Petrol posted:

because, as marxists, we are so bitter and mysognist that we'll gladly support the taliban over a brave young girl they callously gunned down for speaking her mind.

maybe we should bomb them, to save her

getfiscal posted:

there are countless documents showing that NATO promotes girls education as a symbol of the success / justice of their various wars. like it's a cliche now that every member of congress that visits afghanistan gets wheeled around a new school with girls. some of them get pissed off at this because it's so obvious they are being sold bullshit. i think malala herself is probably a great person but that's not why she's famous. she's famous because the US promotes her story heavily, same with pussy riot and such.

& its also just rank islamophobia, western women's magazine style, designed to promote future wars in areas of economic interest and silence domestic opposition b y keeping it as an acceptable point of popular discourse in the English language press that muslims are great and all but we need to save their women from them

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9073181/malalas-school-wars/ posted:

That Malala Yousafzai, the girl the Taleban tried to murder, is a brave and resolute young woman is not in doubt. The youngest person ever nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, she has won many awards, including the Sakharov Prize and an honorary degree from Edinburgh University, in her campaign for ‘the right to -education’.

But something curious is going on. Something crucial to her experience is always omitted when her life and mission are described by international agencies and the media. Education International, the global teachers’ union umbrella group, is typical. Malala is campaigning, they say, so that all can benefit from ‘equitable public education’; that is, government education. The BBC summary of her talk on her 16th birthday to the UN highlighted only ‘her campaign to ensure free compulsory education for every child’. Meanwhile Gordon Brown, now UN special envoy for global education, used the same event to ‘renew the call for all governments to guarantee equitable quality education for all’.

But it wasn’t to governments that Malala and her family turned (or are turning now) to get an education. In fact, everything in her life story — related so beautifully in her just-published autobiography, written with journalist Christina Lamb — points to something importantly different. In her life story, she’s not standing up for the right to government education at all. In fact, she’s scathing about government education: it means ‘learning by rote’ and pupils not questioning teachers. It means high teacher absenteeism and abuse from government teachers, who, reluctantly posted to remote schools, ‘make a deal with their colleagues so that only one of them has to go to work each day’; on their unwilling days in school, ‘All they do is keep the children quiet with a long stick as they cannot imagine education will be any use to them.’ She’s surely not fighting for the right of children to an education like that.

But if not government education, what is she standing for? In fact, Malala’s life story shows her standing up for the right to private education.

For the school she attended, on her way to which she was famously shot by the Taleban, was in fact a low-cost private school set up by her father. This reality gets hidden in some reports: not untypically, Education International describes her father as a ‘headmaster’. Time magazine describes him as a ‘school administrator’. Headmaster, school administrator: these obscure the truth. In fact, her father was an educational entrepreneur.

In 1994, he started a private school in Mingora, seeing few other private schools there and market demand for English-medium schools high. He and his friend invested their entire savings of 60,000 rupees (about $1,754 or £1,127 at contemporary exchange rates). It was a struggle, but they succeeded. When Malala was born in July 1997, the school fees were 100 rupees a month (about £1.50). That’s definitely a low-cost private school, accessible to poor families. Her father joined the Swat Association of Private Schools, and quickly became vice-president. Government officials tried to make him pay bribes to get his school registered — the going rate was about 13,000 rupees, or around a quarter of what he had been able to invest to get the school going. He encouraged other school owners to fight this corruption. ‘Running a school is not a crime,’ he told them, according to his daughter’s book. ‘Why should you be paying bribes? You are not running brothels; you are educating children!’ Pretty soon he was president of the organisation; under his leadership it expanded to 400 school -owners.

This all seems remarkable, and surely part of Malala’s story. Against the odds, her father, with at least 400 other educational entrepreneurs, have created private schools for the poor in a remote region of the world, because even poor parents don’t want to acquiesce in the mediocrity and abuse of government schools. But it’s all studiously ignored by the international agencies and media, who continue to use Malala’s story to push the case for government schools.

...To pigeonhole her as ‘the girl who stood up for education’, and include under that rubric only government education, misses something important about what she and her family stand for. Not mediocre government education, as is found in Pakistan and the developing world over. But the right to educational choice, to educational freedom; the right to a private education.

And where is she going to school now that she’s living in Birmingham? To private school of course, Edgbaston High School for Girls. She and her family have made the same choice here as they did back in Pakistan. It’s odd that this detail is not mentioned in her autobiography, where she just says ‘It’s a good school’ — nothing about it being private. I wonder why not. Is it because she and her family take it for granted? Or because her ghostwriter felt it might undermine her story?

On the contrary, it wouldn’t undermine it at all. Malala and her father are part of a global movement, where families choose low-cost private schools because they don’t think government schools are good enough. Those running low-cost private schools around the world, in places sometimes as difficult as the Swat Valley, against the odds, with governments and international agencies often unsympathetic, need Malala and her father to stand up for them, to be their champions.

But all the commentators who have jumped on the Malala bandwagon proclaim her as only fighting for the right to public education. Nothing in her and her family’s actions, her past or present life story, suggests that she is.

daddyholes posted:

as it happens i do remember the year 2005, when Liberalism won. Hollaback Girl, remember that song? Gold Digger.

this shit is bananas

getfiscal posted:

there are countless documents showing that NATO promotes girls education as a symbol of the success / justice of their various wars. like it's a cliche now that every member of congress that visits afghanistan gets wheeled around a new school with girls. some of them get pissed off at this because it's so obvious they are being sold bullshit. i think malala herself is probably a great person but that's not why she's famous. she's famous because the US promotes her story heavily, same with pussy riot and such.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/06/dissident-fetish-molly-crabapple

The Organization whose gala I drank at does deeply admirable work, but its hush on domestic political prisoners mirrors that of those with more troubling motives. By ignoring humans locked in their own cells, states can pretend that dissent is only punished elsewhere. They can both toast hell-raisers abroad, and clamp down on hell-raisers at home.

Empires love their dissidents foreign.

Any regime, no matter how repressive, will gladly fête its enemy’s critics—while homegrown versions of those critics occupy concrete cells. Cooing over foreign dissidents allows establishment hacks to pose like sexy rebels—while simultaneously affirming that their own system is the best.

The dissident fetishist takes a brave, principled person, and uses them like a codpiece of competitive virtue.

The Kremlin loves (American) whistle-blowers. The State Department loves (Russian) anarchist punks.

Mainstream media cherishes these dissidents because they allow journalists the by-proxy thrill of challenging power. They, too, can stand square-shouldered against Putin or Obama, capes billowing behind them in the wind.

These same media figures aren’t always so lippy on their home turf.