Comments

  1. eveningchaos says

    It is so true. The number one way to bring a country out of poverty and strife is to empower women through education, reproductive rights, and full suffrage. This young woman’s struggle and perseverance has deeply moved me.

  2. Athywren says

    I know I’m alone in the house, and there’s certainly no way she could’ve heard it but, at her comment starting around 3:34, I applauded. I can’t believe there are people who’re willing to dismiss her just because she’s still a muslim. She’s awesome.

  3. says

    She’s impressive as anything, and her Nobel is well-deserved. She has helped and will help many, many women. That she frames her actual good feminist works in a Muslim picture, does not make those works less effective for the people she’s helping.

  4. says

    Wow, that’s a great interview. Definite applause over my tablet too.

    I like that she singled out India as being a place that she wants to help; the more goodwill between Pakistan and India the better. And that she still has some girlishness in her laugh, and the confidence to express it so publicly. Amazing young woman.

  5. Crimson Clupeidae says

    Tabby Lavalamp @ 3:
    That’s just wrong on so many levels.

    And funny in a deeply disturbing way.

    …and wrong.

  6. blf says

    In a sense, Ms Yousafzai does have a “drone program” — for instance, when she meet with President Obama she made it a point to bring up the drones’s extrajudicial killing.

  7. useyourwords says

    Amazing child who is the Light against the darkness. But she can’t do it alone. We (all Muslims and non-muslims, everyone everywhere) human beings need to get up off our couches and lazy butts and start doing something to fix our species together. We can’t expect one girl to fight the taliban. She is a girl who can speak so eloquently in English because God gave her a voice to speak to all of us. I hear people complain about their cushy lives while so many around the world live with so much suffering…poverty, hunger, lack of education, no clean water, oppression, extremism…and then us and our ridiculous whining and our tuning in to things that don’t matter.

    When we are on our death bed looking back, we will realize what realize matters. We will realize that we should have created Light and not been obsessed with the next iphone or the bigger tv or whatever.

  8. congenital cynic says

    Wow. I almost cried. She’s so determined, so strong in her convictions, and she sees the problem so clearly. More brass in that girl than a Rodin sculpture. Press on young lady.

    @8
    We are WAY too obsessed with our first world problems. I’ve been trying to educate my wife about this for years. We are very middle class (what’s left of it) but relative to most of the world, we live like kings. When she gets going about what we need I try to convince her that after the food and clothing we really don’t need anything. It’s mostly all privilege. I’m still not successful in conveying this message. The tug of cultural norms is powerful. I get in arguments about this with her because I want to reduce the consumer urge. Only one of the children has absorbed the message, but it’s a start.

  9. vole says

    She’s a wonderful lady, and speaks so well. And then you realise that she’s still a schoolgirl. It was one of her teachers who gave her the news about the Nobel prize.
    Apparently in Pakistan there are people who criticise her for not going back there. I hope she doesn’t. The world needs her.

  10. says

    With respect, vole, shouldn’t that be ‘wherever she wants, to help whom she chooses to help”? It seems a bit…colonialist to prioritise the world’s needs over her own, no? Working to better the lives of women in Pakistan and India alone covers something like 1 billion women. Can that be enough, for a 16-year-old, for now? I recognise the comment was supportive in intent, but let’s not pile even more of the world onto her back than she’s already taken, perhaps.

  11. says

    Athywren – seconding all that! One question: “I can’t believe there are people who’re willing to dismiss her just because she’s still a muslim” – emphasis mine. Why still? Has she suggested she’d ever be anything else?

  12. Athywren says

    @2kittehs

    Why still? Has she suggested she’d ever be anything else?

    Not as far as I’ve ever seen, but there were a lot of people at the time who thought that, as she had seen “the true face of Islam,” she should abandon that particular ship and become an atheist. They were quite disappointed in her for not recognising extremist thugs as accurate representatives of the religion of her parents, friends and neighbours.

  13. vole says

    @11
    My implication was that if she went back to Pakistan, they’d kill her. That’s the only reason she shouldn’t go – but it’s rather a strong one. She can do more if she’s alive.
    How much more she chooses to do is up to her, as you say. I hadn’t considered the possibility that she might stop what she’s doing, because there is no sign that the possibility has occurred to Malala herself. But if she decides at some point to opt for the quiet life, of course she is fully entitled to it.

  14. lpetrich says

    So Malala Yousafzai is going the way of Abdus Salam? He was Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate, in physics. It was for helping work out electroweak unification. But he has received very little honor in his home country, because he was an Ahmadi Muslim, and many Pakistanis consider the Ahmadi sect a rather gross heresy.

  15. Azuma Hazuki says

    I almost cried. Malala is one of those people I don’t feel worthy to share a planet with; she will go down in history alongside people like Thomas Paine and Martin Luther King Jr., and is arguably a better person than either. This is what a Nobel Peace Prize winner looks like; Bush II and Obama should be on their knees offering their medals to her in their upstretched hands! (And she should strangle Kissinger with his before taking it…).

    She has such inner light. Whoever would extinguish this light, who would impede her path, does not deserve to see the same sun and clouds and breathe the same atmosphere she does. She will kill Taliban in the best possible way: by healing them.

  16. says

    Athywren @14

    Not as far as I’ve ever seen, but there were a lot of people at the time who thought that, as she had seen “the true face of Islam,” she should abandon that particular ship and become an atheist. They were quite disappointed in her for not recognising extremist thugs as accurate representatives of the religion of her parents, friends and neighbours.

    Argh, I have sprained my eyes rolling them again. I shoulda known.

    And that eternal fucking gobshite Dawkins has added his patronising smugness to the mix. He’s the human equivalent of a cane toad.