[CSMONITOR] Malala Yousafzai,...a Pashtun blogger and advocate for girls' education from Mingora, in Swat. She started blogging at age 11-12. She was 15 when a Talib boarded her school bus and shot her in the head in 2012. She was evacuated to a hospital in Britain and the Pak Taliban vowed to kill her and her father. Among other awards, she received the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize, which she deserved more than Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Yasser Arafat, or Rigoberta Menchu...
the Pak advocate for education and peace, has won the Nobel Peace Prize almost exactly two years after the Pak Taliban attempted to assassinate her.
If the child goes back to Pakistain she might as well grab a lily and lie down.
Malala was jointly awarded the prize with Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said on Friday.
Political correctness still running on all cylinders: Y'got a Pak, y'gotta have an Indian to balance the ticket.
At 17, Malala is the youngest Nobel Laureate in the prize's history. Pak Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf...
congratulated her and called her the "pride of Pakistain."
Maybe part of Pakistain. It wasn't a Norwegian who shot her.
Despite the global attention, the young education advocate is often ridiculed rather than praised in her home country. Over the past two years, right-wing activists and conspiracy theorists have flooded social networking websites with allegations against Malala, accusing her of everything from working for the CIA to faking her injuries and defaming Pakistain.
It's a miracle she's alive. She was shot in the head with a Colt .45 at close range. As sometimes happens, the bullet skidded around under her skin and emerged to lodge in her shoulder. Figure the odds on how often it happens. If I was a holy man, I'd be convinced Allan had been standing next to her and I'd leave her the hell alone.
Reaction to Friday's prize was largely congratulatory on Pak television networks, though coverage was limited and quickly shifted to reports on the ongoing political protests led by opposition leader Imran Khan
... aka
Taliban Khan, who ain't the brightest knife in the national drawer...
and holy man Tahirul Qadri.
...Pak politician, and would-be dictator, founder and head of Tehreek-e-Minhajul Quran and Pakistain Awami Tehrik. He usually resides in Canada, but returns to Pakistain periodically to foam at the mouth and lead demonstrations. Depending on which way the wind's blowing, Qadri claims to be the author of Pak's blasphemy law. Other times he says it wasn't him...
SQUIRREL!
"How did she win a peace award? I don't understand this. She is a traitor to Pakistain and to Islam," says Umair Khan, a Bloody Karachi
...formerly the capital of Pakistain, now merely its most important port and financial center. It is among the largest cities in the world, with a population of 18 million, most of whom hate each other and many of whom are armed and dangerous...
shopkeeper. "She has ridiculed the way people used to live under shariah law 800 years ago. She is 99.9 percent a CIA agent. Her entire story is based on lies."
"They didn't give me a peace prize and I'm a lot taller than she is!"
Conspiracy and criticism
Malala won the Nobel Peace Prize exactly two years and a day after gunnies stopped her school van in Pakistain's Swat
...a valley and an administrative district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistain, located 99 mi from Islamabad. It is inhabited mostly by Pashto speakers. The place has gone steadily downhill since the days when Babe Ruth was the Sultan of Swat...
Valley on Oct. 9, 2012 and asked for her before they began firing. The Pak Taliban accused her of carrying out a "smear campaign" against the group.
Ummm... Right. She writes about how brutal they are so they send a button man to shoot her. It probably makes a lot more sense in Urdu.
Malala came to prominence after writing an anonymous diary for the BBC on living in Swat and going to school while the Pak Taliban waged an insurgency in the region. She was the subject of a New York Times
...which still proudly displays Walter Duranty's Pulitzer prize...
video feature, and was given an award by the Pak government after she went public about her role and became an advocate for education in late 2009.
Kinda like painting a target on her burka, as it turned out.
Conspiracy theories about Malala have circulated for several years, even before she was targeted by the Taliban. In 2010, Malala attended an event with Richard Holbrooke, then the US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistain, which sparked many conspiracy rumors that she was being used by the United States government.
She'd have been thirteen years old then. How many thirteen year old secret agents do we have, outside the movies?
The US is viewed favorably by 14 percent of Paks, according to a 2014 Pew Research Global Attitudes poll. Over the past decade, favorable views of the US peaked at 27 percent in 2006.
In the United States, those who've ever heard of Pakistain likely have an even worse opinion. It provides the muscle for international terrorism, and even without considering the terrorism it's a dysfunctional kleptocracy.
Criticism went
kaboom!in the wake of the liquidation attempt in 2012. Opponents accused her of faking her injuries to gain sympathy abroad, akin to when former military ruler
Pervez PervMusharraf
... former dictator of Pakistain, who was less dictatorial and corrupt than any Pak civilian government to date ...
in 2005 accused women of claiming they were rape victims in order to get visas from Canada.
dysfunctional
[dis-fuhngk-shuh-nl] adjective
1. not performing normally, as an organ or structure of the body; malfunctioning
2. having a malfunctioning part or element
3. behaving or acting outside social norms
Anger against Malala has grown since her memoir was published, with right-wing columnists taking offense at her mentioning the country's controversial blasphemy laws in her book. Under Pakistain law, speaking blasphemously against the prophet Muhammad is a capital offense.
Even if you're not convicted somebody's gonna kill you.
One school association in Malala's home province said in January that they would ban the book.
"That way nothing that she wrote about will be so."
'She is a positive influence'
Some in Pakistain do support the teenage activist. "Malala has struggled at such a young age. This award should be a matter of pride for us in Pakistain. She is a positive influence on other children," says Kulsoom Fazal, who runs a beauty salon in Karachi.
It should be a matter of pride, but you know, she's next thing to an infidel. She didn't fall down dead when they shot her.
Mosharraf Zaidi, the campaign director for Alif Ailaan, a political campaign to improve education in Pakistain, is proud of Malala's win, calling it an "amazing moment for Pakistain, for Pak girls." Pakistain has the second-highest number of children out of school in the world, according to European Parliament research, and the enrollment rate for girls in primary schools in Pakistain is 54 percent.
Yeah, well. At least they've got their dignity, and their pride, and nuclear weapons.
But Mr. Zaidi is downcast about the impact of the award. "It could be an amazing moment for education but it won't be because a country that lets Malala happen isn't going to be moved to action because she won the Nobel prize," he says. "My fear is that it's going to complicate the narrative because our insecurities as a nation are actually going to be further aggravated by this."
"So really, it would have been better to do nothing and continue to stew..."
In 2013, Malala told the United Nations
...an organization originally established to war on dictatorships which was promptly infiltrated by dictatorships and is now held in thrall to dictatorships...
that the Lions of Islam who shot her and her friends "thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed."
Try making a personal appearance in Karachi and see what happens.
And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The bully boyz thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born."
She's an extraordinary young woman, much more of a man than the animals who shot her.
Malala is the second Pak to win a Nobel Prize. The first, Dr. Abdus Salam, was a theoretical physicist and one of the winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979, whose work contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson particle. His achievements are rarely mentioned in Pakistain because of Dr. Salam's faith: he was a member of the minority Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, which is considered heretical. His tombstone was defaced to remove the word Moslem from it.
I think a better translation of "Pakistain" would be "Land Populated by People with Small Souls."
Malala and Salam now have this much in common: despite a love for their country, and the Nobel honor, their names are a subject of controversy and contention at home.