Weaponizing Rape

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Jan 19, 2024 Palestine
Photo from Shanaz Deen Photo from Shanaz Deen

Weaponizing Rape

By : Nada Elia

As we watch with horror Israel’s escalating genocide of the Palestinian people, Palestinian feminists and our allies have also had to deal with the accusations of not caring about sexual assault and rape when the victims are Israeli. “Silence is violence, but not when it comes to Israeli rape victims,” writes Bret Stephens in the New York Times.  The conservative, staunchly pro-Israel columnist then repeats horror stories by Israeli government officials about the mass rapes that Hamas fighters allegedly took part in, when they attacked a rave and two nearby kibbutzim in southern Israel on 7 October 2023. Stephens argues that the silence around these accusations is proof of the antisemitism that Zionists claim is pervasive amongst Palestinians and our allies--a hatred of Jews so deeply engrained that even feminists cannot sympathize with rape victims when the latter are Jewish, or Israeli. Another staunch Zionist, former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, wrote an opinion piece in CNN saying the silence around the rapes of Israeli women is “deafening,” and urging readers to “denounce these rapes in every conversation, at every rally, and on signs held on every street corner.”

The accusations are harrowing. In what it claims to be a thorough investigation into the alleged crimes, the New York Times writes that “Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck—the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim—they brutalized women.” According to these Israeli government officials, who included soldiers, medical personnel, and rape counselors, women were mutilated, “shredded to pieces,” had their breasts cut off and tossed around, they were gang raped, in some cases so violently that their pelvises were pulverized. Others had their faces sliced open, yet others were beheaded. A pregnant woman had been cut open, and her unborn fetus stabbed before she was shot in the back.

Feminists know that gender violence increases in times of war, and that women and queers are its most vulnerable targets. Palestinian feminists, in particular, have long documented the gender violence we are subjected to, as we endure settler colonialism and a brutal military occupation that controls every aspect of our lives, including the domestic and reproductive spheres. We also know that coming forward with an accusation of rape frequently refreshes the trauma of that horrific moment, which is why a woman stating she has been raped is to be taken very seriously. We believe in believing the survivors. 

Not one of the rape accusations from the October 7 attack, however, came from a survivor, and there seems to be no reliable evidence to document any of the alleged crimes. Even the woman who was briefly referred to as “the woman in the black dress,” before she was identified as Gal Abdush, was not raped, according to her own sister, who posted on X about her anger at the New York Times manipulating their family’s story. The New York Times “investigation” featuring Abdush’s alleged rape concludes with a claim that Hamas fighters engaged in the systematic rape and mutilation of Israeli women, “a pattern,” rather than isolated incidents. 

According to the widely circulated media reports, there were up to three hundred suspected rapes, all the bodies were hastily buried, and not one screening was done. Even the Physicians for Human Rights-Israel report about the “Hamas mass rapes” is built exclusively from second-hand sources. In an interview with The New Yorker, the head of that organization explained: “Our position paper is based on materials that we collected from public media outlets and videos that we saw in groups on Telegram, as well as discussions with a legal adviser and a doctor who volunteers with a civil-society group that’s supporting the hostages and the families. We haven’t interviewed actual witnesses.” As Lana Tatour writes in her scathing criticism of the methodology of the PHR-Israel and Human Rights Watch reports (the latter into the Al-Ahli hospital explosion): “These reports are based on speculations rather than evidence and a flawed methodology that amounts to unethical conduct.”

Indeed, public media outlets are not “evidence.” Videos circulating on social media can be manufactured, or misappropriated, misattributed. In January 2024, almost three months after the alleged mass rapes,Haaretz wrote that “The police are having difficulty locating victims of sexual assault or witnesses to acts from the Hamas attack, and are unable to connect the existing evidence with the victims described in it.” Every attempt at correlating known victims of the attack with descriptions of the alleged crimes has failed to confirm the veracity of witness reports.

Without evidence, then, one is not wrong to assume that these accusations of systematic mass rape would be tossed alongside the equally harrowing accusations of 40 beheaded Israeli babies, and dozens of Israeli children burnt alive. These reports were promptly denied by the Israeli government itself.

