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2014 Nobel Peace Prize Awarded To Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay
An anonymous reader writes: This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been given to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay for fighting to protect the rights of children and further their education. Yousafzay, at the age of 17, is the youngest recipient of the Peace Prize. Born and raised in Pakistan, she actively campaigned for girls' rights to education. In 2012, the Taliban shot her in the head, but she survived and continued her struggle. Satyarthi, a 60-year-old from India, has led many peaceful protests to fight against child slavery and illiteracy. "Satyarthi estimates that 60 million children in India, or 6 percent of the population, are forced into work. This, he believes, has nothing to do with parental poverty, illiteracy or ignorance. Above all, children are enslaved because employers benefit by getting their labour for free or for a pittance." This year's Nobel Peace Prize awards are also notable for bringing together an Indian and a Pakistani while their respective governments sustain a military conflict along a stretch of border between their countries.
There's some kind of myth that is sought to be promulgated by certain people that the Nobel committee is politically independent. That is completely wrong. The entire commitee is put together by votes in the parliament, and former and high profile politicians are heavily involved. So consider basically the committee's choices the result of the preferences of political appointees.
The current head of the commitee, Thorbjørn Jagland, is a former head politician of the Labour party. He was the one who gave the prize to Barack Obama. Of course, the commitee does have five people in it - but they are all political appointees, and the president has a double vote.
He has been severely and repeatedly criticised over many years, from high profile people, for completely ignoring Alfred Nobel's will. For example, here: http://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/nobels-fredspris/nobel-forfatter-jagland-burde-gaatt-av-for-lenge-siden/a/10062076/ - headline "Jagland should have resigned a long time ago", criticism from the author of the book "Nobel's Will". Article about the author here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_Heffermehl .
Nobel's will states that the prize should go to whomever works to reduce standing armies and arrange peace conferences - it should go to efforts to reduce conventional wars.
The new conservative government has indicated that they are going to remove Jagland. Jagland has presented a conspiracy theory that this is because they are trying to please China. But that's probably not going to float, so the streak of madness and Labour party preference is going to end soon.
Her campaign is for girls' rights to education, pretty sure she doesn't care if people go to coed schools or separate and whether it's private or public.
Plus I'm just taking a guess but there's probably security issues that are easier to handle in a private all girl school. She was shot point blank 3 times for her views after all, I wouldn't exactly feel 100% safe even if I was in the UK.
The people of Pakistan and the people of India have been hostile toward each other much longer than that. Of course, they weren't "people of Pakistan and India" before the end of British rule of what is now India and Pakistan.
About the only period they weren't hostile was during the Raj, when the British tried to prevent that sort of thing.
Note that during the post-British period, when they were split into two countries, the Hindus living in what is now Pakistan were attacked by their Muslim neighbors and driven out of the country.
Likewise, during the same period, the Muslims living in what is now India were attacked by their Hindu neighbors. This reached the point that trainloads of Muslims fleeing to Pakistan were stopped by the Indian Army and machinegunned before being allowed to continue into Pakistan.
Bury the hatchet in each other's head, yes.
The way you mean it, no.
And do you really know so little of human psychology?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
lol, you have no idea what you're talking about and you can't even be bothered to check out wikipedia before you attack a teenage girl?
Let me make it easy for you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
She attended school, despite threats from various, very scary groups that any girl caught doing so would be attacked.
There was basically a civil war while she was in school and girls were banned from attending, but she went anyways.
She worked for the BBC all this time, describing what it was like. Enlightening people in the west to the plight of girls in this area of the world.
Then the Taliban ordered her dead. A gunman drove up, ordered her to identify herself or he'd shoot them all. She did and was shot. She nearly died.
She survived the attack and continued to attend school.
This brought world wide attention to the plight of women in Pakistan.
She recovered, continued to attend school, got exiled, etc...
She's met with damn near every world leader.
Asked and received funding to support the education of women.
Got money from the UN
Wrote books, articles, blogs, etc... all encouraging young women to attend school and get an education no matter what.
At any point during all of this she could have simply attended private school and shut her mouth to avoid the threats but she refused.
Nobel Prizes are given for a lifetime of achievement. This girl has already done more in the less than 2 decades she's been alive then the whole of the Slashdot community combined. There are a lot of questionable Nobel awards out there, but this is not one of them.
There's no moral equivalence here.
I think it was Mohammad's rampaging armies and forcible conversions and associated brutality that created the initial bitterness between people of the same genetic stock. Today, the divide between those that converted and those that didn't still remains. Unfortunately, the brutality from those rampaging armies is still echoing today, with the converted being well indoctrinated. I mean, how many terrorist attacks do Hindus carry out in Pakistan, versus terrorist attacks that Muslims carry out in India? That's not the fault of the Raj, though they did certainly use divide-and-conquer to their benefit. There's no moral equivalence here, while the Nobel committee is trying to imply there is. Islam needs a reformation to make it less virulent and violent against its neighbors. Christians are another proselytizing monotheistic religion, but in practice they're merely annoying as opposed to violent (although they certainly have been). Islam should hope to reach such a peaceful state.