Thomas Jefferson and a 16-year-old vs. Islamists
Townhall – Chuck Norris –
7/16/2013
If only every 16-year-old
had the courage and grit of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who was shot
in the head by the Taliban last year for advocating girls' and women's
education.
Last Friday, she spoke to
the United Nations and said education could change the world, Reuters reported
Malala explained to the
U.N.: "They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullets would
silence us. But they failed, and out of that silence came thousands of
voices."
She added: "The
terrorists thought that they would change my aims and stop my ambitions, but
nothing changed in my life except this: Weakness, fear and hopelessness died.
Strength, power and courage was born."
Aren't those some riveting
truths and, even more, a rallying cry to continue to fight tyranny over the
human mind and spirit? When courageous souls are willing to confront
strongholds, they can overcome any adversity and change any culture.
Let's remember that she's
not fighting a war on terror from without. Her mission is for education,
freedom and reform from within. And that's the most potent type of warfare and
transformation for individuals and society.
Malala is a wiser warrior
than any extremist leader. She knows that the Taliban are afraid of educated
women because they know that women's freedom would mean their loss of control
and demise. They fear that women will know the truth and the truth will set
them free.
In her own words, she said:
"The extremists were and they are afraid of books and pens. The power of
education frightens them. They are afraid of women. ... We realized the
importance of pens and books when we saw the guns."
Jefferson would have concurred with Malala about the power of
education. In his 1818 report for the University of Virginia
-- which he founded -- he asked: "What but education has advanced us
beyond the condition of our indigenous neighbors? And what chains them to their
present state of barbarism and wretchedness but a bigoted veneration for the
supposed superlative wisdom of their fathers and the preposterous idea that
they are to look backward for better things, and not forward, longing, as it
should seem, to return to the days of eating acorns and roots, rather than
indulge in the degeneracies of civilization?"
He wrote the same year,
"If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly
hope and believe, education is to be the chief instrument in effecting it."
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