And yet we remember that US President Joe Biden had appeared on national television, addressing Jewish community leaders, and saying that he had seen photographs of these beheaded babies, evidence of the “sheer evil” of Hamas fighters. Joe Biden had not seen these images. The photos do not exist, as no babies were beheaded. The Israeli government itself stated that there was absolutely no evidence of Israeli babies having been beheaded. Joe Biden was lying, to rally support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Andhe repeated this debunked claim on 12 December 2023, at a re-election campaign event in Washington DC, saying: “I saw some of the photographs when I was there—tying a mother and her daughter together on a rope and then pouring kerosene on them and then burning them, beheading infants, doing things that are just inhuman—totally, completely inhuman.”

The US president’s deceitful claim of having seen “confirmed pictures” of the alleged beheaded babies reminded many of us of then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell telling the United Nations Security Council, in February 2003, that the US had evidence of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. Powell’s emphatic speech, in which he mentioned “weapons of mass destruction” a total of seventeen times, was meant to rally global support for the US war on Iraq, which devastated that country. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources,” he said in the infamous speech. “These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” But there was no “solid intelligence,” no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction, and Powell later admitted he had lied, saying he regretted making that speech.

Biden was lying about the aftermath of October 7, and so was Yossi Landau, the director of ZAKA, who first spoke of the Israeli babies with their heads chopped off, and is now the prime witness for the rape allegations. ZAKA is a group of emergency response teams whose mission is to collect the remains of Jews killed in resistance attacks, road accidents, or other natural or human made disasters, so as to provide them a Jewish burial according to Jewish law. ZAKA is funded by the Israeli government, its volunteers are almost all ultra-Orthodox Jews, and none were at the rave. They arrived at the scene within an hour of the attack. Landau, ZAKA’s director, had gone on national and international television to report on what he had witnessed upon arrival at the scene of the Hamas attacks, and launched into a detailed description of the “babies with their heads chopped off,” and the “piles of babies burned alive,” before the Israeli government denied these crimes had actually happened.Yossi Landau was lying.

On the Need for Evidence


It is therefore important to look at what irrefutable documentation we do have, and see how persuasive it is, as well as who is making the allegations, and what ultimate political purpose they serve. Are these allegations being made to help potential survivors of rape, or are they exploiting the possible rapes, to further Israel’s genocidal agenda? Are any of the families of the rape victims (since no survivor has come forward) asking for justice, or retribution? Bret Stephens, the New York Times opinion columnist, has openly stated that he writes to serve the Israeli narrative. "Insofar as getting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I'm trying to help Israel," he told Haaretz, upon taking his post at the New York Times.  Yossi Landau’s ZAKA organization is funded by the Israeli government, which has everything to gain from dehumanizing the Palestinian people, turning them into beasts and monsters. Landau fully delivered, by stating that in his thirty-three years as a first responder, he had never seen such depraved savagery as in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks. 

Depicting one’s perceived enemy as a sexual predator is an age-old strategy to distract from, or justify, one’s own violence. This is all the more so across racial lines, where the oversexualized “predator” is viewed as violating both sexual and racial lines, rendering the alleged crime even more heinous, and necessitating a collective response from the violated community. A prime example of this is the mainstream US depiction of Black men, even children, as rapists. To cite but a few well-known examples, Emmett Till was only fourteen when he was abducted, tortured, and lynched by white men who accused him of having flirted with a white woman. The “Central Park Five,” Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, were also children, Black and Latino,  ranging in age from 14 to 16, when they were falsely convicted of the rape of a white woman, and depicted in the media as“a wolf pack,” “bloodthirsty,” “animals,” “savages,” and “human mutations.” Hillary Clinton was continuing a long legacy of white supremacist violence when she spoke of Black youth as “superpredators.”

The United States and Israel are birds of a feather: settler-colonial countries founded on genocide, with its inexorable gender violence. And from pinkwashing to purplewashing, Israel has a long record of exploiting gender issues for political purposes. As its war crimes are now broadcast around the world, it has an ever greater need to ramp up its propaganda. And as with pinkwashing and purplewashing, Israel’s exploitation of gendered violence in this instance does not stem from a genuine concern for the vulnerable communities, but rather, uses the alleged crimes to justify its own atrocities. Indeed, it is revealing that Gal Abdush’s family are more outraged at the Israeli government’s exploitation of her death, and at the media’s sensationalizing it, than they are categorical about the fact that she was, or was not, raped.

