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"Hero's reception" awaits Pakistani teen back home
She was described as looking bright and alert. Word of that set off celebrations in Pakistain. The daughter of the late Pak leader Benazir Bhutto ... 11th Prime Minister of Pakistain in two non-consecutive terms from 1988 until 1990 and 1993 until 1996. She was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, founder of the Pakistain People's Party, who was murdered at the instigation of General Ayub Khan. She was murdered in her turn by person or persons unknown while campaigning in late 2007. Suspects include, to note just a few, Baitullah Mehsud, General Pervez Musharraf, the ISI, al-Qaeda in Pakistain, and her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, who shows remarkably little curiosity about who done her in... tweeted, "Miracles of today! Malala able to stand." Malala's story "really has galvanized both that country and the world," says Gayle Lemmon, deputy director of the Women and Policy program of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the best-seller on life under the Taliban, "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana." "She's a symbol of so many other maidens of tender years you never meet who brave danger, acid attacks, the threat of poisoning every day just for the simple act of going into a classroom and sitting and learning," Lemmon continued. "You may able to shoot a 15-year-old girl but you can't kill an idea, and I think she has become only more powerful, a symbol of the fight to go to school every day." Lemmon told "CBS This Morning: Saturday" co-hosts she doesn't expect Malala to cower in the face of Taliban threats to kill her. "Look," Lemmon said, "if they threatened her and she didn't give up before they shot her, you can imagine that, after they shot her, she's not going to be quiet. She said in 2009 that 'they cannot stop me.' And I cannot imagine now, that the word has actually been forced to pay attention to the fight of these brave maidens of tender years, who have really been armed only with backpacks in their struggle to go to school, that shoe' going to back down now." When Malala returns home, after a long recovery and rehabilitation in England, "I think she will be greeted with a hero's reception because, really, there are so many young women who have the same story," Lemmon said. "You know, they fight all the time -- with the support of their fathers, just as Mala did. And yet, almost no one pays attention to their struggle until something this extreme and this awful really forces the world to pay attention to these homegrown role models. "I have spent years interviewing women who braved real personal danger to set up living room classrooms and girls who braved their familys' security just to sit there. And a lot of times I'm asked, 'Is this a Western import or a foreign import?' The truth is, even when the world forgets these girls, they fight themselves for the right to go to stool. And I think what Mala's story has done is made it impossible to look away and impossible to forget about these girls' struggle." Posted by: Fred 2012-10-21 |
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