The liminality of Rafia Zakaria's turd

Rafia Zakaria, a Pakistani American lawyer, whose craziness I have commented on previously, writes of Judith Butler's new book that it  

presents a sharp explication of how the “intensifying phantasmic force of gender” has become the target for all those who fear a world where constructed categories dissipate and expose their own unreality.

In other words, Putin and Xi and Orban and, no doubt, Modi, are all shitting themselves because some people with vaginas dress up like teenage rent-boys. Needless to say, this is because of Neoliberalism.  

For those in the antigender movement, even the thought of such a world, free as it would be from the dominance of colonial epistemology

White peeps didn't just have dicks- which would have been bad enough. Some of them had brains and acquired knowledge. This shows that stuff you find in textbooks are the product of White dicks which continue to RAPE us incessantly. Ban White dicks. They are very evil more particularly because they can cause Whites to have brains and write books. Butler's book is okay. She may be a Jew, but she don't got no dick and thus can't have a brain.  

and compulsory heterosexuality,

Queen Victoria was cool with Lesbians 

is unbearable and thus galvanizing.

Why else did Putin invade Ukraine? It is because Zelensky was dressing up like a girl and having sex with sailors.  

Butler’s discussion of how Black women’s bodies made “women’s medicine” possible is

nonsense. Medicine for women had nothing to do with the color of the skin of the women concerned. Agnodice is the first female physician and midwife recorded in Greek literature.  Trotula De Ruggiero was the first female physician in Italy. She was probably the most famous and important member of the so-called Mulieres Salernitanae (Women from Salerno), a group of women physicians who studied at the Medical School of Salerno and practiced the art of medicine at the end of the first millennium. Both were White and saw only white women because black women did not exist in their vicinity. 

particularly insightful because it reveals the connection between the trans-exclusionary and right-wing vitriol directed

by JK Rowling- right?  

against the dissolution of gender categories and the upholding of the colonial epistemologies that undergird them.

Rafia thinks Emperor Aurangazeb was a cross-dresser. Prophet Muhammad did not condemn the 'xanith' or transvestite (though such people did perform a useful economic function for the harems of the very rich). What happened when the White man came to Ind's coral strand, was that Indians were forced to grow either a dick or a vag. Also, the Viceroy would personally prise apart any dudes he saw copulating with each other. This was the leading cause of the Indian Mutiny.  

In their chapter on the subject, Butler notes that it was the bodies of female Black slaves on which examinations were done.

Not in the places where medicine was advancing most rapidly. Places with a lot of black slaves didn't have much in the way of 'medical examinations'.  

At the same time, Butler tells us that these women were “flesh, not women, since women were presumptively white, and they were not served by the medical treatments they made possible.”

If so the price of black slaves would not have varied according to gender. They would have been sold by weight.  

Gender, Butler explains, “arrives only with whiteness.”

Gender arrived before the gene for whiteness came into existence. It existed in places which had never seen a white man.  

Black flesh exists only as an invisible, undifferentiated mass until reality and permissibility is bestowed upon it by white assessment and categorization.

Butler is white. Since she lacks a dick, she can't do assessment and categorization but repeats any paranoid shit she chances upon.  

This form of genital surveillance was also common in colonial India.

The Arthashastra tells us that, in ancient Magadha, it was one of the duties of the bandhakiposhaka- or keeper of prostitutes. At the time there were both State owned and private brothels. Wherever prostitution has been taxed or otherwise licensed or regulated, there has also been periodic examination of genitals. Soldiers too were subjected to this. Why? The answer is obvious. It was to control the spread of venereal diseases.

One of the first laws that the British passed in the subcontinent was one that made all women subject to forced genital examinations.

No. The first laws passed by the British long predated their gaining 'Nizamat'- i.e. control of the administration. It is not the case that the Brits spent a lot of time surveilling dicks or vaginas. They were in India to make money. It was only over a century after Plassey that the Brits got around to passing the Cantonment Act of 1864. Native states already had such laws or customs. There were also 'Contagious Diseases Acts' for non-Army areas but these were repealed in 1884. The English feminist, Joshephine Butler was a prime mover in this. However, local kotwals quietly used the traditional system of requiring the brothel owner to ensure such checks were carried out. 

Those who did not submit faced imprisonment and criminal charges.

One such appealed to the Court and was released.  

Per Butler’s argument, this too can be seen as an expression of gender surveillance in which the truth of a woman being a woman had to be verified by colonial authorities.

Nonsense! Many women were purdah-nashin. Viceroy wasn't constantly barging into the andaroon demanding to see vaginas. On the other hand, there is considerable evidence that Sherlock Holmes, of Baker Street, disguised himself as a pussy cat so as to meticulously record details of various Indian pussies. 

Also, as historian Durba Mitra points out in her book Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought, body parts from Indian women were collected and stored for British doctors to study.

Did you know that Conan Doyle trained to be a Doctor? That's when he met Sherlock Holmes who had collected lots of Indian vaginas so that British peeps could qualify as Doctors. If you wanted to be a Dentist, you had to have access to a collection of Nigerian dicks. Since Nigerians tend to thump you if you try taking away their dicks, Britain lagged behind in dentistry.  

Some parallels can be drawn between these acts of domination through the examination of genitalia then and legislation to allow genital examinations of minors in countries like Sweden now, under the purported umbrella of identifying cases of female genital cutting.

