In Pakistan, a coward’s attack highlights historic struggle
Malala Yousafzai
“PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A 14-year-old Pakistani activist who won international acclaim for speaking out for girls denied education under the Taliban was shot and seriously wounded Tuesday on her way home from school, authorities said.
The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on ninth-grader Malala Yousafzai, who officials said was shot in the head by at least one gunman who approached a school bus in Mingora, a city in the scenic Swat valley in the country’s northwest….
Yousafzai became known in early 2009, when she wrote a diary about Taliban atrocities under a pen name for the BBC’s Urdu service. In 2011, the Pakistani government awarded her a 1 million rupee ($10,500) prize and a peace award for her bravery in raising her voice for children’s rights and girls’ education when few others in Pakistan dared to.”
What do you say about men so threatened by the mere words of a 14-year-old girl that their best and only response is to try to assassinate her? We can call them moral cretins and cowards, which they certainly are. But that doesn’t do much for young Malala, who at last report was still clinging to life. It also doesn’t do much to protect many others like her trapped in cultures that treat women as chattel, dominated by male authorities that fear education as a challenge to their own teetering authority.
It is some solace, I suppose, that their authority is indeed teetering. Like the lynchings that once marred the American South, such acts of violence against helpless victims are a sign of weakness, not strength, and in the long term they will be interpreted as such. Human cultures may be wildly diverse, but some things are true in all places and times, and grown, armed men attacking young children elicits admiration in very few. It is also important to remember that the circumstances that produced her attackers also produced Malala herself.
Like many outbursts of violence, this attack is an act of desperation, an act of vain, brutish protest against social changes that are coming too fast for many in Pakistan and elsewhere in the deep Islamic world, but much too slowly for Malala and others caught in her predicament.
The challenge for those of us outside that world is how to accelerate that process without putting lives in unnecessary danger. Tempting as it might be to some, it is not a problem that military power can set right. The changes that are necessary cannot be imposed at gunpoint any better than they can be prevented at gunpoint. They will come in time, but time that is measured not in months or even years but probably in decades.
The knowledge that in the meantime, heroines such as Malala remain vulnerable to such cowards does not make the wait any easier.
– Jay Bookman
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311 comments Add your comment
Welcome to the Occupation
October 9th, 2012
5:18 pm
“But if you’re an atheist and you’re wrong then you’ve got a judgement to deal with. Just sayin…”
Pascal!
Towncrier
October 9th, 2012
5:20 pm
“You asked me what I thought; I answered you honestly and forthrightly.”
Fair enough. All of the atheists with whom I have debated this matter in the past have also said that the only thing that is consequential in a godless universe is the present moment hour or day. Solomon’s lament is that since nothing lasts or is permanent, it is all meaningless in the end – a chasing after the wind. I find that prospect very depressing (as I guess so did Nietzsche and Camus). Interestingly, the apostle Paul said that if we were facing no hope for eternal life then we should “eat, drink and be merry – for tomorrow we die”. That is what westerners with their wealth can perhaps do better than those living in third world countries. Frankly, I see no point in striving to build a better society in a godless universe as I feel the time would be better spent gratifying my own personal desires. There is no guarantee of tomorrow and so why not enjoy pleasures as much as you can?
hiram
October 9th, 2012
5:23 pm
@ welcome
Define atheist. Doesn’t it mean anyone who doesn’t suscribe to your particular nonsense – someone who is from a different region of our little planet where they made up their own nonsense? What happens if you were never exposed to anyone’s nonsense? Say, you’re a possum – are you going to burn in hell?
Towncrier
October 9th, 2012
5:25 pm
“We are not “just an animal”. We have knowledge and reason. That is plenty to justify laws that protect individuals from killing an all sorts of other harm.”
Cannibals would beg to differ. Who are YOU, then, to impose YOUR “morality” on them? The ancient Greeks condoned and participated in pedophilia. They didn’t think it was wrong. Who are YOU, then, to impose YOUR “morality” on them? On what grounds? In other words, what is the objective source of your moral code?
hiram
October 9th, 2012
5:29 pm
@towncrier
It’s all learned behavior. What you learn depends on what culture you were born into. All you have to do is skip – not teach, one generation the regional nonsense, and then you can move on to sanity.
That Black Guy
October 9th, 2012
5:30 pm
DebbieDoRight – Plantation Liberal (In Good Standing)
October 9th, 2012
4:39 pm
Ha.Ha. Very funny! josef has a way of looking at a problem or equation differently that is very “enticing” to me. I LOVE brains — I think I love brains more than I love men with muscles………………it’s a close tie.
________________________________________
josef and Debbie sittin in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
First comes , love.
