Lila Rose, anti-abortionist, tries to steal Malala Yousafzai's activist cred

If you ever decide to unironically compare yourself to a civil rights activist who has risked everything and (almost) lost it all while fighting for, say, a woman’s right to be educated, and your cause is as patently uncivil as preventing women from choosing what to do with their bodies, expect to get laughed at and mocked. A lot.

Especially the moreso when the person you’re comparing yourself to got shot in the head for wanting the right to intellectual autonomy, with a bullet grazing her brain and coming within millimetres of killing her, and you’ve never seen real danger in your entire goddamn life and yet you’re fighting for a cluster of cells less than a millimetre across to have more rights over a woman’s bodily autonomy than the woman herself. All because you did a guerilla video campaign for Live Action, undercutting Planned Parenthood, which is as feminist an organization as has ever gotten national traction. Slow fucking clap.

I bet she didn’t ever say “Yousafzai” because she doesn’t know how. I bet, in fact, she knows almost nothing about Malala Yousafzai or her fight, except what someone told her would make good speech fodder.

Found at Right Wing Watch.

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Lila Rose, anti-abortionist, tries to steal Malala Yousafzai's activist cred
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30 thoughts on “Lila Rose, anti-abortionist, tries to steal Malala Yousafzai's activist cred

  1. 1

    I bet she didn’t say it b/c she is not aware that Yousafzai is an integral part of Malala’s name. Adults around her couldn’t pronounce it, and just told her she was their “Malala”. She integrated it into her speech as is. While perhaps she knew that the last name was there, I bet that a large part of why she saw it as optional is because of the example of the adults around her.

    I hope someday she learns to think for truth and not for praise.

  2. 6

    Re Raging Bee @ #3

    Bloody amazing how such despicable people seem to glom onto the best of us.

    Sam Harris, who needs no defense from me, could well quote Harry Truman when he opines on Islam. “I told the truth and the Fairfax floozie thought it was hell”.

    Richard Dawkins was heavily criticized a few weeks ago when he pointed out that the Muslim World has produced fewer Nobel Prize recipients in the sciences then one university in Britain. Subsequently, I was criticized when I went him one better and pointed out that the Muslim World has produced fewer Nobel Prize recipients in the sciences then one high school in New York City. In the 113 years since they have been awarded, 2 Muslims have received Nobel Prizes in the sciences and both of them did their productive work in the West. Just this year, 6 Jews were the recipients of the 2013 awards, 3 times as many as the number of Muslims who have received the award in 113 years. I think that shows that there is something wrong with Islam, just as there is something wrong with born again Christianity and ultra Orthodox Judaism. which, AFAIK, have produced exactly 0 Nobel Prize winners (I have to say that my PhD thesis adviser, who is a born again Christian, was one of the finalists for this year’s Nobel Prize in physics).

  3. 7

    I think that shows that there is something wrong with Islam, just as there is something wrong with born again Christianity and ultra Orthodox Judaism.

    Is that why Rosalind Franklin got fucked over? Because she was a Muslim?

    Or is it possible that there’s a shitload of confounding variables that need to be considered before one runs off drawing conclusions based on the demographics of Nobel Prize winners?

    Frankly, anyone forwarding such an abject slap in the face to science as a plausible metric should be stripped of whatever advanced degrees they obviously bribed or fucked their way into earning.

  4. 8

    Sam Harris, who needs no defense from me…

    That’s good for him, because you couldn’t actually defend him, and had to blither about a totally different subject instead. The fact is, Malala publicly identified herself as Muslim, whether we like it or not; and she spoke for Muslims who wanted a decent education, free of ignorant extremist violence; so it was pure fucking sleaze for Harris to make her a poster-girl for his stupid, uncaring anti-Muslim crusade.

  5. 9

    Furthermore, when Harris says, as he has said before, that the people who tried to kill Malala were the true representatives of Islam, he is explicitly taking the side of her assailants. So his attempt to use her for his stupid axe-grinding bigoted cause is pure fucking sleaze squared.

  6. 10

    Re Anthony K @ #7

    Obviously, Anthony is ignorant of the rules for awarding Nobel Prizes. The rules state explicitly that they cannot be awarded to persons who are deceased. Rosalind Franklin was dead by the time that Watson, Wilkins, and Crick were awarded the prize for discovering the structure of DNA.

    A better example would be Lise Meitner who was very much alive when Otto Hahn was awarded the prize in physics in 1944. By all rights she should have shared it with him.

  7. 11

    Re Raging Bee @ #8 & #9

    Gee, considering the ferociousness of the Fairfax flubber’s attack on Sam Harris, one would think that Harris is a Libertarian.

  8. 12

    The rules state explicitly that they cannot be awarded to persons who are deceased.

    My mistake.

    Yes, Lise Meitner is a much better example. Thank you.