Did you know that a swede is actually a root vegetable? In Sweden, these are generally found inside vaginas. Neoliberalism is causing that country to try to increase rutabaga exports by forcible examination of vaginas. Their claim that they are trying to detect and punish female genital mutilation is just a cover story. 

Butler’s genealogical examination of gender reaches into the past,

when White men invented vaginas and installed them in Black women under Colonialism.  

but its probative value also lies in providing contemporary feminists tools to understand the present.

Sweden has joined NATO. Why? Obviously, their soldiers want to come and search your vagina just in case some rutabaga can be found hiding there. Wake up sheeple! Capitalism is seeking to avert its final crisis by surveilling your genitalia. 

The idea of “phantasmagoria” as a wildly obsessive force is an apt explication of the obsession with curbing reproductive choice.

i.e. killing fetuses.  

The pregnant person presents a riddle of liminality and a challenge to categorization in that it is impossible to delineate exactly where the person ends and the fetus begins.

Where does Rafia end and where does the turd in her colon begin? A person who needs to take a dump presents a riddle of liminality.  

Saying life begins at conception is a literal effort to insist on the reality and naturalness of constructed categories by endowing them with artificial certainty that is then affirmed in law.

Saying Rafia is full of shit is a literal effort to insist on the reality and naturalness of 'constructed categories' which differentiate her from a turd. Why is the law affirming this distinction? If it is okay to flush a turd down the toilet, why is it not okay to do the same to Rafia? After all, it is only because of 'colonial epistemology' that she is considered a human being with legal rights rather than a lump of shit. 

Finally, it is hopeful that Butler sees transnational feminism as a basis for solidarity against the antigender movement.

Because the thing is already known to be utterly useless against anything else. Hopefully, after taking on the 'antigender movement' it will develop the organizational muscle to oppose the Neoliberal 'right to fart' campaign. 

Such solidarity depends on noting and affirming that “translation often alters the meaning of the term.”

Only if the translation is shit. A solidarity which depends on noting and affirming shit isn't worth a fart.  

It also requires recognition that common cause is to be found in the brutality of imposed gender categories

Mummy is a horrible brute. She dressed me like a little girl. Had she had an ounce of humanity, she would have aborted me so as to express solidarity with hijras.  

and that such an imposition was (and is) an act of colonial dominance.

If Rafia has a vagina, it is because Viceroy Mountbatten cruelly imposed it on her. Thankfully, the IRA killed him. But King Charles has taken over that job. Did you know Kate Middleton was forced by Prince Phillip to grow a vagina? King of Sweden is now demanding the right to surveil her kooch. That is the real story behind this so called 'cancer' diagnosis. Wake up sheeple! Don't believe everything you read in the Daily Mail.  

Butler’s work is an invaluable contribution to how the transnational, and particularly transnational feminism, can still exist without an imposed and requisite universal.

Why should feminism be about peeps with vaginas? Why shouldn't it concern itself with turds?  

It is also a valuable example of how the intersectionality of inequities faced by feminists

e.g the manner in which not having a dick exacerbates the inequity of not having had a satisfactory bowel movement since my period began.  

is confronted by a mad mosaic of fear and desire for dominance that is the phantasmagoric antigender movement.

What Rafia represents is a mad mosaic of fear and the desire to be stupider than a turd. JK Rowling can make lots of money out of 'phantasmagoria'. Had she taken a PhD in whatever shite this lady studied, she too could be utterly useless.  

Rafia Zakaria's hatred of White women

 There were and possibly still are men with names like Zakaria, or men who come from the part of the world where Zakarias originate, who spent a lot of time denouncing White women as godless whores. Rafia Zakaria is a woman who wants to outdo such men by denouncing White women as godless whores who take an active part in beating and killing Muslim men who try to kill Americans. Why is she doing this? Is it because she wants a pat on the back from the men back home? Or does she know something we don't- viz. the next country to fall to the Taliban will be her own Pakistan? Might as well get in good with them while the going is good.

She writes-

“I’m fine,” the pale, red-haired Jessica Chastain says as she takes off her full black jumpsuit and face mask. The scene is from Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 film Zero Dark Thirty, which despite the seeming banality of the dialogue, says a lot about a new flavor of feminism that has evolved in the white and Western world since 9/11 and the War on Terror.

Whereas Rafia's brand of feminism consists of condemning women in her adopted country who take an active role in fighting back against the sort of men, from her part of the world, who would beat her if she dared show her face in the street. 

Either women must take on military and other duties so as to protect their own nation or else they have to accept second class status. If they are not risking their lives and getting their hands dirty they have no moral right to claim equality with the men who ensure the nation's security.

Rafia is a lawyer in America. She may think Terror should prevail- provided it is Islamist and spends a lot of time beating women if they show their face in the street and slitting their throat if they bring dishonor on the family- e.g. by refusing sexual services to whomever their father has sold them to. 

In the film, Chastain plays a CIA “targeter” named Maya who is physically delicate but tough as nails in every other way, which in this particular conversation also means that she is up for torture.

Rafia is up for assassinating the character of the brave women who have stepped forward to keep her country safe. Many of them are Black or Hispanic. But Rafia sticks to the 'White women are godless whores' script. After all, in America, there is such a thing as the Nation of Islam.

In fact, that is what she and her male CIA colleague have been doing inside a makeshift bunker that also serves as a torture chamber. “Let’s go back in there,” she tells the men after they have rested a minute from the hard toils of inflicting extreme pain on other human beings.

