Taliban Atrocity

In 2012  the young Ms Malala Yousafai was 14 years old. While on her way to school in Pakistan she was deliberately shot in the head by a member of the Taliban which hideous organisation seeks to  discriminate against half the human race by preventing girls and women from attending school to be educated.

Education is clearly key to much in human life both for the individual and also for the human race. 

The  amazing discoveries by Madame Curie for example of polonium and  radium resulted in her being awarded the Nobel Prize for physics as long ago as 1903. She obviously benefited personally by being educated as a girl and her work as an adult certainly benefited the human race generally. 

For the Taliban to seek to preclude half the human race from education must be intrinsically wrong. That would in my view have justified international action authorised by the UN against such  dreadful group of outlaws both in Pakistan and Afghanistan though sadly the reasons for many western countries becoming involved in fighting in Afghanistan, were not primarily on the grounds of those outlaws' attacks on women.

Reverting to the shooting of Ms Yousafai, her determination to be rehabilitated and  campaign for education for girls is an example of the greatness of mankind for which in 2014 she became the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. 

One of her many courageous attributes that is admirable was her meeting with the then president of the USA Barack Obahma when she complained about American drone strikes in Pakistan killing innocent bystanders and instead asked him to concentrate on education or as Tony Blair used to say:

"Education Education Education".

Quite what she would make of the report in today's Times newspaper that a drone has just killed the Taliban leader behind  her being shot is hard to say. Mullah Fazullah is "believed" to have been responsible but he and four other "insurgents" were killed this week by a drone attack near the border with Afghanistan the Times article states. In democratic societies simply killing suspects without trial would be appalling. Whether different conditions should apply to suspects in countries which have no such system of justice is an hard question.

That apart, the UK has of course been involved in fighting the Taliban but of more relevance to this blog post was also the country which flew Ms Yousafai to the UK to provide life saving medical treatment for her which was clearly successful. Later she attended Oxford University to read PPE.

An example of not letting life get you down.