The silhouette of the large mosque, brick-like but for a bulbous dome, looked blurry in the downpour. The rain of East Java is heavy, lending a sparkle to the green paddies and the scent of moist earth to the air. As the evening prayer ended, hundreds of boys rushed out of the building in waves, mats slung over their shoulders, sarongs hitched up to their knees, flip-flops squelching in the wet.
These students attend Pondok Modern Darussalam Gontor, one of Indonesia’s many Islamic boarding schools, or pesantren. (Estimates range from about 13,000 to 30,000.) Almost three-quarters of the schools, including Gontor, teach secular subjects like science and history in addition to classical Islamic texts and vocational courses in agriculture and mechanics.… Seguir leyendo »
Boko Haram's murderous tactics have descended to a new barbaric low.
Last Saturday, a bomb strapped to a schoolgirl exploded in the center of Maiduguri in Borno state, killing at least 20 people. Then, on Sunday, two girls simultaneously blew themselves up in a market in Potiskum in Yobe state, killing three and injuring more than 40.
It is clear that girls as young as 10 are being lined up as suicide bombers to further Boko Haram's cause. And these new bombings come as Boko Haram has also caused outrage around the world with its indiscriminate massacre of innocent men, women and children in the towns of Baga and Doron Baga.… Seguir leyendo »
There seems to be no respite for school children in Malala Yousafzai’s home province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Days after the 17-year-old received the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating girls’ right to education, the Taliban launched the deadliest attack in Pakistan’s history, killing at least 148 people, including 132 children, at a school in Peshawar.
The people of Pakistan are shaken, angry, confused and fearful. The government just lifted the moratorium on the death penalty. And yet the attack in Peshawar will not be Pakistan’s 9/11 moment.
Terrorist attacks against schools in tribal areas are an old story. Muhammad Khorasani, the spokesman of the Pakistani Taliban (also known as Tehrik-e-Taliban), said the Peshawar attack was retaliation for the deaths of civilians killed in Operation Zarb-e-Azb, an anti-militancy campaign the Pakistani military started in June.… Seguir leyendo »
I am in Kinshasa. I am in a college hall talking to a thousand young people about education. I am handed a note of what has happened just minutes before in Peshawar, Pakistan. The children stand as one. Silence. Faces fall. We are exactly 3,960 miles from London, 4,507 miles from Peshawar, but the vast distances mean little. An event – a terrorist attack, as almost always – has united the world in outrage again: 132 children dead, murdered by the Taliban in classrooms and corridors. This horrific attack, the worst school atrocity ever, was on boys and girls everywhere.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where violence has been common and often brutal, these students understood the enormity of what had just occurred a continent away.… Seguir leyendo »
"All around me my friends were lying injured and dead."
These are not the confessions of a battle-hardened soldier who signed up to fight in his nation's war. They are the words of a 15-year-old boy lying in a hospital bed in Peshawar, Pakistan, after Taliban militants attacked his school in an act of savagery so bloody and brazen it seized the attention of a world grown nearly indifferent to the barbarism vying regularly for its attention.
At a time of playground bombings in Syria, kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria, girls' schools shuttered under threat in Afghanistan and conflicts descending into chaos in real time, the attack on the Pakistan's Army Public School brought home once again the danger children face simply for the act of heading to school.… Seguir leyendo »
The rise of the Islamic State has once again turned the spotlight on Saudi Arabia, which is accused of supplying the theological foundation of the movement’s brutal ideology, as well as many of its fighters and funders.
The kingdom faced similar criticism in 2001 after 15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 terrorist attacks were found to be Saudi. As a result, when King Abdullah ascended to the throne four years later, he established the Financial Investigation Unit to halt terror financing and cracked down on extremist rhetoric in the mosque. But the heart of his campaign against extremism was a major revamp of the nation’s education system.… Seguir leyendo »
Sin pretender evocar al caso Dreyfus, y la carta publicada en 1898 en el diario parisino L’ Aurore, que Émile Zola tituló «J’accuse» –en aquel affaire que marcó un hito contra el antisemitismo en Francia–, hoy tengo que hacer público mi particular «yo acuso». En primer lugar a mí misma, como política, como ciudadana de Occidente y como mujer; y extenderlo después a aquellas otras personas e instituciones que se encuentran en una situación similar en relación con el rapto de las niñas nigerianas por parte del grupo islamista Boko Haram. Y me acuso porque, quizá, todos podríamos haber hecho más para evitar este secuestro que se ha puesto de manifiesto como punta de un problema vergonzoso, inadmisible punta del iceberg, que afecta a millones de mujeres en el mundo.… Seguir leyendo »
Los hombres que el 9 de octubre trataron de matar a Malala Yousafzai, una adolescente de solo 14 años, sabían lo que ella representa: es bien conocido el activo compromiso que tiene desde los once años con la promoción del derecho de las niñas de su región a acceder a la educación.
Aunque los esfuerzos de Malala generan la aprobación de Occidente y de algunos sectores de la sociedad pakistaní, fueron recibidos como un insulto por las fuerzas oscurantistas que el mundo conoció con el nombre de “talibanes” y que en Pakistán se hacen llamar Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan. El nombre elegido encierra una ironía, porque el término árabe Taliban se refiere a las personas que buscan ser educadas, mientras que el principal objetivo de los talibanes es mantener a las sociedades musulmanas en el atraso, para que sea más fácil convencerlas de adoptar una versión del Islam del siglo séptimo.… Seguir leyendo »
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