Malala is not your hero
Malala is not your hero. Over the course of a year, Malala Yousafzai has become an internationally recognized symbol for courage. By now it seems that her story has been near-memorized by anyone with access to a reliable news source. For those who are still unaware, according to BBC News profiles Malala Yousafzai, “has been shot in the head by the militants and has become the youngest person ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize.” She first came to public attention through a diary, published on BBC Urdu, which chronicled her desire to remain in school and for girls to have the chance to be educated. Since then, we have assigned Malala as a symbol of global girls' education. What she really is is a symbol of discourse we are unwilling to have. The talk about women’s education on a global level would dig up our own faults, which have added to the struggle faced by millions of children around the world yearning for an education. Instead, we orchestrate the privilege granted by a special honor such as the Nobel Peace Prize so that we can be heroes and create heroes during a time of moral inconvenience. Malala has been morphed into an American hero and thrown into the American hall of fame. As The Washington Post's Max Fisher argued, following the announcement that the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize had gone to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, Malala's loss was actually a good thing,“It can sometimes feel as if the entire West is trying to co-opt Malala, as if to tell ourselves: ‘Look, we're with the good guys, we're on the right side. The problem is over there.’ Sometimes the heroes we appoint to solve our problems can say as much about us as about them. Malala's answer is courage. Our answer is celebrity.” Stories about girls' education in Central Asia and Africa have long been exploited by Western governments, politicians, public figures and media in order to create feel-good headlines underscoring who the the force of moral good in the world was, is and and always can be. This isn't about any sort of white savior complex, but a feeling of entitlement towards dictating how certain countries, especially those we like to bomb, are represented and understood in relation to our status, goals and views of our exceptionalism. We're not trying to really “save” anyone. Instead, we're just trying to plaster a facade of “hope” that covers our own involvement economically, politically and militarily in undermining children's education around the world. The truth is that we are not ready to talk at a substantial level about girls' education because that conversation would require a good look in the mirror. That conversation would elicit actual action that may not be entirely in 'our' interest. That conversation might also murk the waters between the good and evil lines we tread. At the end of the day who really talks about the effects of the invasion of Afghanistan on girls' education (in addition to pre-existing Taliban prohibition)? Or the effects of the invasion of Iraq, which, according to BBC news, has left a minimum of a half million dead, on girls' education? According to a study done by reliefweb international on girls’ education, figures for 2007 and 2008 show 5,065,276 children enrolled in primary education, with 44.8 percent being girls. This means that for every 100 boys enrolled in primary schools in Iraq, there are just under 89 girls. What about US drone strikes in Pakistan and in Yemen? According to NBC, the UN recently stated that the strikes have killed more civilians than the US admits. This must have an effect on the lives of children there and their education. What about Israeli targeting of Gazan schools? According to the Human Rights Watch on 29 Dec. 2008, Israel bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, destroying the science laboratory block and destroying or damaging other blocks of buildings, including the library. When was the last time we had a conversation about the effects of PTSD, resulting from our actions and our allies' actions, on young children and their education? What effect does our international economic system have on education funding in developing countries? What are the consequences of our arms deals with military allies on access to education? Although the ways to fix these things aren’t simple, there are ways such as ensuring that general economic sanctions against a country are never used again, as they were used in Iraq as a substitute for war. Children and poor adults are those who suffer most from economic sanctions. The use of economic sanctions during a war should be considered a crime, just as is forming a military strategy to starve a cities population. Over the years it has become quite obvious that war testifies more to the insecurity of our culture than a commitment to moral righteousness. We pick and choose the heroes we use and misuse so that we can have some ambiguous sort of 'hope' for something we can't easily define, while ignoring core issues that undermine the very efforts by young girls we throw onto the center international stage. We ignore our own complicity because we'd rather keep eating up the celebrity, heroism and 'hope' than do anything that may remind us that maybe we're not all that exceptional, that we are, either in a big or small way, a part of the problem. Malala is out there, talking about her story, talking about the importance of education, and we are eagerly listening. Again. And, as per usual, we have celebrated her as a symbol of our own heroism and the exceptionalism of our moral conscience while willfully ignoring the accusatory stares of our reflections.
Read the full article at: http://issuu.com/scotscoop/docs/highlander_october