Other human beings who want to kill innocent Americans. 

Here, then, is gender equality at its most perverse, 

No. Equality involves equality of sacrifice. If women won't fight and refuse to get their hands dirty, then they don't deserve equality. This is not perverse. It is natural justice.

Rafia has a tiny little brain. She thinks 'gender equality' means lots of chocolate for her to eat. It would be very perverse if she were called upon to get her hands dirty protecting the country where she gobbles chocolates. Instead she should be given a Pulitzer Prize for denouncing godless White whores who are so perverse that they are trying to defend their country instead of handing it over to Terrorists.

a white woman trying her best to show a white man that she has as much of an appetite for cruelty as he does.

No doubt, Rafia is hoping for a pat on the back for writing this shite from whichever type of Taliban or Boko Haram is operating in her country of origin. 

 And the laconic white men appear to approve. “She’s a killer,” her boss says in her wake as she disappears down a hallway. If this had been an entirely fictional film, all of it could have been discarded as the morbid fantasy of some Hollywood director. As it happens, Maya is based on a very real CIA sleuth, whose identity the agency has never released but to whose gritty greatness many have made pointed allusions. Maya (along with others, also mostly women, CIA sources have said) was responsible for the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

But Osama was Muslim! He was living comfortably in Pakistan! You mustn't kill Muslim men in Pakistan even if they have killed your people. Furthermore, women should be lining up to become wives and concubines of such men. They should not be helping bring the thugs to justice.

Rafia does not mention that some of the women involved were Black, Hispanic and Muslim. The fact is most women in America- even if Muslim or of Pakistani origin- are patriotic. If they are pious Muslims, they will never make invidious distinctions of color. But then not everybody has a tiny brain like Rafia. 

The film Zero Dark Thirty may be a souped-up, cinematically slick, and action-packed retelling of what the real Maya managed to do, but it is based on fact. For her now-feted heroism, the real Maya won the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, an honor about which she was happy to boast to all her CIA colleagues through a mass email.

Whereas she should have quietly become the concubine of some Terrorist and waged war on her own country. It appears the lady in question has a Slavic name. It is a fact that such women played a big role in liberating their countries from the Nazis. It is also possible that the lady is of Jewish heritage. OMG! No wonder Rafia has her knickers in a twist!

I watched Zero Dark Thirty in a nearly full movie theater in Indiana. Jessica Chastain’s Maya may have been “fine” in makeshift torture bunkers, but I definitely was not. 

Indeed. An older generation of Germans was not comfortable watching movies where the Nazis were the bad guys.

Beyond the movie theater, the shopping mall was all aglow with holiday decorations and around me, my fellow moviegoers seemed snug in the cozy darkness of the theater and smug in this elevation of white women as the ultimate weapon in crushing Brown terrorists.

Those 'Brown' terrorists attacked America. They should have stayed at home slitting their daughter's throats and beating any woman who dared show her face on the streets. Thankfully, now the Taliban has prevailed, Rafia will be one happy camper. 

The crowd repeatedly cheered, once during a scene that showed a Brown man being waterboarded, another time as Chastain’s Maya inched closer to catching the man whom the Americans had been hunting for a long decade, and of course at the end as she is hailed as the heroine who crushed the most evil man in the world. The whole exercise was an elaborate revisiting of glory designed to puff the chests of patriots.

Whereas ISIS videos of 'kuffar' beheadings puffed out the chests of Rafia's heroes. How sad that they were only good at beating their own women and totally shit at fighting America!

 The end of the film was never a mystery, America had won, and at least for the purposes of the film, a slight, flame-haired, delicate-featured “killer” had sleuthed and tortured her way to ensuring the obliteration of the most wanted Brown man in the whole world.

I'm cool with that. Why? That lady doesn't want to kill me just because of my religion. But Osama would have been delighted if peeps like me were slaughtered by his suicide bombers. 

I cringed, not just because Maya’s search for parity with men extends to trash-talking

OMG! A woman is using naughty words! What's next? Will she start wearing trousers? Chee Chee, such Godlessness!

 and torture, or even because she calls Pakistan “a really fucked-up place”

I know plenty of Pakistanis who would go much further. That's why, like Rafia, they have emigrated. 

 within the first few minutes of the film, but because it seemed that I was the only person who saw in Zero Dark Thirty an utter perversion of the general project of gender equality.

Which Osama was committed to.

 I cried at the end, because the audience stood up to hand the movie a standing ovation.

Rafia cried because she was living in a country which protects itself from maniacs. Why does she not leave? 

 A few months later, the movie was further regaled at the Oscars. Jessica Chastain won Best Actress. The real and the fictive white women had prevailed, become equal to white men in their capacity to subjugate Brown men.

Women are the equal of men, period. Even India is now letting women undertake combat missions in the armed forces. Since they are just as good as men, nobody is complaining.

In Zero Dark Thirty (and the trueish story behind it), American feminism—once a movement that existed in opposition to the state,

Fuck off! White American women are patriots. So are Blacks and Hispanics and the vast majority of immigrants from Muslim nations. Rafia lives in a fantasy world where being a feminist meant being a secret ally of Osama's. 

 as a critique of its institutions and mores—was recast as one that served the state’s interests through any means imaginable. 

