Malala Yusufzai: Victim of Barbaric Terror and Dirty Politics

[The Green1]

Malala is a brave girl > agreed. Malala wanted to become a politician . Damn she has become one at an early age and politicians are taking full advantage

Politicians are EVIL

 

[Safriz]

Her dad is in Birmingham..
shes walking unaided now

he is on tele and speaks very good english

 

[S_O_C_O_M]

In rebuke to Taliban, Pakistan college named for Malala - CNN.com

 

[S_O_C_O_M]

A handout picture received from the Queen Elizabeth Hospital/University Hospitals in Birmingham on October 26, 2012, shows Malala Yousafzai sitting on her bed amid her mother Toorpekai Yousufzai (L), brothers Khushal Khan (3rd R) and Apal Khan (R) and father Ziauddin Yousufzai, at the hospital in Birmingham on October 25, 2012. —AFP Photo

Response to Malala attack

 

[Leader]

Latest:

Malala's face is partially paralyzed, she require your prayers...

 

[RabzonKhan]

All those who were speculating and making ridiculous statements based on nothing must watch the video. Watch closely when Malala speaks, one can clearly see swelling and partial paralysis of her face.

Taliban terrorists and their supporters should also watch the video and think, whose side is God on?

Malala Yousafzai: Still defiant, girl shot by Taliban is walking, talking - and studying

By Rob Crilly, Islamabad and Lucy Kinder
Oct 26 2012

The father of a girl shot by the Pakistani Taliban for wanting to go to school said his daughter would "rise again" and has started walking and talking after asking for schoolbooks to be brought to hospital in Birmingham.

Ziauddin Yousafzai arrived at the bedside of his daughter, Malala, last night after flying from Pakistan with his wife and two sons.

The 15-year-old was shot in the head at close range a little more than two weeks ago.

Mr Yousafzai said the family had a tearful reunion and that the world's response marked a watershed for Pakistan.

"I love her," he said during an emotional news conference at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital on Friday. "Last night when we met her there were tears in our eyes out of happiness. For some time we all cried a bit.

"The person who attacked her wanted to kill her, but she fell temporarily. She will rise again and she can stand now. But when she fell, Pakistan stood and the world rose. This is a turning point."

Malala was shot as she travelled home from school on October 9 in her hometown of Mingora.

The bullet, which grazed her brain and came within centimetres of killing her, travelled through her head and neck before lodging in her left shoulder.

The Pakistan Taliban later claimed responsibility for the attack saying it was punishment for campaigning for the rights of girls to go to school.

She had also been the anonymous author of a diary published by the BBC documenting Taliban abuses when the controlled the Swat Valley in 2009.

In defiance of the Taliban, Malala asked her father to bring school books from Pakistan to England so she could study for her exams.

Last week, she was flown from Pakistan to Birmingham in a medically-induced coma to be treated in a unit where staff have experience of treating British soldiers wounded in Afghanistan.

The hospital has been inundated with gifts and goodwill messages from around the world.

Mr Yousafzai thanked wellwishers for their prayers.

"She is improving with encouraging speed and we are very happy," he said, adding that his daughter was walking, talking, eating and smiling.

He said: "An attacker, who could be called the agent of Satan, he attacked, but after that I found angels on my side, everywhere, all around me, until this time and this place."

But he described how he feared for her life in the days immediately after the attack, when she was being treated in the north-west of Pakistan.

"A stage came in Peshawar ﾖ God forbid ﾖ I told to my brother in law that you should make preparations for her funeral. There was a stage, but thankful to God...." he said, tailing off and mopping tears from his eyes.

Farooq Sattar, a Pakistani government minister who visited the hospital a day earlier, described Malala's progress.

"The good news is that she is recovering fast," he told The Daily Telegraph. "She appears to have no long-term disability. She has gradually regained her memory."

He added that she has begun a course of trauma counselling to help her deal with the attempted assassination.

[B]"Her remarkable recovery sends a very positive message to the people of Pakistan, that the forces of terror cannot win," he said.[/B]

It will take weeks or months for Malala recover her strength enough to face surgery.
Her skull will need reconstructing either by reinserting bone or using a titanium plate.

 

[fatman17]

Weekend Edition October 26-28, 2012

The Kidnapping of Malala’s Story

The Taliban’s Attack on a 14-year Old Activist

by HAMZAH SAIF



The inhuman and criminal attack by the Taliban on 14-year old Pakistani education activist, Malala Yousafzai, has been hijacked here in the United States to provide moral patina to America’s equally devastating wars in South Asia. Instead of a focus on the political contours of the tragedy, mainstream media have tragically peddled, unchallenged, the tired Orientalist tropes that legitimize American militarism in the region. It is a page right out of Nicholas Krisof’s playbook: the depoliticizaion of a fundamentally political event.

