Malala Yousafzai
U.S. media have shown great, and warranted, interest in Malala Yousafzai, the 14-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head October 9 by members of a Taliban faction for her outspoken promotion of education for women. The attack “has horrified people across the South Asian country and abroad,” reports the Washington Post, and “has also sparked hope that the Pakistani government will respond by intensifying its fight against the Taliban and its allies.”
In recalling conversations with Yousafzai, the Christian Science Monitor‘s Owais Tohid noted her sources of inspiration:
The first time I met Malala, a couple of years ago, I asked her what her name signified. She answered: “Probably, a hero like the Afghan heroine Malalai [of Maiwand] or Malalai Joya. I want to be a social activist and an honest politician like her,” she said, smiling.
It’s good to remember, in that case, how Joya tested the limits of U.S. media’s concern for women and girls who stand up to oppressive authorities. Activist and author of A Woman Among Warlords: The Extraordinary Story of an Afghan Who Dared to Raise Her Voice, Joya has also faced attempts on her life after speaking out against the oppression of women under the Taliban, but she is explicit in counting the U.S. and NATO too as enemies of Afghan women’s (and men’s) right to live and learn in peace.
Time magazine, having named Joya one of its “Top 100 Most Influential People in the World,” nevertheless backhanded her with a profile from Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote that Joya “must use her notoriety, her demonstrated wit and her resilience to get the troops on her side instead of out of her country.”
The very mention of the military occupation of her country seemed to offend CNN host Heidi Collins (10/28/09): “Again, ‘occupation’ would certainly be your word. A lot of people would take great issue with you calling the US presence in Afghanistan, in your country, an ‘occupation’.” These would not include, e.g., the U.N. Security Council or the International Committee of the Red Cross, who recognize US/NATO military occupation of Afghanistan as a simple fact of international law.
While saluting Joya’s “singular and heroic” life, the New York Times Book Review (12/13/09) still sniffed that her “tendency to choose rageful denunciation over calm observation is immensely frustrating” (though it has “earned the plaudits of people like Noam Chomsky”).
Joya recently issued a statement of support for Yousafzai (rabble.ca, 10/14/12) that called Yousafzai’s efforts to “wake up the women of the rural areas of Pakistan to stand up and defend their due rights” a “warning for those who only understand the language of the gun.” One wonders how deeply U.S. reporters understand that, or want to.
It’s always “immensely frustrating” to the corpress when someone insists on dealing in reality.
It makes their job that much more difficult, doesn’t it?
Your headline says, “Sympathy for Afghan Girl Shows Limits of Concern,” but she’s not from Afghanistan.
The headline originally incorrectly identified Yousafzai as Afghan; it’s been changed to identify her correctly as Pakistani.
As i see it, the Taliban is just another faction, willing to kill their own kind just to climb to the top of the power enclave. That’s to say, just more plutocrats, with the fascist mindset. They consider us as merely their cattle, and whenever we dissent, vermin, and pestilence. But, we have them outnumbered, and surrounded. We have sapience on our side. The game is ours!
Imperialism in the garb of human rights:
…The moral sensitivities of the US elite are remarkably selective and inevitably correspond with the pursuit of its predatory foreign policy.
Where was the US media outcry when NATO warplanes killed nine young women collecting firewood on a mountainside near Kabul, Afghanistan, an atrocity the US-led occupation forces initially tried to cover up with the claim it had killed insurgents?
Obama invokes the Taliban’s obscurantist views as regards women to muster popular support for his drive to subjugate Afghanistan, yet for decades the US has been the staunchest ally of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states whose semi-feudal rulers deny women fundamental rights…
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/oct2012/paki-o17.shtml
COLLINS: Again, occupation would certainly be your word. A lot of people would take great issue with you calling the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in your country an occupation. So I guess I’m wondering, when you look at the problems of your country by way of moving forward and by way of defending the Afghan people on your own, what are some of the ideas that the people of Afghanistan talk about? It’s been a very difficult road to hoe.
This pretzel everyone else in the media just seemed to swallow down whole is amazing. I am sure that every country in the world who has believed itself in the right when they invade another country say the same thing.
The Western media’s massive display of outrage over the attempted murder of the young girl is more about enabling the West to score points against the Taliban, not the most difficult target in the world, than it is about the young girl whom they shot in the head. Had she been, for example a Palestinian girl shot by a member of the Israeli military or by some settler, or one of the countless Afghans or Pakistani civilians killed and maimed in drone strikes or one of the many Black Africans lynched by liberation forces in Libya, there would be little or no coverage from the very same media, let alone expressions of outrage.
KR & PEASEHEAD have it right. To me it’s literally outrageous that the US can do things like invoke sanctions against Iraq and cause the deaths of an estimated 500,000 children, or bomb the piss out of tiny countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc and kill hundreds of thousands (Vietnamese casualty estimates range to 3 M), and then just sound vaguely sorry but say “We believe it is worth it” (Madeline Albright) or shrug our shoulders and change the subject. This is MASSIVE killing compared to the miniscule numbers that the minor terrorists can muster, yet the US media coverage portrays it’s feigned outrage in reverse sequence. Yes, one murder is horrible and wrong, but a serial killer has no moral standing to criticize a single-victim murderer.