Did Feminists attack the twin towers because of gender inequality practiced there? No. It was Islamists who did so. They think women should not show their faces in the streets. 

This identification with state interests, and the idea of going out to conquer the world with the same mindset of subjugation and domination possessed by white men, seems to have become a warped feminist goal. 

This stupid woman does not know that non-White women are over-represented in the US Armed forces. 

Put another way, white women

and non-white women 

 wanted parity with white men at any cost, 

no. At the price of any sacrifice for the commonweal and the protection of the Nation.

including by avidly taking on the domination of Black and Brown people. 

Non-white Americans are as patriotic, if not more so, than Whites. They are over-represented in the armed forces. 

As white feminists have progressed within their societies and begun to occupy increasingly important positions, they are constructing a feminism that uses the lives of Black and Brown people as arenas in which they can prove their credentials to white men.

Rafia is trying to improve her credentials with the Taliban. Maybe she knows something we don't. Pakistan may well be the next domino to fall to extreme Islamists. 

Sadly, Rafia will still get beaten or have her throat slit if she doesn't give up her Westernized ways. OMG, she has shamelessly put her own photo- that too without hijab!- on internet! Fatwa her! Fatwa her to death!

In Rafia's defense, I should point out that she is saying Feminism is evil because it aims at gender equality. It should concentrate on being a junior partner in a Terrorist assault upon the Nation. But this is best done by staying home and cooking for jihadis. 

In her 2019 book A Woman’s Place: US Counterterrorism Since 9/11, Joana Cook writes that feminism, particularly in relation to the state, used to be focused on promoting peace and nonviolence. 

Which is done by killing or locking up murderous fanatics. Feminists may not like me, but they don't beat me up because I'm merely ugly and obnoxious. However, if I start killing people, female cops will cart me off to jail with as much alacrity as male cops. That's a good thing. 

Being a feminist used to entail a sense of sisterhood with all women, 

It still does. Osama wasn't a woman and thus couldn't be a sister. 

discouraging actions where one woman hurt the life and livelihood of other women. 

Rafia is trying to hurt the life and livelihood of other women. She says 'I only mean White women' but the fact is non-White women are over-represented in the Armed Forces.

The state was understood as propagating and institutionalizing patriarchal norms, and resisting those (rather than adopting them) was considered a feminist act.

Rafia does not seem very interested in going home and resisting patriarchal norms there. I don't blame her. Look at what happened to Malala. 

 But in America’s War on Terror, the state had subsumed the struggle for equality within itself, giving white women seeming parity with white men in the opportunity to crush Brown, Muslim men, who had become the ultimate antagonist in the white imagination.

Why? Did this have anything to do with 9/11? 

The fact is gender equality gives women parity with men in doing all sorts of jobs which involve some degree of disutility or otherwise repugnant actions. If you become a police-woman you have to slap the cuffs on people who don't want to be restrained. If you become a Doctor you may have to look at parts of my disgustingly obese body. These are not things anybody would want to do for their own enjoyment. But, such actions can save lives. Those who do these jobs win our gratitude and respect. I hope they feel good about themselves- they certainly deserve to. 

I recently had a colonoscopy. A Muslim Doctor performed it. If I alleged that the fellow had an interest in Hindu backsides and that he had joined the National Health Service to gratify the White Man's insensate desire to bugger up Hindus I would, rightly, be considered insane. Yet, is it not a fact that non-Hindus only exist so as to scheme together about ways to get access to Hindu rectums? Was the British Raj not founded upon the Viceroy's unconquerable passion for Hindu bungholes? Did not George Washington say to Benjamin Franklin, 'Dude, we gotta get rid of the Brits so as to be able to get lots of Hindu immigrants whom we can cavity search?' 

Crucially, these white women are allowed to take on the “unfeminine” characteristics of violence and warfare, which would typically threaten the dominant patriarchy they exist under, but only when they exercise this power over someone even lower than them in the white-supremacist hierarchy—that is, on Brown foreigners. 

Rafia herself has frequently been raped by butch White wimmin. Black women, however, refuse to fist her. Or perhaps this is just a fantasy of hers. 

Clearly visible in this trade-off is the kind of conditional, limited power that wealthy, 19th-century British women experienced when they ventured overseas to British colonies.

e.g Margaret Noble and Annie Beasant and Nellie Sengupta all of whom played a leading role in the Independence struggle. 

By contrast the wives of officials and missionaries etc. had no power at all. 

 In both cases, freedom is a zero-sum game, more for one group (white women) only possible as the reinforcement of less for another (non-white people). 

Yet Rafia is in America, not Pakistan. Is she a hypocrite or does she dream of being fisted by White women in uniforms? 

It is not just the notion of women being violent that is shocking and antifeminist

to a Muslim woman from a deeply patriarchal country. A Hindu woman might model herself on the Rani of Jhansi.

 but the racial dimension that is central to this assumption of greater power by white women.

Very true. White women have reintroduced slavery. 

If white American feminists of the 1960s and the Vietnam era advocated for an end to war, 

an end to the Vietnam war- sure. Every sensible person did.

the new American feminists of the newborn 21st century were all about fighting in the war alongside the boys.

Ho Chi Minh didn't attack the American homeland. Osama's goons did. Rafia may say 'well, if American women stayed at home cooking and cleaning then 600 of them would not have died on 9/11'. However, she herself has a job.