Then comes marrage…
Then comes Unmentionable with a baseball bat, a pair of pliers, and a blow torch…
Your Mother
October 9th, 2012
6:36 pm
Every Taliban should be rounded up and given a 50 calibur Bullet along with Pakistans intelligence agency, no trial, no discussion. I am sick and tired of these people using their religion as a weapon. No where in the Koran does it say shoot everyone you dont agree with. Just a bunch of low down dirty thugs. Would the wives learn how to cock their AK47 and use it against them while they sleep the world would be a better place. Women have worth in the world and were it not for them these so called Men would not have been born.
Joe Hussein Mama
October 9th, 2012
6:41 pm
Towncrier — “Frankly, I see no point in striving to build a better society in a godless universe as I feel the time would be better spent gratifying my own personal desires. There is no guarantee of tomorrow and so why not enjoy pleasures as much as you can?”
There’s also no guarantee of *disaster,* so why not try to inprove your lot and the lot of those around you? Look, it’s a canard of the religious right that atheists have no reason to behave in a socially responsible manner because nothing has value to us. I respond by pointing out that IMO, my life is INFINITELY more valuable to me than a theist’s life, because I only get one and it’s limited in length. Given that — and given that *all* human lives are likewise limited and finite, why should I try to harm or otherwise take advantage of others? Why not try to improve our shared lot in a *cooperative* fashion, even if our works may be impermanent and flawed?
FWIW, I think you have a rather limited and biased view of atheist thought and philosophy, and I think that your personal beliefs may cause you to prejudge us.
Towncrier
October 9th, 2012
10:01 pm
“There’s also no guarantee of *disaster,* so why not try to inprove your lot and the lot of those around you?”
Because like even someone like Jimi Hendrix understood that castles made of sand fall into the sea eventually. All of our efforts are, in the end and as Solomon says, meaningless – a mere chasing after the wind. There is no real hope in a godless universe, in my opinion.
“Look, it’s a canard of the religious right that atheists have no reason to behave in a socially responsible manner because nothing has value to us.”
They may have a professed reason – but it simply doesn’t strike people on the “religious right” (as you put it) as a particularly good one. I mean, look at what Camus says in his “The Myth of Sisyphus”. He at least recognized and tried to face squarely the futility and absurdity of an existence without God. That’s why I like this particular essay: it’s gut level honest (unlike, I think, a lot of the agnostic posters here who haven’t – judging from their glib posts – given more than a second’s thought to ultimate questions of life like this one). His conclusion is that Sisyphus can be thought of as happy in his futility. But I don’t think that is a particularly persuasive conclusion.
“I respond by pointing out that IMO, my life is INFINITELY more valuable to me than a theist’s life, because I only get one and it’s limited in length. Given that — and given that *all* human lives are likewise limited and finite, why should I try to harm or otherwise take advantage of others? Why not try to improve our shared lot in a *cooperative* fashion, even if our works may be impermanent and flawed?”
Surely you recognize, as I tried to intimate in my last post, that you live a relatively blessed life because you are in the US. When one is NOT so blessed (a prospect Camus considers in some of the literary passages quotes, such as Hamlet’s soliloquy), then one may be given to ask entirely different questions (as we even see in the book of Job). I would submit that you and I (and most everyone else in a “western” nation) are more of a statistical anomaly than anything else. The plain fact is, I think, that outside of western countries, life has not improved much at all for most people in the world. Nations rise and fall. We can expect that ours will as well. Capitalism will die because it can only grow through expansion and cheap labor. We are all of us kings in a material sense and there has never been this much wealth accumulated in the hands of so many people in all of history. One question Jesus asks on his way to be crucified is that if men do such wicked things when the “tree is green”, what will they do when it is dry? Suffering and want increase wrongdoing because, as I have claimed, people are NOT essentially good. I suspect you think better of mankind. But if nothing else, the tremendous scale of carnage in the 20th century should convince anyone otherwise.
“FWIW, I think you have a rather limited and biased view of atheist thought and philosophy, and I think that your personal beliefs may cause you to prejudge us.”
FWIW, I think you (and any atheist who shares your view) has a rather rosy view of the world. I haven’t “steeped” myself in atheistic philosophy, but I have read Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, Camus and Ayer. I don;t see much optimism is many of these philosophers, except perhaps in Russell and Ayer.
Towncrier
October 9th, 2012
11:12 pm
BTW, JHM, to the extent you strive to do good I commend you. It is not a path I would take were I an atheist. I probably would have been dead by now.
Gary
October 10th, 2012
12:13 am
When will the Middle East rid itself of these cowards?