As Malala Yousufzai recuperated from Tuesday’s militant attack, the American media intently noted the Pakistani nation’s expression of solidarity with the teenaged rights activist and it’s outrage against the terrorist attack on the “symbol of hope” for the country.
“Perhaps it was the prayers of an outraged nation, perhaps her own indomitable spirit,” began a CNN report on the 14-year-old student’s recovery after surgeons removed a bullet that had lodged in her neck following the Taliban gunfire on her.
Headlined “Pakistan Enraged over Attack on Teen Blogger,” the channel’s report said an “angry chorus of voices in social media, the street, in newspapers and over the airwaves has decried the attack as cowardly,” while also criticizing the government for being unable to stamp out militancy completely.
At the same time, reports in the US media, cited strong condemnation of the attack by top political leadership including President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf and military chief Gen Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, with all of them also pledging to fight terror.
Both the electronic and the print media outlets closely followed the Pakistani nation’s reaction to the attack on education and girls’ rights activist, who has earned nationwide respect for her stand against the Taliban.
The Washington Post, in an Islamabad-datelined dispatch, said schoolchildren throughout the nation held prayer vigils for the teenage education activist and many Pakistani political leaders and international figures expressed revulsion over the assassination attempt in the Swat Valley region.
The “mainstream Pakistanis view Yousafzai, whose advocacy of girls’ education won global recognition, as a symbol of hope in a country long beset by violence and despair,” the Post noted.
However, the report noted that the religious parties and mosque leaders were “largely silent.”
In a report, Voice of America noted that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari vowed to send the 14-year-old girl abroad, if doctors in Pakistan recommended moving her.
The Washington Post noted Prime Minister Ashraf’s emphasis on fighting off the mind-set that breeds militancy and terror.
“We have to fight the mind-set that is involved in this. We have to condemn it,” Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf told the Pakistani Senate. “Malala is like my daughter and yours, too. If that mind-set prevails, then whose daughter would be safe?”
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, here has called the shooting “barbaric” and “cowardly.”
The American media also reported Mian Iftikhar Hussein, the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa information minister’s announcement putting a bounty of $100,000 for the capture of the culprits in the attempt on Malala Yousufzai’s life.
Reporting on Army Chief Gen Kayani’s visit to the hospital treating Malala, the CNN said he delivered a simple message: “We refuse to bow before terror.”