According to today’s New York Times (for some reason I didn’t get a CNN bulletin), the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to two people. You will know one of them: Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager (now 17) who was shot two years ago, nearly died, and then began campaigning for universal access to education (she was shot, probably by the Taliban, for the crime of trying to go to school). She is the youngest recipient of any Nobel Prize. The other recipient, from India, is Kailash Satyarthi. It’s lovely that an Indian and a Pakistani, two nations traditionally at odds, are sharing the Peace Prize.
And this is also nice:
British news reports said Ms. Yousafzai was at school in Birmingham, England, where she has lived since being treated for her gunshot wounds, when the prize was announced and was taken out of her class to be informed of the award.
Satyarthis isn’t as famous, at least to Americans, but, at 60, has an even longer record of activism:
In India, Mr. Satyarthi, a former engineer, has long been associated with the struggle to free bonded laborers, some born into their condition and others lured into servitude. For decades, he has sought to rid India of child slavery and has liberated more than 75,000 bonded and child laborers in the country.
Mr. Satyarthi began working for children’s rights in 1980 as the general secretary of the Bonded Labor Liberation Front, an organization dedicated to freeing bonded laborers forced to work to pay off debts, real or imagined. He also founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Children Mission, an organization dedicated to ending bonded labor and saving children from trafficking.
“This is a very happy moment for every Indian,” he said in comments aired on the Indian news channel NDTV on Friday. “If with my humble efforts the voice of tens of millions of children in the world who are living in servitude is being heard, congratulations to all.”
Deserving recipients, and I thank Ceiling Cat that Pope Francis, who had been mentioned as a possible recipient, was a candidate for the prize. That would have put him on the list with Henry Kissinger as Egregiously Undeserving Awardees.
Finally, this is heart-warming:
. . . news of the Nobel Prize on Friday inspired jubilation and well-wishers in the Swat Valley, who spilled onto the streets and distribute [sic] sweets in a traditional celebration.
Good choices!
…for once! The trouble is Yousafzai is not regarded highly in her homeland.
Perhaps not all that bleak…
“Meanwhile, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif, said of Yousafzai’s win in a statement to AFP: “She is (the) pride of Pakistan. She has made her countrymen proud. Her achievement is unparallelled and unequalled. Girls and boys of the world should take the lead from her struggle and commitment.””
“Girls and boys of the world” should have been “Girls and boys of the Muslim world” as there are no obstructions to academic education elsewhere. Hindu, Christian, Sikh, and Buddhist girls have no such problems at all. Nearly in other religions of the world there are no fetters put to stop the pursuit of education. Nawaz Sharif should have stuck to his own country or the Muslim world at large.
Still, they have their own issues. They might not be as serious as Malala’s, but nonetheless they are still causes worth fighting for.
Yes! I am extremely gratified that they did not offer the prize to another politician (presumably as some kind of incentive to get them to behave).
Applause!
I think Bergoglio had been “the tw*t peace winner”. (Wasn’t it the tw*t to Syria that precipitated the idea?)
Malala is Muslim. All of the discussions about Islam here–what do you think of this announcement? A good article by Fareed Zakaria was published in The Washington Post today. A good lesson he learned in grad school would do well for all of us: “You can never explain a variable phenomenon with a fixed cause”.
“Malala is Muslim.”
Your point?
Fareed may want to bone up on his history. Islam’s past is not the story of centuries of peace punctuated by 70 years of “cancer”. Islam did not spread out from the peninsula by a process of peaceful conversion. Early in our national history (the US) we were dealing with Islam in international conflict. (“To the shores of Tripoli”… the First Barbary War. The justification for Barbary piracy was…. Islam.)
And… Why does Fareed finish up by posing a false choice? “You can try to make news or you can make a difference.” This is wrong. The first step to making “a difference” is to speak honestly about problems. What Harris and Maher and other “strident atheists” have been doing is insisting that the conversation be honest and that we stop pretending that religion isn’t a powerful motivator. There can be no “difference” made when liberals allow multicultural “respect” for religion to trump the human rights we should be fighting for.
Well said!
Absolutely!
He must have had a very bad graduate teacher. Almost all phenomena are variable, due to influence of random factors. Most scientists search for causes that explain the mean phenomenon, and recognize that in the observed phenomenon, there is variability added onto the mean effect. The existence of variability should not make us reject an explanation, though we must recognize (and quantify) the variability as well. (And of course we must think about causation vs correlation, but that is a different issue.)
You mean to say that you can explain something such as the variability in seasons on a fixed phenomenon like the Earth being tilted on its axis? Who would’ve thunk it? 😉
During her interview by Jon Stewart, Malala, to the best of my understanding/memory, mentioned that the terrorists do not represent true Islam.