“One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic” – Joseph Stalin
This is what we have become.
I like the answer of this German Scholar when he was asked about terrorism and Islam: He said:
· Who started the First World War, which killed 37 million and injured 22, 379, 053 that includes 7 million civilians? Muslims?
· Who started the Second World War, which killed over 60 million, which was over 2.5% of the world population? Muslims?
· Who killed about 20 million of Aborigines in Australia? Muslims?
· Who drop the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which killed 166,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki? Muslims?
· Who killed more than 100 million Red Indians in North America? Muslims?
· Who killed more than 50 million Indian in South America? Muslims?
· Who took about 180 million African people as slaves and when 88% of them died, threw them into the Atlantic Ocean? Muslims?
NO
They weren’t Muslims! First of all, you have to define terrorism properly…. If a non-Muslim does something bad… it is crime. But if a Muslim commits the same, he is a terrorist. So first remove the double standard… then come to the point.
*** Just for your information ***
Where’s the outrage over what Israelis did to Rachel Corrie and just got away with it? Where is the outrage over all the little girls who are starving in Iran because of the immoral sanctions put in place by the US? I don’t know how these pretty talking heads can reconcile their double-standard and hypocrisy. It must be nice to be able to compartmentalize events in your head and assign different moral values to them. The human mind and its ability to rationalize never ceases to amaze me!
When anyone puts a gun to a child’s head, everyone knows that it’s a murder in progress. I wonder why droning civilians in their homes, or when collecting firewood, or murdering them at weddings and funerals doesn’t count as the same?
Is it because a man with a gun is personal, but a drone doesn’t seem to be? I can’t tell the difference between personal and collateral.
@gloriana… It’s because they’ve been trained to believe that “droning civilians in their homes, or when collecting firewood, or murdering them at weddings and funerals doesn’t count as the same”.
Gloriana and Sam the difference is easy to explain though in reality amounts to little.An assumed Terrorist enters a road in his auto.A drone kills him and his body is identified.But in the car with him is a young girl.His daughter..not seen by the drone.We all know the incident I am speaking of.A tragedy.A horror.Sad beyond understanding.But to compare that to putting a gun to a young girls head,and pulling the trigger?
Sam: Thank you, for the link; it does seem that we are going that way, but then, as a tutor, I always carry with me, Howard Zinn’s A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES ; )
michael e: WHAT? The video that you refer to must be the wikileaks one, where the Americans are laughing as they shoot journalists, and as one notices the children in the van, the other says it was the parent’s fault for bringing the kids there. Fortunately ONE soldier does still retain his humanity and races in to help the children.
Really, sometimes you are just so wrong, michael e,, that I feel sorry for you. You said in the beginning that “… it’s easy to explain though in reality amounts to little.” Then, at the end you say, that you can’t compare that to putting a gun to a young girls head. What do you really believe, or do you just like to confound yourself? I think, with this kind of thinking, that it’s scary that you work in the health care field. Sorry : (
Michael-e is one of the many millions, including some Liberals and others who have been indoctrinated in the US American way of understanding how the US hegemon functions out side our boarders. Actions are translated differently and looked at in opposite ways. Someone is up close and personal with their terrorist and criminal act they are identified as such. But if they are operating remote drones armed with missiles from thousands of miles away safely in driving distance of their homes and families and kills targets without proof of guilt in other peoples homes, cars place of business in their countries, that is fine. And any who are with them are just collateral damage and is regrettable but it is their target’s fault. Such is how the external empire operates as nearly the entire earth is a global kill zone. The UN is powerless and no other country of power defies the USA.
Such targets we find out have been labeled by our intelligence (spy) services and our valiant humanitarian peace loving Constitution teaching president signs the death orders like any dictator. Oh and if it is proven that the person they targeted for remote murder is innocent? A postumous apology is given. No resurrection for them for their grieving families. The American way for the New American Century. The Hope of the oligarchs to render democracy useless continues, the change started in 1980 to move us to a vigorous theocratic plutocracy is coming closer every day. The Iron Heel descends further to crush more under it.
The Taliban are no worse than certain fundamentalist Christians or ultra-conservative Jews. There seems to be a deep desire in some men to own things beginning with land and houses, going on through livestock and pets, and extending to other humans, even to wives and children. This desire is so deep that they prefer to destroy the possession rather than relinquish ownership. I renounce that desire.
Glriana no I was not talking about that incident,so im not sure where you are going with it.I think your point is similar to greg above.Death is death.And how it happens matters not one wit.It is that moral relativism, drilled into minds of mush. But there is a difference.Pilot looses control of his plane.Plane crashes 300 dead.911 plane is hijacked ,- pilot looses control of his plane,plane crashes 300dead.First plane was flown by a jew.Second an Arab.No difference there?
What in God’s name are you talking about? You completely, utterly missed the point of both the article and what Gloriana said.
Follow the thread of our conversation Tim.You are always lost.And striking out with weak insults because of it.