In December 2008, Taliban commanders in the Swat Valley who had banned girls from attending school threatened to kill any female students who dared to defy the ban. They had already destroyed scores of government-run schools, leading some to set up private schools in their homes to educate girls. Yousufzai’s father ran one of the last schools to defy Taliban orders to end female education.
At the time, an official at the Pakistani education ministry was reported to have said there were more than 1,580 schools registered in Swat and that militants had destroyed 252 schools, “mainly those where girls and boys were studying together.”
How could anybody in his/her right mind oppose the education of people on the basis of gender? Religion is a mental illness.
Yes, a highly contagious one that is by all indications pretty much incurable.
I’m in two minds about Pakistan’s official response to this Taliban atrocity. Pakistan is a theocracy in everything but name and they get all in a huff when someone has the temerity to suggest that their blasphemy laws are mediaeval. On the other hand, they condemn what the Taliban have done even though the Qur’an (like the Bible) clearly commands that women are to be kept ignorant. There is nothing admirable about such hypocrisy. The Pakistani “moderates” are perhaps more insidiously dangerous than the Taliban. With the latter at least you know you’re dealing with irredeemable loons.
It reminds me of a documentary I watched the other day: The truth about child brides. It plays of in Bangladesh, but it is fairly common in all of those countries. Its a vicious circle: the communities in Bangladesh are very poor, so what happens is the girls are sold of at a very early age of up to 11 years. Because they don’t have education like the men in the country they have no other option but to accept their circumstances. Paedophilia is condoned, and the state refuses to acknowledge the problem and change the law. In fact I really do hate the Bollywood Movies, because it is a bunch of despicable lies.
I do feel better when there is at least one girl who refused to listen to her parents no matter the consequences, and went to work at the age of 13. It is still not ideal but she didn’t bow down to her fate.