Wednesday, July 17, 2013

TERRORISTS AND ISLAMISTS FEAR EDUCATED WOMEN


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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