During her Friday meeting with President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, Pakistani Nobel Peace Prize nominee Malala Yousafzai confronted the president about ongoing US drone strikes against Pakistan.
Malala said she “expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people.”
That fact was conspicuously absent from the White House statements on the meeting, which portrayed it as beginning and ending with a call for more support for education. Malala has been pushing education as a top priority, but the drone strikes have played a major factor in garnering sympathy for Taliban factions across the tribal areas, and those factions have launched anti-education strikes across the nation.
The issue of drones, and especially of the civilian deaths they have caused, has been a thorny one for the Obama Administration, which continues to insist in vague terms that they are “legal” and disputing the claims of civilian deaths, while refusing to offer any real details to support their position.
Malala also hit out at charges from the Taliban that she is “a Westerner now” insisting that she is a proud Pakistan and that education is neither a Western nor Eastern ideal.
Good for Malala! That's a message the Obamas wouldn't want to hear.
America has always held a strong view that punishment is an effective form of education. Its interactions with native Americans, black slaves, successive waves of immigrants and enemies in a series of wars are indicative of that fact. Punishment works to develop friendship, because bullies are 'only looking for friends', after all.
"There is no worse enemy", as they say, but if you can lose gracefully "There is no better friend".
We have been marinated in Malala stories.
This is one, however, the mainstream media pretty much buried
It is an amazing story; not just the saturation of Malala throughout the international press; but that, when using her international celebrity status to actually criticize at least one aspect of US foreign policy, that that part of her message is effectively censored. Do we need any further proof that corporate media is nothing other than a propaganda arm of the US corporatist state?
Malala's more popular than the Kardashians now–it's Malala 24-7. You can order a life-size Malala poster board for your bedroom on Amazon. For the more adventurous, there's the Malala inflatable doll.
Malala's massive western media and political attention reminds me of the tremendous amount of coverage that the media gave when the Jews ran over Rachel Corrie with a Caterpillar bulldozer paid for by you and me (actually, ran over twice), or the overkill given to the story of the drone strike that murdered al-Awlaki's 16 year old boy while he was noshing on BBQ. That was…oh, no, wait. Never mind.
Malala is a creation of McKinsey and Co.'s global for profit, private education business.
Malala is to be commended, regardless of the us MSM. Unfortunately, she didn't tell Obama anything he didn't already know. It's all part of the plan to further justify the MIC.