  9. 13

    Re Anthony K @ #12

    In fairness, even if Franklin had still been alive, she probably would not have shared the prize as it would have required either Watson, Wilkins, or Crick to be left out as the rules state that no more then 3 may be named for any one prize. Of course, the committee could have awarded her the prize in chemistry or physics at the same time as they awarded the prize in physiology/medicine to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, but that probably would have been a long shot, even though it was not technically against the rules.

  10. 14

    Re Anthony K @ #12

    Actually, IMHO, the failure to name Chien-Shiung Wu along with Lee and Yang for discovery of parity violation in weak interactions was, perhaps, even more egregious then Meitner.

  11. 15

    Using the number of nobel prize winners to generalize about a population is basically bad statistics, because it is a relatively small sample size. There many more scientists that probably deserve a nobel prize but are not lucky enough to get it.

  12. 17

    OK, name 10 Muslim scientists who should have received a Nobel Prize in one of the sciences but were overlooked.

    How about no, and you go and take a basic stats course, so that you can understand why that’s about the stupidest retort possible to having it pointed out why your data cannot be used to draw any sort of reasonable conclusions.

  13. 18

    Rose is also ignoring (read: rewriting) and important fact.

    It’s not the anti-abortionists who are under threat of being shot or their buildings bombed, as Malala Yousafzai has faced and will face on her return home. It’s the abortion doctors and their clinics who are under attack from the anti-abortion extremists (re: Kopp, Rudolph, Roeder, et al).

  14. 19

    Addendum:

    If anyone deserves comparison with Yousafzai, it’s someone like Benino Aquino, someone who has the courage to go back home knowing there is a target on their back.

    I fear for her life, but she’s doing it for others like herself, choosing not to run away to protect her own life. No one would begrudge her asking for refuge in another country. Going back takes even more guts and spine than speaking out as she has done.

  15. 21

    Re Anthony K @ #17

    OK, let’s talk statistics. There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world and 15 million Jews. Two Muslims have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences. I would be willing to bet that a very conservative estimate of the number of Jews who have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences is 50 (I can name 20 in physics alone off the top of my head, including 3 who I have taken courses from: Emilio Segre, Steven Weinberg, and Julian Schwinger). Now the implication in Karmacat’s comment is that there are a number of Muslims who should have been awarded the prize but, for whatever reason did not. So far I note that he/she has failed to name as many as 10.

    Re Raging Bee @ #20

    Actually, I look forward to a Brayton post involving Libertarians, knowing that the Fairfax flipper will be along with a nasty comment. He’s entirely predictable in that regard.

  16. 22

    Nobel prizes actually track staggeringly well with the wealth of the country the recipients did their work in — the more wealthy, the more likely the country is to have a decent scientific research prioritization. The Middle East is, honestly, not all that wealthy, save for Dubai. And even that isn’t all that interested in science at the moment, as far as I can see, so much as splashing around money trying to make it look like a shining jewel city to compete with the West.

  17. 23

    When the Arabic world was the scientific nexus for civilization a thousand years ago, they gave us a lot of Nobel-worthy scientific breakthroughs, none of which happened when the Nobel program existed. Ultimately, the Nobel program is a product of its time. It is a selection of the best science coming from the wealthiest nations. That Europe is starting to figure into it again, and Japan, is also evocative of that fact.

    This whole argument feels to me like the argument about IQ — where it’s a product of how many Western conventions you know, and thus a non-Western audience (like African bushmen) would be rated very low because they aren’t Western, and thus treated as though they’re unintelligent by racists who don’t realize IQ only measures IQ, not intelligence.

  18. 24

    OK, let’s talk statistics.

    Did I ask you to talk statistics? No, I told you to take a fucking class in statistics because you’re a fucking know-nothing about statistics. If you knew anything about statistics, you wouldn’t have rattled off some data and called those statistics. You’d have recognised that there’s a lot more to drawing conclusions than assuming correlation between two variables. So don’t “talk statistics”. It just cements the fact that you’re an idiot.

    Now, why don’t you take my advice and learn something about experimental design, controls, and confounding variables before you open your fetid piehole again, you goddamn dipshit.

  19. 25

    Nobel prizes actually track staggeringly well with the wealth of the country the recipients did their work in — the more wealthy, the more likely the country is to have a decent scientific research prioritization.

    They even more strongly track with having the appearance of a owning a dick. Like, to the tune of ~20:1 men over women. Only a fool who misunderstands science would assume unadjusted crude rates from such a source could be used to infer anything about the base populations. Like, one would almost have to be purposely and maliciously ignorant of basic statistics and inference to not immediate see this.

  20. 26

    Yeah, no kiddin’, right? Likely the same reason Harris thought racial profiling at airports was a good thing — he didn’t grok that the statistics for terrorism don’t track at all with what he was suggesting.

  21. 27

    @colnago80: And the presupposition that number of Nobel Prizes in any way functions as an accurate metric of something other than number of Nobel Prizes is supported by what, exactly? Are there no bounds to what people will try to essentialize?

  22. 29

    @colnago80 reminds me of a certain person whose name starts with K and who has shown himself to be terribly impressed with the alumna of his high school (in New York), especially himself. I wonder……

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