The image carried by the Islamophobic website, islam-watch.org, showing a bearded man cowering from a small girl clutching a book, best summarizes the scope of American coverage of the atrocity: the cowardly Taliban hate women, especially educated ones. This reductive focus on the barbarity of the Taliban, to the exclusion of a discussion of the full circumstances that required a Malala to rise – what distinguished historian Mahmood Madani has called a ‘pornography of violence’ – does little but perpetuate America’s messianic narrative among its domestic audience.

In Malala’s country, Pakistan, where distrust of both America and the Taliban runs high, the conversation is far more multifaceted and complex.

The crime has met widespread condemnation from both sides of the country’s political spectrum.

Condemnation among conservatives has been strongest from the religious organizations. Sunni Ittehad issued an edict criminalizing the assault, and asked the military to ‘crack-down’ on the Taliban. Pakistan’s televangalist industry was not far behind: with popular scholar, Amir Liaquat, issuing religious indictment of the Taliban across the country’s many TV channels. News shows also hastily invited Soviet-era mujahids to declare the assault unIslamic. The response from Pakistan’s major Islamist parties, Jama’at-e-Islami and Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, was equally vociferous, but remained reticent in assigning blame solely to the Taliban.

Among Pakistani liberals, condemnation was expectedly strident. The Pashtun nationalist party, ANP, expressed early outrage. The crescendo grew quickly, and Karachi’s left-of-center Muttahida Qaumi Movement, among many others, issued biting criticism of government inaction against the Taliban. Pakistan’s vibrant NGO community organized rallies in solidarity with Malala, and, indeed, posters reading “Drones Kill So Malala Can Live” were seen at demonstrations.

This uncomplicated liberal ascription of blame to the Taliban found uneasy reception among Pakistani conservatives, who continued to highlight the role of failed American and Pakistani policies that created both the Taliban and the need for Malala. This otherwise trenchant critique met quick dissolution at the hands of social media, where the shameful scandal of spurious accusations of Malala being an American lackey found more voice than an honest conversation about the tragedy.

Yet, just as the sordid lies that associate a 14 year old with imperial militarism require our unequivocal condemnation, the role of the American machinery in co-opting Malala’s story, too, demands our attention.

In his recent New York Times column exhorting Americans to save Pakistani girls from Saudi “medieval extremists”, Mr. Kristof offered another stale, Orientalist, recipe for American activism: liberate their women. This gendered inanity, no doubt, found little room to contemplate that those initially arrested for the crime included a woman.

Identifying himself with Malala, Mr. Kristof also quoted a Pakistani man showering him with gratitude for America’s war in the country. Americans were now both victims and saviors. The politics of Central Asian control, of the emergence of the Taliban, of economic destitution and political marginalization, of a million uprooted, and of the broken and charred bodies called America’s collateral damage were all subsumed under a new, more seductive narrative: American boots and drones saving Pakistani girls.

In a longer New York Times article reviewing the shameful social media chatter falsely alleging Malala’s American connections, chief strategist of America’s Iraq invasion, Col. Robert Mackay, offered yet another picture glut with Orientalized imagery and bereft of political context. The article, largely plagiarized from a Pakistani blog post, which in turn offers absurdly comical evidence of its claims, painted the Pakistani right dumb-witted, misogynist and rabidly assaulting a teenage girl. It was an assessment of the Pakistani conservative the way that a review of Pamela Geller’s twitter-feed would be of the American Republican.

The article’s female protagonist, a Pakistani journalist, diligently exposed the lies of her anti-American adversaries by proving their exhibits of drone casualties to be, in fact, the doing of the Pakistan Army, thereby absolving the United States of the atrocity. The cognitive dissonance of American disavowal of the casualties simultaneous with U.S. demands that its ally “must do more” failed to register with Col. Mackay.

The moral sanitization of a war already swept clean from the American conscience could scarcely have been better facilitated.

A composite picture emerges from such coverage of not just a fringe movement, but an entire nation complicit in the attack on a teenage girl. An idea of American power is reinforced that is not only benign, but also capable of preventing another such misogynist tragedy.

The stage is set for the meeting of two strange bedfellows: neo-conservatives and liberal feminists.

