The story of Malala is not exactly as the people who push her story would have you believe and I'm sure we are not getting the entire story regarding Greta's sudden popularity.
Malala was already writing a blog for the BBC, interviewing with the NYT and was the subject of a documentary years before she was shot in 2009. She was already gaining political and international media exposure before she was shot. You think that just happened by chance? Her family hired a top public relations firm after she was shot. Her rise to fame was not just some random occurrence.
She was shot because of the strong anti-taliban message being pushed by both her and her father not because she was a girl who wanted an education.
Why Pakistan Hates Malala
The
disclosure in 2013 that
Malala’s family had retained Edelman, a top American public relations firm, to assist with her media management has only heightened these suspicions. So have the views of Malala and her father, Ziauddin, which align with many in the West. Ziauddin has been
associated with the Awami National Party, a leftist and secular political party in a conservative and deeply religious country. Even before Malala was shot, they were both championing girls’ education.
Malala was also writing blogs (albeit anonymously) for the BBC and giving interviews to the New York Times (she was the subject of a gripping 2009 Times documentary film). The core themes in the messaging of Malala and her father in those earlier times — opposition to the Taliban and the importance of educational opportunities for girls — resonated in the West, and to a significant extent in Pakistan as well. However, in a conservative and patriarchal society like Pakistan’s, such views nonetheless displeased many. The fact that these opinions were imparted to prominent Western publications likely attracted suspicion as well.
Tellingly,
a Taliban commander later claimed in an open letter to Malala that his organization targeted her not because of her education advocacy, but rather her anti-Taliban “propaganda.”
Malala was not living in abject poverty in her early years;
her father owned a school and was an English-speaking activist. Additionally, she enjoyed the privilege of strong connections to the Western media; she was writing for the BBC, after all, even before she was shot.
