as part of the charitable institution, above the ugly demands of profit has become essentially predatory, and i think it's pretty much across the board. if you examine the way universities behave, private schools we are talking about here. some public schools as well. pretty much across the board they behave like predatory institutions. you know, truth be told i have never heard of a college flying

a student down. >> i will forward you that email, and i'm telling you it's a good college. >> yes, yes. >> what you are talking about. there's a competitive vicious circle leading to higher tuition, colleges doing everything they can to attract applicants. some of these colleges look like restarts. is part of the problem that there's too much money available for loans. is that what is feeding it. i know you wrote - you had strong statements - saying - it's a rip off on too many levels with too many victims. >> i don't think loans are what is at fault. we had student loans before this whole thing got out of control. we had the g.i. bill in the 1940s. the tuition - we know when the tuition spiral took off, in 1981. student loans had been around before that. i don't think that is really the cause. by the way, i want to go back to

the university spending money on frivolous things, which is, of course, true, and there's new tales of these outrims in the newspaper all the time. there was one in the "new york times" about colleges building a lazy river. do you know what this is. a slow moving swimming pool. okay. now everywhere has to have one, you sit in an upper tube and ride it. there's an aspect frt college experience they are not spending a lot of money on, and it is the - let's put to this way. the most important aspect of the college experience, which is professors, education, people that have been essentially deprofessionalized in a matter of 20 years. >> is this about the colleges acting as competitive corporations. you know, trying to be as high as they can on the best colleges list published every year. if they get more

applicants - getting money from the applications, it looks better because the acceptance rate goes down, and it seems they are going after applicants they never know they'll never accept. >> yes, that's probably right. i find in these situations the most mercenary, cynical explanation is so frequently the one that turns out to be right. and i think - all i know about this is what i read in the nourp, and according to the newspaper, yes, they are trying to - if they get the numbers of applicants up and deny a bunch of them, it bumps the score and the ranking of best colleges, which has this kind of astounding authority over what high schoolers value, and where parents went to send the children. it will bump ratings. >> what does it do to high school students. you write that higher education is the industry that sells tickets to the affluent life. >> yes.

>> is this about fear? is it increasing stress to kids that they have to apply to a lot of colleges in a hope of getting that important ticket to the affluent life. >> absolutely. this is the only ticket to the - to the middle class or upper middle class that our society acknowledges once upon a time you worked your way up, took a job out of high school and worked your way up. the only ced ep shall that matters is the college diploma, by the way, we won't go into this now, but it has little to do with what you learn at college, more to do with the idea of the college as a brand signifier, a sticker on the rear window of the s.u.v. this matters. so high school students - they know this. they know they have to get into college and no the better college, the better off they'll be somewhere down the road. essentially they have no power in this sort of negotiation.

right. and the way in manifests itself, the awful way in which this turns out is you graduate the glasses of students who out of college, who are then what, 30,000 in debt. $40,000. this is people just starting out their lives as adults, with essentially, you know, the same debt you have if you bought a house. >> and people with more than that. it's an important topic, and it's certainly changing. good to have you, as always, thanks. >> any time we'll be back with more of "consider this". it's been going op -- on for a long time. there's so much labour competing in the world, and winners at the we'll be back with more of

church going is on the decline in much of america and on a free fall in western europe. a desire to travel to a religious place and experience a transcendens moment is growing.

200 million religious pilgrimages happen every year. a documentary on pbs follows pilgrims making spiritual journeys. it follows american wounded warriors on an annual pilgrimage to the catholic shline in lords. there a staff sergeant who had been badly wounded in iraq found peace. >> the most beautiful experience that i had while here was when we went to the grotto. >> reporter: every year more than 350,000 pilgrims take part in a ritual of baithing and renewal. >> they put me inside the water. as soon as it was placed over my head, i felt a sense of relief. i don't know how to explain that. it is incredible. that changed me completely.

>> for more, i'm joined by pbs contributor bruce. the first episode of "sacred journeys" debuted on tuesday on pbs and online. you said organised religion is threatened but we have seen a greater number of people going on pilgrimages, 200 million. why the contradiction. >> there's a correlation. our religion was handed to us, our identity, where we lived. now we have a role in selecting that. religious identity is fluid. half of americans will change faith, four in 10 americans are in interfaith marriages, and pilgrimage is an expression of that, you get off the sofa and go on the journey and decide what you believe. >> what were the americans doing that you followed. were they going there to express

their faith or find it. >> the answer is yes, they are doing all sorts of things. i went on six of these, as you mentioned. india, mecca, jerusalem, lourds, and you see in general people in moments of transitions. they graduate from school, starting a new phase, lost a parents, a job. people going flow divorce or retiring. it's in those moments that people open themselves up to someone or something higher. and some people are going to walk in the footsteps and have that experience. others are not. we have a couple that we meet who graduated from medical school in japan. on 750 mile buddhist track. they say we are people of science, not faith. >> most people hear of lords, jerusalem, mecca. you went to japan, nigeria, india. the biggest of all. >> 100 million to 50 days.

>> bathing in the ghangis. >> that is spectacular. nigeria was the eye opening. >> that was the one i had never heard of. >> most of the slaves that came to the united states were taken from this one part of the west africa. a lot of traditions lived upped the surface of african-american and brazilian. you have african-americans going back to reclaim their cultural identity as one priest says to us, we left africa, africa never left us. >> the pilgrimages, if you go back history, were not for the faint of heart. >> exactly. >> you had to go as rough, people had to beg for food, and the way to get to some of these maces. that changed a bit. there are those that complain there has been a disneyification of some. we know that mecca has some fantastic and expensive hotels in the world. has that changed the experience for pilgrims? >> if you saw me the night

before the festival in nigeria. you wouldn't say. suffering is part. in mecca, you may be buying your way into a fancy hotel room. it's rigg ourous, demanding. some by foot. accommodations are not always great or people generous. that is part of it. if you look at the scriptural tradition, it's in moments of dislocation that the breakthrough comes. that's why people in dislocation tombs in their life want to go. when we are fat and happy and comfortable. who needs this. it's when we are needing it, we are open to something higher. >> you made a 10,000 mile pril grimmage, walking the bible, going to biblical sites, it became a pbs series. you travelled for a long time. at one point in your journey you wrote:

you are jewish, this time that you went to the other sides, did you - for other religions - did you feel a tug, a spiritual moment? >> in my life as a traveller i thought of myself as a bungee court, i'd pop out and bounce back. being in the meddle east for the first time it called. i rds these places were connected. what i saw in the series "sacred journeys", is that there are special places where the universe opens and we are attracted to that. what i took away from the pril frames is that we don't have to sit back and accept what the institution or the people on the high mountain tells u we are called to decide for ourselves what we believe in. there's one way to do that. get off the sofa and go. >> again, the new series -

"sacred journeys", can be seen on pbs or online. that's all for now. the conversation considers on the website, aljazeera.com/considerthis and we are on facebook and twitter and tweet me @amoratv. see you next time. >> august 25, 2014. michael brown is laid to rest by his family and friends