Meanwhile, we have a number of Israeli women who are recounting their ordeal in captivity,  stating that they feared being raped, and endured “psychological warfare,” yet none of them says she was raped. Other freed hostages who spoke to the press said they “met hostages” who had been abused, but again, this is not their personal experience.

As mentioned above, feminists understand that gender violence increases during strife, conflict, and war. But the weaponization of the allegations, none by a survivor, and many by witnesses who have been proven to be utterly mendacious, does not serve anyone. And we do need to examine the political context of the hitherto-unsubstantiated and mostly debunked allegations, and the purpose they serve. Specifically, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that Israel is weaponizing claims of sexual violence for propaganda purposes, to rally support for its genocide of the Palestinian people. And by publishing unsubstantiated and sensationalized reports of atrocities against Israeli women, and presenting them as facts, the media are complicit in this propaganda. This is taking place in a context of the complete erasure of sexual violence against Palestinians.

Gender-based Violence vs. Sensationalization of Rape Allegations


Since October 7, close to two million Palestinians have lost their homes and are facing catastrophic famine, rampant diseases, merciless bombardment, inclement weather, and yes, gender and reproductive violence too. Israeli soldiers arresting Palestinian men and stripping them naked is a form of gender violence, even though “gender violence” is generally understood as sexual assault, and presumed to be against women. Between 180 and 200 Palestinian women giving birth each day under genocidal conditions is a form of gender and reproductive violence. Because of the 16-year siege preceding the months-long genocidal war, the majority of these women have had no prenatal care prior to giving birth, so there is no way to tell if they have diabetes, high blood pressure, anemia, or other complicating factors. Nor is there a way to treat these conditions, if they were to be known. Newborn babies not being bathed for a month is a form of reproductive violence. And so are premature babies dying for lack of medical equipment. Considering that the genocidal assault on Gaza only accelerated since October 7, but had been going on for decades prior to that, we can attest that gender violence against the Palestinian people has been going on for decades, and utterly dismissed as non-existent, despite Palestinian feminists presenting copious evidence of it.

Did some Hamas fighters rape any Israeli women during the attack on the rave and kibbutzim on October 7, 2023? None of what I have written so far is to suggest otherwise. And yet, the question Palestinian feminists and our allies keep fielding is why we are looking away from what Zionist pundits assure us are “not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.”We are not looking away from gender-based violence, we are steering clear of the sensationalization of rape allegations for genocidal purposes. We have a long history of first-hand experience of official lies by governments intent on annihilating peoples viewed as disposable, undesirable, and we have reason to doubt the unsubstantiated claims being made today.  And we need not be derivative, nor apologetic, as we maintain that the Palestinian people’s suffering is also gender violence, because Zionism is racism, and gender violence—Israeli gender violence against the Palestinian people--is an essential aspect of racism, of settler colonialism, of genocide.
Nov 6, 2013 Lebanon
Sara Mourad By :
Sara Mourad

In the Shadow of Malala: The West’s Unsaved Others

Malala Yousafzai has made a number of headlines in the past few weeks: Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, addressing the UN on the occasion of “Malala Day” dedicated to youth education, meeting with the Obamas in the Oval Office, chatting with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, speaking at the World Bank’s “International Day of the Girl,” and receiving the honorary Canadian citizenship. In case you missed it, even The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart declared his wish to adopt her.

Many have written about Malala’s fame. Journalist Assed Baig argued that Western journalists and politicians have used Malala to appease their white man’s burden, to hide their sins in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to divert attention from the Western-caused suffering of many in the region. In a recent piece on Al-Jazeera, Murtaza Hussain compared Malala to nine-year-old Pakistani girl Nabila Rehman who came to Washington D.C. to testify before Congress about the drone attack that killed her grandmother last year. Only five out of 430 representatives came to hear Nabila’s story. For Hussain, Malala Politicians and pundits used Malala as the human face of the American-led War on Terror, on behalf of whom “the United States and its allies can say they have been unleashing such incredible bloodshed.” Nabila, on the other hand, had become, “simply another one of the millions of nameless, faceless people who have had their lives destroyed over the past decade of American wars.”