Hope this does not embed:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjGL6YY6oMs
That’s quite a touching account she gives of her experiences in Pakistan, her father’s worries (and worries about her father’s safety), and her commitment to upholding education. Thanks for linking to it. 🙂
On the point about “true” Islam, I can appreciate that her exposure to Islam would be different from that of the terrorists’ – if, for instance, Islam is for her a word to describe a branch of Islam with a more secular-humanist-esque moral outlook – but I disagree with her that the Taliban are not genuine believers rather than cynical opportunists pretending. One of the biggest motivators behind historical atrocities is the conviction that one is fighting on the side of the angels (metaphorically and literally speaking, depending on any particular case).
In general I think Jerry put it well here:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/what-is-a-true-religion/
“In the end, there is no “true” religion in the factual sense, for there is no good evidence supporting their truth claims. Neither are there “true” religions in the moral sense. Every faith justifies itself and its practices by appeal to authority, revelation, and dogma. There are just some religions we like better than others because of their practical consequences… By all means let us say that ISIS is a strain of Islam that is barbaric and dysfunctional, but let us not hear any nonsense that it’s a “false religion”. ISIS, like all religious movements, is based on faith; and faith, which is belief in the absence of convincing evidence, isn’t true or false, but simply irrational.”
Malala is Muslim. All of the discussions about Islam here–what do you think of this announcement?
I think good for her. It’s not exactly news to us that there are good and decent and brave muslims in the world. I do parenthetically wonder why she would identify with Islam, not only because her attackers were almost certainly part of an Islamic sect themselves, but on her stance towards education and equal rights, I haven’t found fault.
It doesn’t change the depressing statistics about misogyny, homophobia, and execution of apostates among Islamic nations’ populaces, though, much less actual criticism of Islamic doctrines (on intellectual grounds) and the behaviours of at least some Islamic movements (on moral grounds). Nor does it imply that we should stop condemning or criticizing either.
Source for that sentence about the depressing statistics, to show I’m not pulling them out of nowhere:
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/10/04/maher-harris-kristof-steele-and-affleck-squabble-about-islam/
pharmanci #4 wrote:
The fact that you ask this question suggests that you haven’t understood our argument. Malala had been discussed and praised by atheists even before she was shot. She is a Muslim trying to introduce humanist ideals into Islam and Islamic cultures. Harris and Maher (and Jerry and us) consider her to be on our side. She is fighting FOR liberal principles .. principles which aren’t to be discovered in the religion, but in religious individuals. Malala is a heroine; she’s our heroine.
As we see it, it is the accomodationists who have the greater tendency to treat Muslims as a monolithic block because they want to idealize Islam and its followers.
I was going to say to pharmanci that those first two sentences of her’s are like a brilliant beacon drawing attention to the fact that she doesn’t have a clue what “we” have been saying. Just like Ben Affleck on Maher’s show.
But, you said it much nicer.
You seem to be implying that we believe all Muslims to be bad people. If so, you have failed to grasp our point, which is this: we think the ideas of Islam, not the people, are terrible ideas. We see these ideas as terrible because they go against liberal ideas enshrined in secular values. It is a pity that there are Muslims who have not jettisoned these bad ideas in their religion in favour of secular ones.
Malala is someone who favours these liberal secular values, even though she holds that these values come from “true Islam”; I disagree with her on that point. Anyone who espouses and promotes liberal, secular values, whatever the naming convention they choose, is an ally of atheists who espouse the same, though we may disagree on the god parts.
It is important to note that we disagree on the god parts, not only because we reject the idea of a creator, but we find the doctrines that support this creator to be morally repugnant. As Steven Weinberg says:
Islam is poisonous, but evidence suggests that many people, especially in America, who are Muslim are pretty nice people and generally well educated.
Muslims must deal with reconciling their religion with science and the modern world. There is no reason why they cannot turn a Copernican paradigm shift from dogma to metaphor, which is what has happened with most Christians who reject the vitriol of the Old Testament.
The discussions here are anti-Islam which is, as Sam Harris pointed out on Maher’s show, “the mother-lode of bad ideas”. We don’t have a problem with individual Muslims unless they espouse those bad ideas, such as considering being an atheist, gay, an apostate, or an adulterer a crime punishable by death.
Malala Yousufzai promotes secular education for girls. That is always a good thing to those of us who comment on this website, therefore we support her. Right-wing Islam considers her actions in this regard likewise a crime punishable by death. (The full name of Islamic terrorist group Boko Haram, for example, means “Western education is a sin”.)
I feel strongly that those of us who are social liberals need to always speak up for liberal ideals. It is my opinion that too many equate the criticism of religion, which is a belief system, with bigotry relating to things that can’t (mostly) be changed such as race, colour, gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity etc. A person’s beliefs, however strongly and sincerely held, should always be open to criticism. I’m sure Ben Affleck would not have come up with the comparison to racism if Maher and Harris had been criticizing the beliefs of white supremacists.
I presume that his efforts are thwarting the designs of those relatively Indians who are holding millions of children in servitude, so his award isn’t a happy day for them – and that’s a good thing too.
…relatively few…
Unfortunately, since they gave it to Obama in 2008, they have removed any shred of credibility from the Nobel Peace Prize.
Kissinger was awarded the prize long before Obama and was much worse.
so there you go, a meaningless prize.