 Warfare, traditionally one of the most starkly gendered activities in human society, was opening its arms to women in even its most gruesome and violent moments, 

War has gotten a lot less gruesome- at least for Americans. It is now more about brains than cannon-fodder.

and this was seen as a great step forward for everyone. The War on Terror, at least in theory, was America’s first “feminist” war. It wasn’t just CIA analysts who were glorified, it was also female soldiers. The story of Pvt. Jessica Lynch is another example. On March 23, 2003, Lynch, a 19-year-old truck driver with a maintenance unit of the US Army, was caught in an ambush and captured by Iraqi forces. Eight other soldiers were killed, and Lynch was taken to a hospital, where, according to the Pentagon, she was mistreated by the Iraqis. The US Special Forces launched a secret mission to rescue Lynch; it was alleged that the first words she said when she was found were “I am an American soldier too.”

This was the first successful rescue of an American soldier since the Second World War. Having watched Rambo movies, I can well understand American sentiments in this respect. 

The rescue was recorded and a five-minute video was released to the media by the Pentagon. Within hours she became a media heroine, her courage was feted all over the news, she appeared on the cover of Newsweek against a giant American flag, and she was called a “female Rambo” and an “American hero.” It was much later that the heroics of Lynch began to be questioned. The BBC aired a scathing documentary that accused the US government of exaggerating the heroics of her rescue and mistreatment by the Iraqis to bolster public support for the war. Many of these allegations were later proven to be true, but the hero-making the Pentagon set out to do in the immediate aftermath of the rescue was already in play. The female American soldier as heroine in the Iraq war was the image Americans would remember. It was notable that the television film Saving Jessica Lynch, aired on NBC in 2003, told the same heroic story that had been challenged by the BBC and others. America wanted a soldier-heroine, and they got one.

Meanwhile ordinary Brits turned against the Leftists in the BBC. They are now much more circumspect. 

I also refer to the war as “feminist” because 

you are a cretin

the propagation of women’s rights was front and center as an actual goal. American women were liberated, and now they, along with male service members, would go to Afghanistan to root out the misogynist regime of the Taliban.

This stupid woman does not know that the invasion of Afghanistan occurred first. 

 America, thus, was not a cruel superpower bombing a small and hapless nation but a force for good that would actually help bring gender equality to a war-torn country. The effort to eradicate terror (read: Islamic terror, not white nationalist terror, despite the latter’s considerably larger tally of dead Americans) 

In the last 20 years, Muslims have killed some 500 Americans for every casualty attributable to 'White Nationalist' lunatics.

was one of providing schools and health clinics and even beauty parlors, assisting in legal reform and the development of domestic-violence shelters, drafting progressive constitutions. 

How wicked! American forces should have been handing out burqas and beating any woman who showed her face in the streets.

The small matter of devastating bombings

which al-Qaeda was very good at.

 that left thousands dead and more disabled, forever splintered families, and wrecked livelihoods was a necessary means to that shining feminist end. When a white American woman (such as Chastain’s Maya in Zero Dark Thirty) did something unimaginably violent or cruel, it was part of the larger noble project of helping Afghanistan or Iraq become countries that valued women just as America valued them.

Yup. That's where America fucked up. Thankfully, Biden is of the same mind as Rafia- let women in her ancestral part of the world rot. But Trump came to that conclusion even earlier. But then Obama too had given up on the Rafias of this world. 

Rafia Zakaria jelly of Malala Yousafzai

Rafia Zakaria is the author of 'Against White Feminism'. Quite naturally, she lives in a White country where Feminism has achieved much for all of the population.

She writes about Malala 

 Pakistan is in Malala’s past.

No. It is likely that Malala- like other celebrated Pakistanis with superior foreign credentials and work experience- will play a part in building a better future for Pakistan. This may have to wait till the Tehreek-e-Taliban is less powerful or changes its policies. 

The celebrity world of international renown, red carpets, and millions and millions of dollars for her Malala Fund NGO are her current reality.

If she continues to work hard- I believe she is working with Apple TV to develop content- then she will enjoy more renown and have greater achievements to her credit.  

It’s the flip side of Pakistan, a realm that is particularly attuned to the framework of her story as a young Muslim girl shot in the head by rabid and bloodthirsty Muslim men.

Who get shot by other Muslim men who are part of the Pakistani Army. True, American drones too might take some of them out.  

As the scholar Shenila Khoja-Moolji

whose work, like her subject, is shit 

has noted, the enduring and all-encompassing strength of this narrative is such that the individual, even Malala herself, is erased from it.

Except she isn't at all in contrast to our narrative of Shenila who got bitten by a radioactive spider and then took to battling super villains who, sadly, were wholly imaginary. Thus she wasn't invited to join the Avengers. 

One integral pillar of hundreds of years of colonialism,

was making money out of having colonies or, if that wasn't happening, then pretending there was some geopolitical benefit from occupying that shithole

or at least trotted out as its moral imperative,

was making money out of it or see above

was the idea of saving Muslim women from Muslim men.

Fuck off! Nobody gave a shit about Muslim women. Indeed, White men didn't give a shit about their own women. That's why Feminism started.  

In Malala, the West, now sheepish about its self-serving colonial aggressions,

The West isn't sheepish at all. It made money when money was to be made then fucked off when the place became an even shittier shithole. There may be one or two libtards who apologize for colonialism. But they also apologize for having a dick when what they should be apologizing for is having a tiny dick or, if that isn't the case, not sucking off homeless dudes, or- if they are sucking off homeless dudes- not paying those homeless dudes loads of money for gobbling their precious jizz.  

has a modern and extremely endearing testimony to point to instead.