By shedding light on the suffering, past and present, of people in the Middle East, such critical interventions expose Western political propaganda’s use of Malala. But who are Malala’s others? For she has many. And they are not just those in the Middle East, but in the heart of the West itself. Certainly, Malala’s near-canonization diverts attention from the chaos and injustice of the War on Terror in the region. But what about those black, brown, and white poor bodies, in the West, that remain in Malala’s shadow?

Malala rose to international fame following a failed assassination attempt by the Taliban on 9 October, 2012. Taliban gunmen shot her in the head and neck as she was returning home on a school bus in the Swat district of Pakistan. The attack received worldwide media coverage and prompted condemnations from President Obama, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Days after the attack, Malala was flown to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for surgery and rehabilitation. Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote a Washington Post op-ed comparing Malala to Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. Angelina Jolie donated 200,000 dollars to the Malala Fund. The young girl received the Simone De Beauvoir Award (previously given to Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Foreign Policy voted her among the top one hundred global thinkers in 2012. Time magazine listed Malala among the one hundred most influential people in the world in 2013. She had also made it to the magazine’s shortlist of Person of the Year in 2012. At sixteen, Malala has already published her first autobiography, I am Malala, and has her portrait commissioned for the National Gallery in London.

As the French magazine Le Point put it, Malala had become “an enterprise,” one that is run by the world’s largest independently owned public relations firm, Edelman. The multimillion dollar firm had allegedly dispatched five employees to assist Malala and her family, pro bono, in managing the media interest in her campaign. McKinsey, the renowned American global management consulting firm, is also involved in the campaign, handling the Malala Fund for the education of girls.

Of course, Malala is a modern-day heroine, and a great model to many. She was shot by the Taliban for speaking up against their ban on girls’ education, most famously in a 2009 series of blog posts commissioned by BBC’s Urdu service website. But Malala’s message of girls’ right to education cannot but be eclipsed by her larger-than-life persona that Western states, international organizations, public figures, and public relations firms have manufactured. This essay is not about Malala, the person, as much as it is about her international circulation as an icon. It is not about Malala’s deeds, unquestionably noble, but about Western politicians and media figures’ fascination with this young girl.

The history behind Western media narratives about Muslim women’s plight is by now all too familiar. As Lila Abu Lughod has shown, in the context of the post 9/11 War on Terror, Western political projects, including the United States War on Afghanistan, justify themselves by purporting to liberate and save women. Decades earlier, Frantz Fanon wrote about France’s project to colonize Algeria by unveiling/civilizing its women. Laura Bush’s unwavering commitment to brown women attests to the tenacity of the narrative. In fact, the former First Lady explicitly framed her Washington Post op-ed, “A Girl’s Courage Challenges Us to Act,” as a follow-up to her first presidential radio address. During that address in November 2001, Laura Bush justified the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of the liberation of its women, claiming that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Bush ends her most recent op-ed with the following words: “Today, for Malala and the many girls like her, we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” Plus ça change…Eleven years after the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush is still bent on saving Muslim women. Eleven years after asking her initial question, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Abu Lughod is still trying to explain why, in fact, they do not.

Activists, artists, and intellectuals have repeatedly challenged everyone from Bush to the bare breasted women of FEMEN in their imperative to liberate Muslim women by speaking on their behalf. One recent example is thisbeautifully-executed Muslim superhero cartoon. Third world feminists have powerfully formulated these critiques for decades. But there is something peculiar about Malala that cannot be explained only by exposing the fetish of saving the brown woman. The critique must move further into the underbelly of this affective excess, to recuperate those other brown women that the “we” of Laura Bush does not want to save Otherwise, the analysis remains politically incomplete and critically lopsided, further reproducing the fixation on brown women “over there.” There is something about this sixteen-year-old amassing award after award and prize after prize that says much more about the West than it does about Malala, Pakistani girls, or the right to universal education.

