Malala and The Perils of Overreaching

The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Malala Yousafzai is a reminder of an important fact. It is possible – with all the terrible events in the world, the apparently ceaseless absorption of bad news – to think that the enemies of civilisation have some advantages over us.

After all it is only tyrants like Putin who are willing to cross borders, land-grab and reorganise agreed upon boundaries without justification. No democrat would ever act in such a way. And it is only terror groups like ISIS that are not only willing to impose their world-view on others but are willing to kill, maim and torture in the effort to force that world-view on others. It takes months for any Western alliance to even agree to push back such barbaric forces. There are advantages which such barbarians undoubtedly have.

But the case of the schoolgirl Malala is a reminder of an often-forgotten fact, which is that tyrants and extremists always overreach themselves. And the reaction to them can come from almost anywhere. It is possible to point out – as some of us have for a very long time – that the Taliban and other such ideological Islamist movements are the complete and self-professed enemy of all women’s rights. It is possible to write leader after leader, organise attention-raising conferences and organise joint letters from political leaders. And still the world can remain immobile. And then sometimes groups like the Taliban overreach themselves.

The Taliban did just that when they shot the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala. She had begun to make a name for herself as a proponent of the rights of girls in her own country to go to school and have an education. The Taliban decided it would be best to rid themselves of this troubling schoolgirl. And in that moment they did something which has done more than any other killing or maiming which the Taliban has been involved in to set their own cause back.

When historians study the history of World War II one of the keys parts to analyse is why the Nazis lost. Some people have studies to show that steel production or parts manufacture rates were the key elements. But the most persuasive studies – whilst taking all of this and more into account – are those which explain that the Nazis lost the Second World War because they were Nazis. Time and again, in the closing days of the war, the high command of the Nazi party, given the choice of loading a train with their own men or packing them with Jews to send to the gas chambers opted for the latter as their priority. It was their ideology and its awfulness which in the end did for them.

And so it may well be with groups like the Taliban. Offered the chance they will try to silence the schoolgirl, oppress fifty percent of the human race and disgrace the other half. But from somewhere at some point – and in recent years with the case of Malala – something happens which brings out that tendency more loudly and more clearly than ever and to a global audience. The fanaticism of fanatics gives them advantages over ordinary, everyday, getting-on-with-our-lives democrats. But it is the fanaticism and the extremism which will also, always, one day do for them.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image, courtesy of The Straits Times – Asia, is of Pakistani schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai at the United Nations in the Manhattan borough of New York on Aug 18, 2014. — PHOTO: REUTERS