What is Malala's testimony? It is that, if you have grit then you can survive getting shot in the head by the sort of nutters who want to shoot all us kaffirs in the head; and what's more you can graduate from Ox-fucking-ford University and sign a deal with Apple TV etc, etc.  

“This,” a time-traveling British colonial officer may as well be saying to the Western world, “this is why we stayed as long as we did.”

Fuck off! The only reason the Brits were in Malala's part of the world was to keep the Rooskies out of Afghanistan and thus India. Nobody gave a shit about brown women- or white women for that matter.  

Malala’s contradictions make her even more compelling.

There are no contradictions. She and her family stand for good, modern, Education delivered by the private sector. She got shot in the head by nutters who are against this. Then modern medical Science helped her recover and she went to School and then College and is now working with Apple. This is a narrative about how Education is a good thing. Sure, it is tough to acquire- especially if you have been shot in the head. But its worth acquiring and we are all better off when more people have it.  

At least one publication reviewing Vogue’s Malala cover noted how her headscarf, or hijab, “covers” Vogue.

P. Chidambaram's dhoti covers his delectable haunches. But Dalal St. still got a hard on when he became Finance Minister. Sadly, he took to stripping off his dhoti to reveal leopard skin budgie smugglers. I'm not saying his twerking aint arousing but India is a deeply conservative country. The thing is contrary to Hindu culture. 

In the accompanying interview, Malala delivers a little explainer as to when she wears it—“I wear it more when I am outside and in public”—as well as what the scarf is, “a cultural symbol for us Pashtuns.”

Actually, Pashtun women have a really pretty 'tsadar' though they'd also have a shawl or chador. Come to think of it, the Queen Gor' bless 'er, and other women of that class are big on head scarfs. 

Why does Malala mention the fact that she is Pashtun? Why do I mention that I'm Tamil? Sadly, the answer is that me and Malala are proud of where we're from- probably coz our Mummies and Daddies and neighboring Uncles and Aunties and so forth were really nice to us. 

Her adherence to it gives her the sort of authenticity that is comprehensible to the West.

Fuck off! Having a name like Malala instead of Maggie is enough to establish authenticity. This isn't Elizabeth Warren pretending to be Pocahontas.  

That a practicing Muslim girl proud of her Pashtun identity would have found freedom only in the West is just what the

libtards who demand we take more and more refugees from shithole countries want. By contrast the 

neoliberal white-savior-industrial complex

would just want us to drone strike the fuck out of every bunch of turbaned, bearded, blokes driving in a pickup truck with a rocket launcher or two 

ordered to justify decades of ill-considered interventions.

For the last two decades 'ill-considered' interventions have had to with fucking over those fuckers where they live before they can turn up on our shores to 9/11 out asses. Seriously, nobody gives a fuck about women- which is why Feminism exists. How come there is no Hindu Malala? There must be some backward bunch of cretins who don't want their daughters educated. But the Hindus aren't trying to kill us. So we won't spend money 'intervening'.  

If the West wishes to see Malala as the perpetual brave girl,

The World wants to see girls as brave. Why? Girls who aint brave won't have babies. Humanity will die out.  

the Pakistani religious right wants to present her as a crafty woman.

To be fair, the Tehreek e Taliban tried to ensure she'd be a draughty woman with a big hole in her head through which the wind could blow.  

Similarly savior-friendly is the single-issue solution of “girls’ education.”

Nobody wants to be the savior of poor people in shitty parts of the world. On the other hand, if nutters from there try to kill us then we want to bomb those fuckers to death. We may celebrate the recovery of a girl they shot coz that shows our Science is better than their Fanaticism.  

“If one girl with an education can change the world,” Malala has said, “imagine what 130 million can do.”

Okay, maybe she hasn't completely recovered. On the other hand, she did PPE at Oxford- i.e. has become as stupid as shit. 

Inherent in this sort of reductionism is the premise that the world’s needy inhabit a simpler world without the complexities of intertwined issues and consequences.

This worthless cretin lives in a very simple world where everybody has a savior complex towards women from her part of the world whereas the truth is nobody gives a shit about them.  

Building a girls’ school, like the one Malala once went to,

which her family built. They were educational entrepreneurs.  

thus becomes the antidote for decades of Western interventions, war, and large-scale neglect.

No it hasn't. It was briefly under British suzerainty but the Brits built nothing there. This was because no matter who or what, was the Akhond of Swat, fucking with him was so not worth it.  

The fact that girls’ education does not in fact solve everything is never mentioned.

Nor is the fact that farting doesn't solve everything mentioned each time someone toots and says 'better out than in'. Zakaria finds this very sinister. What a superb lawyer she must be! 

As Khoja-Moolji discovered

Khojas like her are now targets for Islamic militants in Karachi 

while visiting girls’ schools in rural Sindh, the Pakistani province where I was born and raised, it was not access to education that was the problem, but the quality of education and instruction.

This fool doesn't get that access to quality education matters. Access to worthless education doesn't.  

The rampant joblessness girls saw among their fathers and brothers was also a problem. Simply put, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at girls’ education is unsurprisingly not the magic wand that too many saviors would like for it to be.

