The great Khuldune Shahid has a satirical piece on Why He Hates Malala Yousafzai.
How much a Pakistani hates someone depends on how easy it is to hate them. And few individuals are easier to hate than Malala Yousafzai.
Here’s a girl, not old enough to have an ID card, taking on Pakistan’s biggest enemy without an iota of fear.
She takes a bullet to her head not fighting for a jingoistic agenda, but for something as universally celebrated as education. For her commendable bravery she gets global acclaim, speaks in front of a global audience at the UN, meets the American president and is pretty much the only positive coming out of this country in recent times.
So what’s not to hate, right? Right??
Do you honestly believe that it’s easy for me to accept that a young girl from our neck of the woods, with all the societal handicaps that one can think of, can singlehandedly orchestrate a global rude awakening? The thought rips the bigoted, discriminatory and misogynistic ideals that I’ve grown up with, into tiny little shreds.
How can I accept Malala to be a hero, when her speeches do not have any Islamic or nationalistic agenda? How can I consider her to be my future leader when nothing she says or does imbues a false sense of superiority in me as a Muslim or a Pakistani? How can I accept that a young girl was able to highlight who our actual enemies are, when grown up men in our parliaments are still hell bent on befriending them?
How can I rejoice at Malala’s global achievement when I’ve been taught all my life that a girl’s place is in the kitchen? I just can’t.
But maybe some day…
Christ.
The awful thing is, it’s practically impossible to tell this is satire.
That pretty much sums it up. Putting others down is generally due to the need to feel superior. And that
canhas become the basis foranentire culture-s.I know, that’s why I spelled it out at the beginning.
Mind you, if you read on it becomes apparent, or if you’re familiar with the writer you’ll know, but if you just read the beginning – it’s impossible to tell.
It is perhaps the classic Poe. Good thing you spelled it out first.
Irony is not a poe.
I quickly looked at another article on that site that was about the ironies of the Nobel prize. The one that stuck out was giving the award partly to a man who’d campaigned 60 years against child exploitation and the partly to a girl, who according to the author, was being exploited by the west to justify their attacks on the muslim world. It wasn’t poe or satire. Just minimization of Malala. I’m not saying that some politicians aren’t using Malala as a feel good cover, but she’s got agency, she’s providing a focus for something good and working for something good.
I don’t understand why, because something one person does might be coopted by another, that then we’re allowed to dismiss whatever good they do….Its a bit like the fallacy of greater evil where some blowhard will state, why complain about western women while non-western women have it worse. Anyway, I’m rambling.