In her searing indictment of this noxious ideological concoction, anthropologist Sunania Maria highlights how appeals to feminism continue to legitimize American imperalism. Victims of the violence of anti-American militias are offered a platform for their grievences, she details, while those who hold the United States accountable for their suffering are accorded no voice. Percipient critical theorist, Hamid Dabashi concurs, and characterizes the situation as “the abuse of legitimate causes, in this case, women’s repression, for illegitimate ends, US global domination.”

While women’s rights remain tragically curtailed in Pakistan, America’s claim to the mantle of feminist liberation is belied by facts. The very Islamist parties Col. Mackay indicts as incurable sexists are also responsible for some of the greatest leaps in female literacy and access to women’s health services in Pakistan’s restive Khyber-Pukunkhwa province. Despite this, their rhetoric against American interference remains unabated. Similarly, despite Mr. Kristof’s claim of having brought benevolent American protection to Pakistanis, the country ranks highest in a poll of 24 nations in its desire to see an immediate U.S. withdrawal from its neighbor, Afghanistan. Pakistani approval of U.S. assistance, too, remains dismally low, with Pew reporting only a tenth of Pakistanis believing it to be in their interest.

Eschewing an exploration of the tensions of “racialization, class, gender and nationalism that shape the nature of terrorism in all forms” in favor of a vapid, moralized conversation about right and wrong obscures the reality that Malala and thousands others like her live. It is a reality where America is neither hero nor victim, but a superpower with geo-political interests. Anything short of such a frank discussion is what sociologist Marnia Lazreg has called the use of women as a “Trojan horse.”

The last decade has seen the publication of more books by Afghan women highlighting their plight under the Taliban than the entire history of the United States preceding it; yet one finds barely a mention among these pages of the atrocity of American invasion. In such a time, the shameless pandering of this journalism to an American public ravenous for stories of barbaric Muslim men from whom to save their women does little but whet American appetite for its mission civilisatrice.

Attacking a 14 year girl to assert religio-political dominance is despicable; using her tragedy to sanctify wars that destroy the lives of thousands of others is no less shameful.

Hamzah Saif holds a Masters in Public Policy from Georgetown University and has previously published on the U.S-Pakistan relationship with Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) as their foreign policy fellow.

 

[Peregrine]

Latest:

Malala's face is partially paralyzed, she require your prayers...

Sorry, but its a blatant lie. She was never shot in head or face. She received one bullet in shoulder and from day one, was never in critical condition not to mention she never slipped into comma. They had been tranquilizing her all the time she was in Pakistan. This is coming from some one who was involved with her case. There is going to be no reconstruction of her skull as its perfectly fine.

 

[Zarvan]

Sorry, but its a blatant lie. She was never shot in head or face. She received one bullet in shoulder and from day one, was never in critical condition not to mention she never slipped into comma. They had been tranquilizing her all the time she was in Pakistan. This is coming from some one who was involved with her case. There is going to be no reconstruction of her skull as its perfectly fine.

Sir stop being a fool she was short in head and one bullet hit her shoulder people always tell many false conspiracy theories although I firmly many many conspiracies are done by governments but at least spare this one

 

[SamantK]

I noticed earlier the duppata in the hospital, it is so freaking wrong..

 

[humanfirst]

Sorry, but its a blatant lie. She was never shot in head or face. She received one bullet in shoulder and from day one, was never in critical condition not to mention she never slipped into comma. They had been tranquilizing her all the time she was in Pakistan. This is coming from some one who was involved with her case. There is going to be no reconstruction of her skull as its perfectly fine.

So the van driver and her class mates who witnessed the incident,other locals who helped to hospitalise her,Doctors and staff of pak military hospital who treated her initially and perfomed decompressive craniotomy on her,Doctors and staff of Armed Forces Institute of Cardiology in Rawalpindi where she was transferred later,Doctors and staff of Queen Elizabeth hospital in birmingham where she is currently being treated....All are lying and involved in some grand conspiracy to defame taliban?You mad bro?

 

[Safriz]

I noticed earlier the duppata in the hospital, it is so freaking wrong..

Makes her feel comfy..nothing wrong with that...

 

[SamantK]

Makes her feel comfy..nothing wrong with that...

In hospital cloth from outside can lead to infections, patients should be touched only after sanitizing their hands, an outside cloth should be a strict no no..

 

[humanfirst]

In hospital cloth from outside can lead to infections, patients should be touched only after sanitizing their hands, an outside cloth should be a strict no no..

Outside cloth can be autoclaved and sterlized and worn if it make patient more comfortable than the usual sick-dress.

 

[SamantK]

Outside cloth can be autoclaved and sterlized and worn if it make patient more comfortable than the usual sick-dress.

but generally it is not and I think it was not.. And its not what she is wearing but just wearing on her head.