Malalai Joya a 'worthy choice' for Nobel

Malalai Joya, fittingly described by the BBC as the bravest woman in Afghanistan, begins the Canadian leg of her speaking tour this week in Vancouver. She has been in the US the past few weeks, where her autobiography impressed the heck out of America's leading intellectual.

Noam Chomsky writes, a propos of Obama's Nobel win:

The Nobel Peace Prize committee might well have made truly worthy choices, prominent among them the remarkable Afghan activist Malalai Joya.

This brave woman survived the Russians, and then the radical Islamists whose brutality was so extreme that the population welcomed the Taliban. Joya has withstood the Taliban and now the return of the warlords under the Karzai government.

Throughout, Joya worked effectively for human rights, particularly for women; she was elected to parliament and then expelled when she continued to denounce warlord atrocities. She now lives underground under heavy protection, but she continues the struggle, in word and deed. By such actions, repeated everywhere as best we can, the prospects for peace edge closer to hopes.

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