Taliban don’t consider women as human being: Malala

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai has said that the Taliban government has deprived Afghan girls of their basic right to education, adding that the Taliban do not even consider women as human beings.Addressing the two-day “International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities: Challenges and Opportunities”, in Islamabad, Nobel laureate said that Taliban have made legislation seeking ban on girls’ education.Malala said, “If we don’t talk about deprivation of educational right for Afghan girls, the mission of this moot will not be completed. She said it was the basic right of every girl that she is allowed to attend school for at least 12 years”. She said worldwide 120 million girls fail to attend schools and in Pakistan 10 million girls are out of schools.According to AFP, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai urged Muslim leaders on Sunday not to “legitimise” the Afghan Taliban government and to “show true leadership” by opposing their curbs on women and girls’ education. “Do not legitimize them,” she said at a summit on girls’ education in Muslim nations being held in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.”As Muslim leaders, now is the time to raise your voices, use your power. You can show true leadership. You can show true Islam,” said 27-year-old Yousafzai. The two-day conference has brought together ministers and education officials from dozens of Muslim-majority countries, backed by the Muslim World League.Since sweeping back to power in 2021, the Taliban government has imposed an austere version of Islamic law that the United Nations has labeled “gender apartheid”. Their curbs have shut women and girls out of secondary school and university education, as well as many government jobs, and seen them sequestered out of many aspects of public life.Delegates from Afghanistan’s Taliban government did not attend the event despite being invited, Pakistan Education Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui told AFP on Saturday.”Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings,” Yousafzai told the conference. “They cloak their crimes in cultural and religious justification.” Yousafzai was shot in the face by the Pakistani Taliban when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in 2012, amid her campaigning for female education rights. Her activism earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, and she has since become a global advocate for women and girls’ education rights. “The Taliban are explicit about their mission: they want to eliminate women and girls from every aspect of public life and erase them from society,” she told the conference. While there is outcry in much of the international community over the Taliban government curbs, nations are divided over how to engage with Kabul’s rulers on the issue. Some countries argue that they should be frozen out of the diplomatic community until they backtrack, while others prefer engagement to coax them into a U-turn.No country has officially recognized the Taliban authorities, but several regional governments have engaged on the topics of trade and security.Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai on Sunday said she would continue to call out Israel’s violations of international law and human rights in Gaza. The education advocate was speaking at a global summit on girls’ education in Muslim nations hosted by Pakistan and attended by representatives from dozens of countries.”In Gaza, Israel has decimated the entire education system,” she said in an address to the conference. “They have bombed all universities, destroyed more than 90 percent of schools, and indiscriminately attacked civilians sheltering in school buildings. “I will continue to call out Israel’s violations of international law and human rights.”Yousafzai was shot when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl by Pakistani militants enraged by her education activism. She made a remarkable recovery after being evacuated to the United Kingdom and went on to become the youngest ever Nobel Prize winner at the age of 17.”Palestinian children have lost their lives and future. A Palestinian girl cannot have the future she deserves if her school is bombed and her family is killed,” she added. The war in Gaza was sparked by Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures.During the attack, Palestinian militants took 251 people hostage, of whom 94 remain in the Gaza Strip, including 34 the Israeli military has declared dead. Israel’s retaliatory military offensive in Gaza has killed 46,537 people, the majority of civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory considered reliable by the United Nations.