Meaningless? Not with these recipients. They’ve added luster, polish, and glory.
I don’t think Obama was a bad choice if you take it into the context of america’s history. Sure he might not have done anything that makes him personally ‘worthy’ of the prize. But as a ‘symbol’ for democracy and free society and all that jab, he surely does.
Wow, you’re clearly missing a huge chunk of America’s history abroad for the past 120 years. They’ve overturned countless democratically elected governments and replaced them with convenient dictators. They still support many horrible regimes, like Saudi Arabia. They are only “for” peace and democracy when it is politically convenient. An to give the USA the Nobel Peace Prize on the tail-end of the Afghan and Iraqi disasters is laughable.
Yes, it certainly was politically convenient for the US to get involved in World War II was really convenient, wasn’t it?
As for “laughable,” it was Obama who got the peace prize, not the US. So don’t imply that the US got the Nobel Peace Prize; our country was NOT the recipient.
I didn’t imply that, Buku did, that’s why I countered it.
Yes actually the USA NEEDED to join WWII, it wasn’t out of convenience. But you are cherry picking. Just as when you counter religion, you can’t just point out all the good things the USA did and forget all the bad they have done and continue to do to this day.
Well thank you for giving us all that necessary lesson that the U.S. is the worst country in the world. Nobody denies that we’ve made disastrous political missteps, but you seem to have a hair up your fundament about what a horrible country it is. Sorry, but I can’t agree. Yes, we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq or propped up dictators, but people like YOU forget the enormous amount of good the US does as well. Let’s remember, as Obama said, the enormous amoutn of disaster relief and food relief that the US provides for the rest of the world.
No country is perfect, but, all things considered, I wouldn’t be one of those who rushed to demonize the US. And you, of course, are doing your own cherry picking.
Has any other country given anywhere near as much disaster and food relief as the US? I’m with you on this, Jerry ( also re: mistakes made).
Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at the Brum school earlier today: “er Malala, the headmaster would like a word.. There is someone on the phone from Norway for you……”
Yes! What do you say when you go back into your class?
/@
Somehow it seems reasonable to assume that Ms. Yousafzai blushed when she explained to her classmates why she had been called out of class.
I know! The only time I got called out of school was to tell me someone had died.
This is such good news! I’m gonna smile all day.
Sub
Oops sub. 🐟🐳
for realz this time. Ugh, what is wrong with me? No one answer that!
Your brain is hung the wrong way?:-)
Hey! I said don’t answer that! 😉
Malala was awarded the Nobel for her extraordinary courage in pursuit of a basic human value–education. She literally put her life on line for this essentiality to enlighten herself with the realities and workings of the world. But what about nearly 70% of girls in the Muslim world who are denied even basic education? Women’s education is the core of a progressive, liberal, democratic and secular society. Education starts with home. There is a positive association between illiteracy (female in particular) and extremism—in religion, politics, language, culture or any other human aspect; except for a few ‘so-called educated’ manipulators, who brainwash the remaining. Very few Muslims study Biological sciences and even worse, less than 1% believe that evolution is true. If evolution is true then they have to let go of Koran–the final word of Allah. There is no way! You’ve got to get out of the castle if you believe science as a collection of laws, facts, and theories, lest you become a bigot like all religious apologists, including Reza Aslan.
Illiterates in poor parts of the world (or even in a city) can easily be identified as being undernourished, underdeveloped, untidy, unskilled, underpaid, oppressed, overpopulated, frustrated, easily-brainwashed, crime-prone, lot. An illiterate society is not only dysfunctional but also self-destructive. This is the main problem with the Muslim world. Even the males are not equally educated compared to males in other communities. In India, Muslims are the least educated lot and are, naturally, at the bottom of socio-economic hierarchy. Being at least 18% of the total Indian population, they are only around 2% in highly paid white-collar jobs. Just 1% in commercial and industrial sector. 20% of the world population and have a look at all the Nobel laureates until today in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology/Medicine and Literature. How many Muslims are there and what is their percentage relative to their population in the world? Well, the figures are utterly dismal.
Malala is born to a Muslim family with educated parents, like most of the god-fearing educated families in the west which simply overlook the horrible side of the religious coin, she may continue her life fighting for education for women all her life. But to acquire education free of prejudice and ancient dogma is another matter. What I almost hated during the announcement of her win was the mention of two religious backgrounds–Islam and Hinduism–as if these two religions were behind their achievements. So, these two religions got a free publicity for good or bad.
Thanks!
Anwar Khan
“during the announcement of her win was the mention of two religious backgrounds–Islam and Hinduism”
– I noticed that as well. Is it a general practice to mention the recipient’s religion? I suspect it would not have been mentioned had Satyarthi been the sole winner. In any case, I say “it’s just not cricket” :).
Well deserved. These choices should always be honored as some of the best for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Two worthy winners. Well done!
Reblogged this on The Darks Side and commented:
Not to take away from the elder recipient but she’s 17! Amazing that she felt confident enough to become an activist after such a horrible occurrence. Well deserved to both I’m sure.