This painful story “over here” is particularly poignant given the collapse of public education in the United States. The US president commends Malala on her “inspiring and passionate work on behalf of girls education in Pakistan" just as twelve-year-old Laporshia Massey died because the government did not find it necessary to pay a full-time nurse at her under-funded Philadelphia school. To be sure, no one will award Laporshia a Nobel Peace Prize. She is not Pakistani, not a Middle Eastern Muslim girl shot in the head by the Taliban. No one will send Laporshia a helicopter to fly her to a hospital. She is just a poor black girl from Philly. She suffocates quietly in her classroom. She is told “there’s no nurse, just be calm.” She is ordered to wait even as Laura Bush implores, “we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” The world that must be saved is far away over there; ours is doing just fine. In his meeting with Malala, president Obama signed a proclamation to mark Friday as the “International Day of the Girl.” The proclamation reads: "on every continent, there are girls who will go on to change the world in ways we can only imagine, if only we allow them the freedom to dream." Young girls from American public high schools are pleading with their government to build schools, not prisons. They are dreaming out loud, but who is listening?

Muslim girls’ right to education must also be brought into relief in France, which bans Muslim girls donning the headscarf—the one Malala wears—from attending public schools. Many believed that the 2004 law, which instituted a ban on “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliations in French state schools, was specifically targeting Muslim girls wearing headscarves, and through them, the country’s Muslim minority. The secular republic ostensibly banned the headscarf to safeguard France’s laïcité. But many intellectuals and public figures couched the ban in a rhetoric of gender equality whereby the secular law saves women from the tyranny of their religious communities. Lest we forget, the headscarf controversy itself dates back to 1989, as Joan Scott shows in The Politics of the Veil, when three French Muslim girls (of Moroccan origin) who refused to remove their headscarves were expelled from their Middle School in the Parisian suburb of Creil. Canada will not grant them honorary citizenship, but the King of Morocco himself will intervene to convince them to remove their headscarf when entering a classroom. But, as Scott shows, in a clear demonstration of their personal conviction, they continued to wear the hijab in the school’s hallways and courtyards. Their struggle did not go down in history as a story of Muslim girls’ fight for equal education. Nor did that of fifteen-year-old Cennet Doganay (of Turkish origin) who shaved her head to be able to attend class. Following the ban in 2004, Doganay tried to substitute a beret and a bandana for her headscarf, “but they still refused to let her into class." The BBC, who reported her story, did not ask her to blog about her experience.

There is something about Malala, and it is not the “white savior complex,” or not only that. It is the erasures that are enacted by her global circulation as an iconic brown, Muslim girl. Malala screens from view the Laporshias and Cennets in our midst. There is something about her hypervisible presence that further enacts a symbolic violence against the poor, black, and brown bodies, in our midst in Europe and the United States. These bodies are constantly erased from public, undeserving as they are of collective “white” middle-class attention and care. These bodies are ordered to enact their own self-erasure: by being quite, not blogging about injustice; by hiding their difference, not flaunting their scarves; by accommodating dominant social values, not subverting them. Would a million prizes for Malala wash away the hefty price of an American or European education?

Yes, Philadelphia may not be the Swat Valley, but one has to wonder, given the history of mass school shootings in the United States that have taken the lives of American children and teenagers. The Pakistani government, following Malala’s shooting, ratified the Right to Education Bill; the United States has yet to pass a law on gun control. Yes, the girls of Creil were not shot in the head. But the comparison is not meant to suggest similarity. The juxtaposition of these differently-situated young brown female bodies is necessary if we are to grasp the connections between the injustices they face. Mapping these connections does not equalize experiences; it reveals how education is a common discursive thread, differently-deployed, across these stories. It forces us to contemplate the terms of “girls’ right to education,” of which Malala has become the poster child. It impels us to specify the subject of these rights, and to identify those whose exclusion is masked in the process.

