M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad reports on the hatred of Malala in Pakistan.
It wasn’t even reported as breaking news on Pakistani tv, Khan says.
Many Pakistanis would not even have known she was up for the award.
Indeed, Tariq Khattack, editor of the Pakistan Observer newspaper, actually condemned it, telling the BBC: “It’s a political decision and a conspiracy.”
“She is a normal, useless type of a girl.
Nothing in her is special at all. She’s selling what the West will buy.”
Wo, that’s revealing – normal girls are useless; it’s normal for girls to be useless. Girls are useless. Wham, that’s half of humanity dismissed. That’s why Malalas are needed.
While many in Pakistan have praised her for her desire for education and her courage to make a stand for it, many others view her as a stooge of the west, as someone the Americans have set up to become a role model and misguide Pakistani Muslims.
“The Americans and Malala’s father conspired to get her shot so she can become a hero,” was the somewhat surprising conclusion of one editor of a Mingora-based newspaper some months ago.
One Islamabad housewife said: “What has she done to deserve [the Nobel prize]? She may be brave, but she’s only a child. They should have waited 10 years and let her make a mark among the deprived sections of the society.”
It is a view that has infuriated many more liberal Pakistanis who made their anger known on Twitter, excoriating those who tried to belittle this win.
It’s a longstanding divide, and one that is sadly recognizable.
This division in views on Malala is for the most part symptomatic of a division that dates from the partition of India and the creation of Pakistan.
Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai, who has been her guide and mentor, is associated with ANP, a political party that links up with the Red Shirt movement. This is a secular force of Pashtun nationalists that was allied to Mahatma Gandhi’s All India Congress and opposed the Indian partition.
After independence, the Red Shirts were dubbed as traitors and Indian agents, and often persecuted by successive military regimes that used religion and religious groups to garner support and legitimacy.
And thus created the hellhole that is Pakistan today.
Although, to be fair, if you follow that line of reasoning then an abnormal girl might be useful. You know, if she was abnormal in a useful way.
Well, sure, but then she’d have to be put to death for defying gender roles. 😛
What if her abnormality made her more in line with gender roles? Like, what if she had 2 uteruses (uteri?)? That might make her useful. Twice as many sons.
Sometimes you have to laugh because otherwise you’d lose it.
Now where have we seen this narrative before?
Yeah, that editor would get along well with the (horrible event of your choice here) truther crowd. Well, he would if he weren’t a Muslim.
In addition to the obvious misogyny and Islamist (pro-Taliban) bias, many of the Malala haters have a class bias. She is from a lower middle class family. If she were from an affluent family in a major city, the backlash would not be as strong.
What he really wanted to say was: “She is a normal, meaningless girl, nothing special.” And the critical voices are entirely justified. What has she actually done? She wrote a weblog and survived accidentally an assassination attempt on her school bus. Was that really all? This is certainly good for her and her father, but far from being a sufficient reason to award her the Nobel Peace Prize. That she as a juvenile still got it, gets here in any case a bitter aftertaste.
This is the same claim of “false flag” that we are seeing with gamergate and people with Watson Delusion Syndrome. Women are being accused of doxxing themselves and Zoe Quinn has been accused of planning to fake a violent attack on herself. I think it’s linked to the claim that women commonly lie about rape, harassment and abuse.
Misogynists everywhere must share the same playbook.
So she’s going the way of Abdus Salam, Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate? His was for working out electroweak unification, but he was an Ahmadi Muslim, and many Pakistanis think that Ahmadis are not Real Muslims.