Thursday, October 11, 2012

Justice for Malala Yousafzai will come at a price worth paying.

The religious have a way of making a virtue of infamy.  Not by anything they do, of course: self-loathing makes a mockery of individuality and of unfettered inquiry.  Genuflections and ululations are de rigueur of the faithful; any exercise into the intellectual realm is both prohibitive and prohibited.

(Yes, I understand that there are some out there who are quite willing to guffaw at this idea: they after all are normal law-abiding citizens of secular republics and Western democracies; they live in relative peace with their neighbors who have different and diverse confessions of faith.  Their own spiritual beliefs are personal to them and harm no one, or so it seems.  And that might well be be true; but truer still: as an American I can esteem their right to believe what they want and find disdain for their cognitive dissonance. )

Malala Yousafzai?  What do the 'faithful' say about her?  Well, for a start, all indications --clearest of which is a bullet that was launched and lodged into her brain by the Pakistani Taliban (Malala's assailant... no... Malala's furtive and failed assassin hid behind a balaclava)-- point to the convincing fact that the Islamic faithful of the Swat Valley want to see this fourteen-year-old girl dead for nothing more than wanting to go to school.  The thinking world is outraged enough by this simple act of barbarism that even the not-too-esteemed Laura Bush has spoken out.

Scrambled Middle Eastern geopolitics aside, Malala's attempted murder and the current bounty on her teenage (think about it: this girl is a seventh grader!) head should be a pivot point for the remaining foreign policy debates between President Obama and former Governor Romney.  Sadly, the damage of Benghazi, and the butcher of Syria  will politicize Malala into the deepest recesses of newspapers, blogs and 'interest'.