Malala Yousufzai

 The Shooting of Malala Yousufzai

On the 9th of October 2012 an Islamic extremist wearing a fake police uniform shot 14 year old Malala Yousufzai in the head and leg as she waited to return home on her school bus, several other young girls were also injured in the attack. After the attack Malala was airlifted to hospital where doctors managed to stabilise her condition because the the bullet had miraculously missed her brain.

Malala Yousufzai

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the shooting and justified it by claiming that she was "pro-west" and that she had been "speaking against the Taliban" and "promoting secularism and so-called enlightened moderation". They also claimed that if she survives her injuries they will try to kill her again and that anyone preeching a similar path will also be targeted.

Malala was only 11 when she started documenting how difficult it was to get an education in Pakistan. At first she documented the atrocities committed by the Taliban as they occupied her native Swat Valley between 2007 and 2009 but she soon focused her writing upon the subject of female education in Pakistan. In 2011 she became the first ever recipient of Pakistan's National Peace Prize for her campaign for female education rights. Here are a few of her most famous quotes:

    "I dreamt of a country where education would prevail."

    "I don't mind if I have to sit on the floor at school. All I want is education. And I am afraid of no one."

    "Sometimes I imagine I'm going along and the Taliban stop me. I take my sandal and hit them in the face and say what you're doing is wrong. Education is our right, don't take it from us... So even if (God let this not happen) they kill me, I'll first say to them, what you're doing is wrong."

In the wake of the shooting, the vast majority of Pakistanis have united in condemnation. Government officials, media personalities and religious leaders have all spoken out against the attack and praised Malala's bravery.

Talk show host Hamid Mir said: "I can see the whole nation's head bowed in shame today. I want to ask those who shot a girl who only wanted to go to school: Do you think you are Muslims?"

This question, to me, is of fundamental importance. What kind of warped belief system would provide a person justification to shoot children? What kind of morality was the attacker attempting to defend as he decided to shoot a child in the head? How on Earth could he have believed that Allah would have approved of such a brutal attack?

Given that the vast majority of Pakistani Muslims have united in condemnation of this attack, it is quite clear that the Taliban interpretation of Islam is at odds with everyone else's. That in the minds of most Pakistanis, the Taliban are not genuine Muslims. It is a great shame to see so many shouty atheist ranters using this disgusting attack as an invitation to wade into the debate with their divisive "Islam is evil", "all religions are evil" diatribes, especially given that the vast majority of Muslims, people of other faiths and people of none are united in condemnation of this kind of barbarism.

At a moment where voices of moderation within the Muslim faith have a wonderful opportunity to present their interpretation of Islam; that it is an ideology of peace, tolerance and scholarship, the atheist ranters would prefer to use the actions of the very worst religious extremists as an excuse to launch the kind of offensive, ill-informed and generalisation laden diatribes they specialise in, and drown out the voices of moderation with their intolerant ranting.

The Taliban are degenerates who completely disregard the elements of Islam that contradict their agenda, they preach a message of hate, intolerance and anti-intellectualism. However Islam was once a religion of tolerance and scholarship.

The Islamic caliphate of Córdoba famously allowed Christians and Jews to freely practice their religions, which contrasts strongly with the religious intolerance, persecution and widespread use of torture by the Catholic regime that replaced Moorish rule in Spain. During the great age of Islam, Islamic scholars preserved and translated countless Greek works of philosophy and mathematics, they invented algebra and became the first civilisation in history to comprehend irrational numbers.

Many millions of Muslims still believe that peace, tolerance and scholarship are the most vital aspects of their faith, but it suits the narratives of imperialist warmongers and intolerant atheists alike to characterise all Muslims as backwards, education hating and murderous fanatics. However the widespread condemnation of the attack on Malala Yousufzai by Muslims from across Pakistan and the World demonstrate the falsity of this simplistic narrative.

In order to understand the assassination attempt against Malala Yousufzai, it is important to understand how the Taliban came to be operating in Pakistan in the first place.

1. Before the "War on Terrorism" there were no Taliban in Pakistan.

Matt Herring

2. The Pakistani Taliban came into existence in 2004 when the Pakistani government carried out severe military operations in the tribal belt, under direction from the United States military.

3. US drone strikes have killed countless innocent people in the tribal belt of Pakistan.

4. The tribal belt suffers high levels of illiteracy and poor education, meaning that the victims of such attacks are easily manipulated by religious extremists. When the Pakistani state and "western forces" are killing innocent people, it should be easy for us to see how fanatics present themselves as the only people fighting on the side of the victims.

