“Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death, but once.” ~ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

A 14 year-old Pakistani girl, who was braver than I, and braver than every single member of the Taliban, may possibly die as a result of a gunman’s attack.

A 14-year-old Pakistani student who won international acclaim for speaking out for girls barred from school by the Taliban was critically wounded Tuesday by a gunman who boarded her school bus, asked for her by name, aimed his pistol at her head and fired, officials said. The Pakistani Taliban asserted responsibility for the attack on ninth-grader Malala Yousafzai, who gained notice in early 2009 when she wrote a diary about Taliban atrocities under a pen name for the BBC’s Urdu service. Yousafzai lives in Mingora, a city in the scenic northwestern Swat Valley, where Taliban insurgents imposed harsh Islamic law for two years before being routed by a major military operation in May 2009.

That girl had more guts than the lot of them.

Many Pakistanis view Yousafzai, who also promoted literacy and peace, as a symbol of hope in a country long beset by violence and despair. In 2011, the Pakistani government awarded her a national peace prize and 1 million rupees ($10,500). She also was a finalist last year for the International Children’s Peace Prize, awarded by a Dutch organization that lauded her bravery in standing up for girls’ education rights amid rising fundamentalism when few others in Pakistan would do so.

If you thought this situation couldn’t get more sickening, you were wrong.

While school children throughout the nation held prayer vigils for Yousafzai, and many Pakistanis and politicians expressed revulsion over the shooting, major religious parties and mosque leaders were largely silent. Clerics frequently do not rebuke suicide bombings or sectarian attacks for fear of alienating their increasingly conservative congregants or provoking the Taliban.

What is there to type in response to that? All I can think to do is shout “You fucking cowards!” as if I could be heard half a world away. Her crime was her compassion and, for that, she was nearly killed.

We’re told that religion is supposed to make people better. We’re told that morality cannot exist without being grounded in a god. Anybody ever uttering those words should be made to look at this. Yousafzai, who was a child not long ago, was brave enough to point at the suffering of others and condemn it, but religious leaders will stay silent for fear of alienating their congregations. Bravery is a human quality, not a religious quality, and Yousafzai’s existence should forever shame any religious leader who watches the suffering of others with tacit approval.

And for what might she die? For saying women are equal. And for that, they found a young girl whose bravery might redeem that country and they attempted to kill her before boasting of it. These people…they’re not even human. Now look at me and tell me if believing god has vetted and endorsed their mission has contributed to their madness or mitigated it, because it’s sure as shit not neutral.

Irrationality is a poison, and it’s a poison that allows people to mistreat women and to murder a woman who had just begun to live because her compassion exceeded her fear. I hate these people! I hate the cultural irrationality that brought them to this state. I may not make a huge dent in my lifetime, but I am happy to work with any movement seeking to wipe this kind of abject and institutionalized insanity from the face of humankind.

Yousafzai is in stable condition. Thank you for the numerous readers who caught my mistake and pointed out, thankfully, that she is alive.

Although, this headline is confusing.

Because the article says…

According to the Associated Press, a team of army and civilian surgeons have been treating Malala in a military hospital in Peshawar, where she was airlifted after the Tuesday shooting in her hometown of Mingora in the country’s volatile Swat Valley.

There are undoubtedly people praying for her death at this very moment, to the same god no less. That would be the god who didn’t bother to tap Yousafzai on the shoulder and say “Hey, look out! There’s a lunatic with a gun behind you!” like any of us would have done.

Let’s hand the credit for this one to the doctors and to the medicine conceived by human minds rather than god.