LYING BY OMISSION

 

Seventeen year old Malala Yousafzai is the youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She is also a socialist - which the corporate media have ignored.

WHILE THE Nobel Peace Prize is not all it is cracked up to be (think Barack Obama), it was still a wonderful achievement that seventeen year old Malala Yousafzai won the prize this year.  She shares  the award with another children rights activist, Kailash Satyarthi of India.

What has been less wonderful has been the news coverage of her award. I made a point of watching the coverage on the evening news bulletins of Prime, Television One and TV3 yesterday. The all lied abut Yousafzai, not blatantly but by omission.

All three news shows  took their  stories from overseas sources and all three stories  failed to mention that Yousafzai is a socialist. They highlighted the fact  that  she began  campaigning for the education of young Pakistani girls' from  the age of 11, three years before she was shot by the Taliban. What none of the stories mentioned  was that, shortly before she was shot, she had attended a Marxist Summer School run by the Pakistani section of the International Marxist Tendency. She spoke in the debates. This  important  part of her life was 'deleted' by the corporate media.

From her hospital bed in England she  sent a message of thanks and encouragement  to her Pakistani comrades:

  “I’d like to thank The Struggle and the IMT for giving me a chance to speak last year at their Summer Marxist School in Swat and also for introducing me to Marxism and Socialism. I just want to say that in terms of education, as well as other problems in Pakistan, it is high time that we did something to tackle them ourselves. It’s important to take the initiative. We cannot wait around for any one else to come and do it. Why are we waiting for someone else to come and fix things? Why aren’t we doing it ourselves?

    “I would like to send my heartfelt greetings to the congress. I am convinced Socialism is the only answer and I urge all comrades to take this struggle to a victorious conclusion. Only this will free us from the chains of bigotry and exploitation.”

In her memoir,  I Am Malala,  she writes of her father ‘wanting to end the feudal and capitalist systems in our country, where the same big families had controlled things for years while the poor got poorer.'

While her political views are still forming it is also true that the corporate media have already begun to  sanitise her political convictions. If it has its way, she'll be tranformed into another corporate apologist like Bono. So it is up to the rest of us to celebrate the real Malala Yousafzai. Let the truth be known.