But appearing to throw away money has a reputational effect which makes the game worth the candle.  

Reinforced by figures like Malala, the Western world refuses to confront the folly of simple solutions,

While this cretin thinks 'the Western World' gives a shit about peeps in shithole countries who reproduce like rabbits. 

or their error in imagining and universalizing all “girlhood” as a time of innocent curiosity and exploration.

As opposed to what? Deeply perverted curiosity and exploration? What sort of porn has this woman been watching? 

No one who drinks the Kool-Aid of magical thinking pauses to consider that this sort of girlhood is only available to the female progeny of wealthy Westerners.

Or wealthy Easterners or middle class Easterners in countries which have undergone demographic transition- at least partly coz women are getting jobs as Computer programmers or FinTech mavens.  

Malala looks beautiful, even resplendent, on the cover of British Vogue. Underneath her photo are the words “Survivor, activist, legend.”

Whereas it ought to have read 'Western stooge- in the opinion of a stupid American lawyer of Pakistani heritage.'  

There is a funerary air to this sort of commemoration on a magazine cover at the age of twenty-three.

No there isn't. British Vogue says Red is the color of energy, of revolution. 'Red is life’s intensifier, with an edge of impolite danger, like pouring petrol on a barbecue.' That's why Vogue gave Malala a strong red background.

Perhaps this is so because the old Malala, the ordinary girl blogger, did in fact die on that life-saving flight that flew her from Pakistan to the United Kingdom.

Or perhaps this cretin is brain dead.  

The Malala that survived is entombed in expectations;

This cretin is entombed in cliches. 

in the West, they can indeed be summed up by “survivor, activist, legend.”

If people expect a lot of you, it becomes easier for you to achieve a lot. This stupid woman probably thinks that when people are entombed or buried in coffins then everybody expects them to return to life and get good jobs with Apple.  

Those who are invested in a certain sort of “liberated” Muslim woman

tend to be those same women and those connected to them by ties of blood or affection

commemorated in the pulp-nonfiction rescue of books like Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel or Malala’s own I Am Malala need to believe that she is free, better off, holy—in the wildly rich neoliberal sense.

Niall Ferguson is married to the beautiful Ayaan. They have a son together. I hope sonny see's his Mum, like all Mums, is holy. Under her feet is paradise. 

This is where the story is now. The beautiful, feminist Malala staring out

She isn't staring out. Her eyes are luminous and kind.  

from the cover of Vogue is, despite all her struggles, still burdened by inordinate expectations.

No she isn't. This is because she did PPE at Oxford. It will be a miracle if she can still tie her shoelaces. On the other hand, had she studied Kung Fu at Shaolin, then we'd have inordinate expectations of her kicking to death various terrorists in scenic locations.  

Whatever was left untouched by the paranoia she elicits among Pakistanis, and the pride she generates among Westerners, has since been gulped down by celebrity.

Jealous much, Zakaria? 

A young woman who chooses not to write about winning the Nobel Prize at age seventeen in her college essay

Brits don't go in for that shite. Maybe Malala was applying to Harvard as her 'safety school'.  

because she is “embarrassed” is in too many ways living a pre-determined life,

No it isn't. She could have gone to the LSE or SOAS etc. Education enables people to rise above 'pre-determination'.  

one where Malala the icon, the celebrity, the legend, if you will, engulfs entirely any other kinds.

Kinds of what? This cretin forgot what she herself was ranting about. 

We must free Malala.

No we must free Britney. Malala can look after herself.  

As feminists, we should

pull each others' hair and scratch each others' eyes out. 

champion the Malala who is not a prisoner of her own story,

that's the real Malala, not the freak this cretin has invented 

one who breaks out, who abandons the carefully choreographed persona of an international celebrity, Nobel Prize Winner, etc., and embraces the possibility of messing up or even (imagine) being a bit irresponsible.

Malala should be more like Britney Spears.  

All of those experiences are the privilege of the actually free.

No. Anyone can mess up- even in prison- or so binge watching 'Orange is the new black' has convinced me.

Vogue is a worthy conquest, but laying claim to her own individuality would be even better.

But I already laid claim to Malala's individuality. Zakaria must get in line.  

Perhaps if she realizes this, then Malala would not be freaked out by the choices and decisions that confront her now that she has graduated from Oxford;

In other words, she won't be a young woman with an excellent educational credential who has lots of different very attractive career and other opportunities before her. 

she would be delighting in them. If she doesn’t, then the rest of us need to get together and free Malala.

By writing worthless shite.

Rafia Zakaria advocate of imbecility

Rafia Zakaria moved from Pakistan to America as a young bride. She is a lawyer and novelist. She writes in the Baffler-

The situation of black Americans today is more similar to that of the colonized Indians.

How can this be? African Americans are a small minority- about 12 per cent of the population. The Brits in India did not represent even one tenth of one percent of the population. In any case, non-violent, Trade Union and Church based, agitation by African Americans like Randolph and Dr. King had secured Civil Rights by the mid Sixties. America has had a Black President. Will India have a Muslim Prime Minister? It seems unlikelier now than every before.

The vast web of subjugations small and large directed toward black Americans insures that their labors will be ignored, their character continually besmirched, their voices silenced in service of white supremacy.

