The clash of civilizations

Malala Yousafzai is big news these days.

She is the 14 year old "child activist" who survived a Taliban assassination attempt in Pakistan. Her crime? Speaking out for the right of girls to get an education.

That is a story guaranteed to evoke revulsion across the Western world.

Which is why I wonder about the story. I am reminded of that equally revolting story about the Iraqi troops dumping babies out of incubators in Kuwait. That was another story designed to whip the West into a righteous frenzy of vengeance.

And it worked. The American public was overwhelmingly behind the first Gulf war.

More than twenty years later, the war parties need to ramp up support for a wider war on the Taliban. Who better to raise that support than a "child activist" brought low by a Taliban bullet?

There is utterly no evidence that the Nations of Virtue or our allies in the Towelistans have the slightest compunction about snuffing the life a child, be they a teen, pre-teen, or toddler, boy or girl. In fact, there is a vast archive of evidence to prove that we are absolutely indifferent to the children at the receiving end of our projectiles of democracy and missiles of peace.

They've never been anything other than collateral damage.

But let the Taliban execute a "child activist" and suddenly the lives of children become sacrosanct. There is a medivac jet idling on a runway in Islamabad to take the victim for advanced medical care in Dubai. Headlines around the world scream about the barbarity of our Taliban adversary.

It's all a little too convenient.

I'm betting that before long Malala will have made a full recovery, thanks to the miraculous interventions of Western medicine. She will be spirited out of Pakistan and make the rounds of the talk show circuit. She will be on Good Morning America and Ellen and Oprah and Piers Morgan before she becomes a regular on the dog-and-pony show of those internationally famous child activists, the Kielburger brothers.

And by God, we'll have to do something about those primitives over there in the Pakistani tribal lands before they try to kill another 14 year old.