Islamabad: Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai says she would continue to call out Israel’s violations of international law and human rights in Gaza.
Malala said while speaking on the second day of “International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities: Challenges and Opportunities” on Sunday.
“In Gaza, Israel has decimated the entire education system,” she told a summit on girls’ education in Muslim nations, hosted by Pakistan and attended by representatives from dozens of countries.
“They have bombed all universities, destroyed more than 90 percent of schools, and indiscriminately attacked civilians sheltering in school buildings.”
Malala Yousafzai has called on the international community to tackle the global crisis of girls’ education, emphasising the vital role educated women play in building a thriving society.
Stressing the need for collective action to ensure that every girl has access to schooling, the education activist said that “if we don’t tackle this crisis, our society will not thrive as it should”.
“We will fail to live up to Islam’s fundamental values of seeking knowledge.
Malala said that girls in a number of Muslim countries, including Yemen and Sudan, are living under dire circumstances, facing poverty, violence and forced marriages.
“In Afghanistan, an entire generation of girls is robbed of their future. This conference will not be serving its purpose if don’t talk about the education of Afghan girls,” she said.
The youngest Nobel laureate urged the Muslim leaders not to “legitimise” the Afghan Taliban government and to “show true leadership” by opposing their curbs on women and girls’ education.
“As Muslim leaders, now is the time to raise your voices, use your power. You can show true leadership. You can show true Islam,” she said.
“Simply put, the Taliban do not see women as human beings,” Yousafzai told the conference.
“They cloak their crimes in cultural and religious justification.”
“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.
This conference, she said, is an encouraging first step. “But we can only have an honest and serious conversation about girls’ educations, if we call out the worst violations of it.”
Yousafzai was shot in the face by members of a Pakistani armed group when she was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in 2012, amid her campaigning for female education rights.
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.
The federal capital hosted the two-day conference that brought together global experts, educators to address issues surrounding girls’ education in Muslim countries.
The event was snubbed by Afghanistan’s Taliban government, as Education Minister Khalid Maqbool Siddiqui apprised that Islamabad had extended an invitation to Kabul, “but no one from the Afghan government was at the conference”.
