By Dale McFeatters
In a bit of encouraging news out of a nation that has produced few of them, a broad spectrum of Pakistan has become enraged by a Taliban attempt to murder a 14-year-old schoolgirl as she rode a school bus home.
The Washington Post reported that the attempted killing "united Pakistanis from across social divides" ― conservative clerics, members of the military, secular politicians, the media and, most of all, an outraged public.
The critically wounded girl, Malala Yousafzai, has been visited in the hospital by Pakistan Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, arguably the most powerful official in the country. And Pakistan will pay a $100,000 reward for the capture of the perpetrators, several of whom have now been arrested.
Even Jamaat ud Dawa, a wing of the militant Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba, couldn't stay silent. "Shameful, a group considered terrorists by the U.S. government called the attack "shameful, despicable and barbaric." It called down a curse on the would-be assassin.
One blogger taunted the Taliban, "Come on, brothers, be REAL MEN. Kill a school girl."
The young victim was an activist for women's education, her principal outlet being a blog on the BBC, using a pseudonym, and she was also the recipient of a number of national and international awards for her efforts.
Yousafzai knows whereof she speaks because she lived in Swat Valley, when the Pakistani government, in a horribly mistaken peace gesture in 2007, let the Taliban control the region. They closed all the women's schools, including one run by her father, which Yousafzai faithfully and covertly reported on in her blog.
On Tuesday, a masked ― no profiles in courage here ― Taliban gunman stopped her school bus as it was leaving the school grounds, asked which one was Malala Yousafzai and, when told, shot her in the head and neck. For good measure, he shot the girl who had pointed her out. Both are expected to recover.
A Taliban spokesman called the teen's campaign for women's education an "obscenity" and "a symbol of Western culture" and promised that if she survived they would again try to kill her.
No one who doesn't hew to the rigid 16th century orthodoxy of the Taliban will truly be safe until the Pakistani people collectively decide that this murderous conduct is unacceptable and then act on that outrage. The determination and courage of a 14-year-old school girl seems a great place to start.
Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).
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