Malala Yousufzai, Teenage Pakistani Girl Activist, Attacked By Taliban

[Vikrant]

I have always maintained that looking beautiful is the most basic human right of a woman.

 

[waltky]

Taliban retort to Malala...

Taliban's letter to Malala Yousafzai: this is why we tried to kill you
Wednesday 17 July 2013 > Adnan Rasheed tells schoolgirl she was targeted because Taliban believed she was running smear campaign

A senior member of the Pakistani Taliban has written an open letter to Malala Yousafzai – the teenager shot in the head as she rode home on a school bus – expressing regret that he didn't warn her before the attack, but claiming that she was targeted for maligning the insurgents. Adnan Rasheed, who was convicted for his role in a 2003 assassination attempt on the country's then-president Pervez Musharraf, did not apologise for the attack, which left Malala gravely wounded, but said he found it shocking. "I wished it would never happened [sic] and I had advised you before," he wrote.

Malala was 15 when she and two classmates were targeted by a masked gunman who picked them out on a school bus as they went home from school in Pakistan's northwest Swat valley last October. She was seriously injured in the attack, and was flown to Britain to receive specialist treatment from doctors in Birmingham, where she and her family now live. Last week, she celebrated her 16th birthday by delivering a defiant speech at the United Nations in New York, in which she called on world leaders to provide free schooling for all children.

Malala Yousafzai has received a rambling letter from a Taliban commander, claiming she was targeted for maligning it.

In the letter, Rasheed claimed that Malala was not targeted for her efforts to promote education, but because the Taliban believed she was running a "smearing campaign" against it. "You have said in your speech yesterday that pen is mightier than sword," Rasheed wrote, referring to Malala's UN speech, "so they attacked you for your sword not for your books or school." The rambling four-page letter, in patchy English, citing Bertrand Russell, Henry Kissinger and historian Thomas Macaulay, was released to media organisations in Pakistan.

In it, Rasheed – a former member of Pakistan's air force, who was among 300 prisoners to escape jail in April last year – advises Malala to return to Pakistan, join a female Islamic seminary and advocate the cause of Islam. He admitted that the Taliban are "blowing up" schools, but justified the attacks on the grounds that the Pakistani army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps use schools as hideouts. Hundreds of schools have been targeted in Pakistan's north-west: activists say some had been used by the military, but many attacks were motivated by the Taliban's opposition to girls' education.

More Taliban's letter to Malala Yousafzai: this is why we tried to kill you | World news | The Guardian

 

[Peter Dow]

It really annoyed me the way the news media, both sides of the Atlantic promoted the views of the evil Taliban like they were sponsored by "THE FRIENDS OF THE TALIBAN".

I don't want to know what their sick excuses are for shooting at Malala.

I don't care what they think now or how they might behave if this or that.

I want the Taliban dead. Them all.

Meanwhile if anyone can find a spokesperson for the Taliban - don't quote him, kill him.

This is war.

Thanks.