It should now be beyond question that the single clearest consequence of the "war on terrorism" has been the effect of stirring up and popularising Islamic fanaticism. This is as clear in the tribal belt of Pakistan as it was in post-invasion Iraq. When the only exposure to "the West" that uneducated and illiterate people get, is drone strikes, overwhelming military force and civilian massacres, it shouldn't take a great deal of empathy to understand why they would want to fight back against these violent and murderous "Western forces". Islamic fanatics like the Taliban thrive on suffering and ignorance, which makes it all the more obvious why they are so fundamentally opposed to female education. If they succeed in preventing half of the population from even attending primary level schools, they succeed in maintaining the culture of ignorance that they need in order to thrive.

Drones

 3 Ways That Drone Warfare Is Putting US Lives At Risk

    by Judy Molland

It’s no secret that the Central Intelligence Agency has a drone warfare campaign: the tracking and lethal targeting of Islamist radicals in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The campaign is estimated to have killed at least 2,000 people, although no one knows exactly how many militants and how many innocent civilians have died. The death tolls are educated guesswork.

But is it making America any safer? While the drone strikes may take out some terrorists, don’t they also create serious risks for the United States?

But first, what do we know about drones?

In a time of cutbacks, Barack Obama has set aside around $5 billion for Predators and Reapers, “drones” in common parlance, signalling their growing importance as a policy instrument. The air force has struggled to supply enough crews for the multiplying hardware.

Here’s how Rory Carroll, writing in The Guardian, describes Holloman air force base in New Mexico, where pilots are trained to operate these planes not from cockpits but from trailers wedged in the sand, at a distance of 8000 miles.

The electronic cavern is dark, save for the glow of consoles, and Lt Col Mike Weaver surveys his apprentice warriors with satisfaction as they project American might halfway around the world. One crew – two young men in flight suits seated before half a dozen screens – prepares to fire missiles from a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) at a boatload of suspected insurgents in Afghanistan. Another crew circles a suspicious bulge by a roadside in Iraq and feeds co-ordinates to ground troops. Another tracks what appears to be a vehicle in Yemen.

Is this the future of US military force? If so, it’s a scary picture.

This year the base at Holloman will graduate 360 crews; each crew consists of a pilot, a sensory operator and sometimes a mission coordinator.

Is all this really keeping America safer? Critics suggest that drone warfare could actually be dangerous for the US.

1. Innocent civilians are murdered

Far from being precisely accurate, the number of civilians being accidentally killed seems to rise daily.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

A new joint study from New York and Stanford Universities, “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma  to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan,” estimates from an analysis of public records that as many as 881 civilians, including 176 children, have been killed since the US covert drone program began.

2.  No one is overseeing the campaign

Although the rules for drone warfare by the US military in a declared war like Afghanistan are clear, when the CIA is using drones for covert purposes in places like Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, the extent of the oversight is far less clear.

It is traditionally the US military that wages war on behalf of the country. But what happens when the CIA is waging the wars instead, through drones whose operators may or may not be US military personnel?

Wars

War and rumors of wars: number of armed conflicts increased strongly in 2011 says new report

Last year, the number of armed conflicts in the world increased markedly, with the strongest increase taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is the conclusion in a new report by researchers at the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), published in the Journal of Peace Research. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has presented the statistics to the UN General Assembly in his report on international mediation. Following a year (2010) that signaled hope for a more peaceful development, the number of conflicts increased by nearly 20 percent, from 31 to 37. Last year’s jump in conflicts deviates from the long-term trend line, which shows that the world is gradually becoming more peaceful. “It should be pointed out, however, that even though we have now witnessed the largest increase between any two years since 1990, the number of conflicts is still far below the peak levels of the early 1990s,” says Professor Peter Wallensteen, head of the UCDP. At the peak 53 armed conflicts were active. 2011 also saw an increase in the most severe conflicts. Six conflicts were categorized as wars, passing the level of at least 1,000 battle-related deaths. This is up from four in 2010. While the wars in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, and Somalia have received much media attention, the intense conflicts in Sudan and Yemen have been less covered. “The increase in the category of the most deadly conflicts is disquieting,” says Lotta Themnér, project leader at UCDP. The growth in conflicts is not primarily a reflection of the Arab Spring. Only in Libya and Syria did the unrest develop into organized armed conflicts. The strongest growth has happened in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the shade of the Arab Spring events. Armed conflicts in Sub-Saharan Africa have increased by 50 % in only one year, from 10 in 2010 to 15 in 2011. – This is a grave development for a region that desperately needs stability and development, says Helge Holtermann, PRIO researcher and Managing Editor of the Journal of Peace Research. The partition of Sudan has caused new conflicts, while former conflicts in Nigeria and Senegal have reemerged. –