What on earth is Rafia talking about? African American Culture is hugely popular across the globe. Obama was a two term President. African Americans have the same, or lower, percentage of people with problems linked to drugs or alcohol. Crime in that community is linked only to this. But it was African American Churches- and politicians like Clinton and Biden who pandered to them- who insisted on the draconian Policing and Incarceration laws which plague America. Gandhian gobshitery will continue to stigmatize Blacks disproportionately if they engage in recreational drug use. This is what has ensured that some Black Lives stopped mattering at all. Their deaths were the Statistic that Democratic Administrations used to show they were 'tough on crime'. Of course, this did not affect Organized Crime Lords at all.

The American brand of subjugation is one of not only outright violence—from agents of the state as well as white nationalists

African Americans can deal with 'white nationalists' by themselves. They are not a timorous and cowering community. It is the licensed violence of the Police, which the majority of Blacks themselves support, and the discriminatory incarceration of non-violent Black offenders, which again the majority of Blacks support, which has led to some Black Lives continually being sacrificed on the altar of 'broken windows' policing which, in truth, is anything but.

—but also deprivation and neglect: excluding many millions of black people from access to health care, functioning educational systems, and countless other privileges that most white Americans enjoy.

But which the upwardly mobile African American too enjoys. The reason the incarceration rate for Blacks went up between 1960 and 1990, before sky rocketing because of things like Biden's 1994 Crime Bill, was because better off Black Americans distanced themselves from those with problems. Of course, this happened amongst Whites as well. But the Whites weren't claiming affirmative action on the basis of their own 'left behind' class. This is the hypocritical aspect of American politics which Black economists and jurists and sociologists have exposed. Thus Sowell and Fryer are quoted by the Right. But the Left objects to the work of Princeton Professor Omar Wasow which shows the counterproductive nature of violent protest. They can't get him fired because he is technically 'Black', but a white data scientist who linked to his tweet lost his job.

Rafia comes from Pakistan. She is educated. Yet she writes

Like the British did with native Indians, white America has historically justified its cruelties by insisting that there is something inherently immoral, inherently criminal, inherently dissolute about black people. British India believed that natives (and of course, those colonized throughout the Empire) were deficient, a perspective they substantiated by creating metrics of education, health, etc., that would ground their white superiority in “fact.”

This is crazy shit. The Brits came to India to trade. Since their ships carried the goods they bought and sold, they grew rich and thus could afford to pay Indian soldiers properly. Thus the sepoys showed up for battle in order to fight the enemy, not sneak around looking for a baggage train to loot. They didn't run away if there seemed no prospect of stealing stuff.

 The British realized they could make a profit running Indian territory. Since property and life was more secure under the Brits and because any 'pension' they granted was paid decade after decade, century after century, Noblemen took the British shilling while the mercantile castes thrived as compradors and tax-farmers.

The Brits were careful to protect the indigenous religions and laws of the Indian people. Back in Blighty you were welcome to speak of the savagery of the heathens. But if you tried to convert Indians on Indian soil and the Indian ruling class objected, then you were thrown out of the country.

African Americans have always been a small minority in America. Indians have always been a huge majority in India. The Brits had paramountcy in India because of their financial might. But they were ugly and the Indian climate was unkind to them. Nobody thought them superior in anything save efficiency and enterprise. After the Second World War left the Brits bankrupt, they negotiated a good severance-package for themselves and quietly packed their bags.

Jews in Germany did better than others in terms of education, enterprise, etc. President Hindenberg was surprised when half of all the Jews who had lost their Government jobs when Hitler became Chancellor turned out to have fought on the 'front line' during the War. Even in terms of military courage and sacrifice, the Jews were ahead, not behind. But what good did this do the German Jews? Their condition soon became worse than anything faced by victims of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Rafia ends her article thus-

Ultimately, the British were driven out of India in part by the battering they took in World War II. White America has been similarly battered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the rapid spiral into Trumpian racism and denial.

The Brits were a miniscule minority in India. Even in 1818, Warren Hastings was saying that 'the time is not distant when the only connection between India and England will be that of commerce'. Hastings could not have predicted how shite Indian intellectuals would turn out to be. Even after Independence, they would go to study worthless shite in Oxford or Cambridge. Seventy years later, the grandchildren write nonsense of Rafia's sort. This is India's revenge on Macaulay.

While many protesters have turned to King and the example of Gandhi before him, this moment has also shown that great change can come from more confrontational tactics, like the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis, where a majority of City Council members have since vowed to disband the police department and “dramatically rethink” their approach to public safety.

Devi & Fryer have a paper which shows that moral panics in the face of 'viral violence' have a perverse effect. First crime goes up as the Police 'work to rule'. Then there is a backlash and over all police brutality ratchets up. By contrast, proper mechanism design and 'Pattern or Practice' investigation resulting in consent decrees has an exemplary effect. I may add that Public Sector Unions must be cut down to size. The problem is easily fixed. The Right wants it. Only the stupidity of the 'woke' Left stands in the way. Rafia, though a lawyer, is on the wrong side of History on this one. But then she isn't really 'Black' is she? What she is doing is jumping on a bandwagon for a careerist reason, not showing 'solidarity' at all.

Either way, the moment of change is no longer a sentence that begins with when, but one that starts with now.

It may start with now but must finish with 'shut the fuck up you stupid, careerist, virtue signaling clown. Fixing the problem is easy. It makes everyone better off. Not fixing the problem, however, could make some lawyers very rich. You can take the wokeness out of the shyster but you can't take the shyster out of the woke movement.'