Exclusion is universal; it is historical and contextual. In Jim Crow America, black girls were not allowed in public (white) schools. In Taliban-dominated Swat Valley, girls are not allowed in public (boy) schools. In republican France, veiled girls are not allowed in public (secular) schools. In many places around the world, from Philadelphia to Santiago, poor girls (and boys) are not allowed public schools altogether. Schools are places where the exclusionary logics of racism, republican secularism, Islamism, and neoliberalism, as different as they may be, become manifest. Schools are the locus where such exclusions are enacted, learnt and normalized. Schools are where children become versed in the grammar of national culture. They are where “others” are taught that they are unwelcome into the fold of the nation, society, and community.

Exclusion is not a Taliban-created exception. It is all around us. And there is something about Malala, as a poster child for girls’ right to education that is meant to make us think otherwise. There is something about an internationally-endorsed, officially-supported, generously-funded, Nobel-prize nominated, and branded campaign for education, starring a brown Muslim girl, that sharply contrasts with recent student protests in Quebec, Chile,France, the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom (among other places). There is something deeply wrong when gender is deployed as the sole source of inequality that must be addressed (albeit in far-away places). There is something deeply wrong when transnational state feminism displaces class inequalities, deeply felt in the languishing state of public education, onto the body of a Taliban-shot sixteen-year-old girl. Such a displacement undermines Malala’s just cause against religiously-inflected social injustice by making it exceptional, by severing its links to global demands for equal and free education. If feminism is not to be co-opted by a neoliberal discourse, as Nancy Fraser recently argued, we must be aware of the fetishization of gender inequality that makes moot all other inequalities.

Western governments have used the figure of the victimized brown woman in the past to justify overseas action, intervention, expansion. Here, they are also using it to whitewash and legitimate the withdrawal of the state from the public domain. As if this child’s small body, stretched and overblown by awards and honors, is supposed to hide the ever-shrinking state; as if Malala’s inflated body will cast a large enough shadow over the growing pool of bodies the state has abandoned.      
Nov 6, 2013 Lebanon
Sara Mourad By :
Sara Mourad

In the Shadow of Malala: The West’s Unsaved Others

Malala Yousafzai has made a number of headlines in the past few weeks: Nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, addressing the UN on the occasion of “Malala Day” dedicated to youth education, meeting with the Obamas in the Oval Office, chatting with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, speaking at the World Bank’s “International Day of the Girl,” and receiving the honorary Canadian citizenship. In case you missed it, even The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart declared his wish to adopt her.

Many have written about Malala’s fame. Journalist Assed Baig argued that Western journalists and politicians have used Malala to appease their white man’s burden, to hide their sins in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to divert attention from the Western-caused suffering of many in the region. In a recent piece on Al-Jazeera, Murtaza Hussain compared Malala to nine-year-old Pakistani girl Nabila Rehman who came to Washington D.C. to testify before Congress about the drone attack that killed her grandmother last year. Only five out of 430 representatives came to hear Nabila’s story. For Hussain, Malala Politicians and pundits used Malala as the human face of the American-led War on Terror, on behalf of whom “the United States and its allies can say they have been unleashing such incredible bloodshed.” Nabila, on the other hand, had become, “simply another one of the millions of nameless, faceless people who have had their lives destroyed over the past decade of American wars.”

By shedding light on the suffering, past and present, of people in the Middle East, such critical interventions expose Western political propaganda’s use of Malala. But who are Malala’s others? For she has many. And they are not just those in the Middle East, but in the heart of the West itself. Certainly, Malala’s near-canonization diverts attention from the chaos and injustice of the War on Terror in the region. But what about those black, brown, and white poor bodies, in the West, that remain in Malala’s shadow?

Malala rose to international fame following a failed assassination attempt by the Taliban on 9 October, 2012. Taliban gunmen shot her in the head and neck as she was returning home on a school bus in the Swat district of Pakistan. The attack received worldwide media coverage and prompted condemnations from President Obama, US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, and British Foreign Secretary William Hague. Days after the attack, Malala was flown to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for surgery and rehabilitation. Former First Lady Laura Bush wrote a Washington Post op-ed comparing Malala to Holocaust diarist Anne Frank. Angelina Jolie donated 200,000 dollars to the Malala Fund. The young girl received the Simone De Beauvoir Award (previously given to Ayaan Hirsi Ali). Foreign Policy voted her among the top one hundred global thinkers in 2012. Time magazine listed Malala among the one hundred most influential people in the world in 2013. She had also made it to the magazine’s shortlist of Person of the Year in 2012. At sixteen, Malala has already published her first autobiography, I am Malala, and has her portrait commissioned for the National Gallery in London.

As the French magazine Le Point put it, Malala had become “an enterprise,” one that is run by the world’s largest independently owned public relations firm, Edelman. The multimillion dollar firm had allegedly dispatched five employees to assist Malala and her family, pro bono, in managing the media interest in her campaign. McKinsey, the renowned American global management consulting firm, is also involved in the campaign, handling the Malala Fund for the education of girls.

Of course, Malala is a modern-day heroine, and a great model to many. She was shot by the Taliban for speaking up against their ban on girls’ education, most famously in a 2009 series of blog posts commissioned by BBC’s Urdu service website. But Malala’s message of girls’ right to education cannot but be eclipsed by her larger-than-life persona that Western states, international organizations, public figures, and public relations firms have manufactured. This essay is not about Malala, the person, as much as it is about her international circulation as an icon. It is not about Malala’s deeds, unquestionably noble, but about Western politicians and media figures’ fascination with this young girl.

The history behind Western media narratives about Muslim women’s plight is by now all too familiar. As Lila Abu Lughod has shown, in the context of the post 9/11 War on Terror, Western political projects, including the United States War on Afghanistan, justify themselves by purporting to liberate and save women. Decades earlier, Frantz Fanon wrote about France’s project to colonize Algeria by unveiling/civilizing its women. Laura Bush’s unwavering commitment to brown women attests to the tenacity of the narrative. In fact, the former First Lady explicitly framed her Washington Post op-ed, “A Girl’s Courage Challenges Us to Act,” as a follow-up to her first presidential radio address. During that address in November 2001, Laura Bush justified the invasion of Afghanistan in the name of the liberation of its women, claiming that “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women.” Bush ends her most recent op-ed with the following words: “Today, for Malala and the many girls like her, we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” Plus ça change…Eleven years after the invasion of Afghanistan, Bush is still bent on saving Muslim women. Eleven years after asking her initial question, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Abu Lughod is still trying to explain why, in fact, they do not.

Activists, artists, and intellectuals have repeatedly challenged everyone from Bush to the bare breasted women of FEMEN in their imperative to liberate Muslim women by speaking on their behalf. One recent example is thisbeautifully-executed Muslim superhero cartoon. Third world feminists have powerfully formulated these critiques for decades. But there is something peculiar about Malala that cannot be explained only by exposing the fetish of saving the brown woman. The critique must move further into the underbelly of this affective excess, to recuperate those other brown women that the “we” of Laura Bush does not want to save Otherwise, the analysis remains politically incomplete and critically lopsided, further reproducing the fixation on brown women “over there.” There is something about this sixteen-year-old amassing award after award and prize after prize that says much more about the West than it does about Malala, Pakistani girls, or the right to universal education.

This painful story “over here” is particularly poignant given the collapse of public education in the United States. The US president commends Malala on her “inspiring and passionate work on behalf of girls education in Pakistan" just as twelve-year-old Laporshia Massey died because the government did not find it necessary to pay a full-time nurse at her under-funded Philadelphia school. To be sure, no one will award Laporshia a Nobel Peace Prize. She is not Pakistani, not a Middle Eastern Muslim girl shot in the head by the Taliban. No one will send Laporshia a helicopter to fly her to a hospital. She is just a poor black girl from Philly. She suffocates quietly in her classroom. She is told “there’s no nurse, just be calm.” She is ordered to wait even as Laura Bush implores, “we need not and cannot wait. We must improve their world.” The world that must be saved is far away over there; ours is doing just fine. In his meeting with Malala, president Obama signed a proclamation to mark Friday as the “International Day of the Girl.” The proclamation reads: "on every continent, there are girls who will go on to change the world in ways we can only imagine, if only we allow them the freedom to dream." Young girls from American public high schools are pleading with their government to build schools, not prisons. They are dreaming out loud, but who is listening?

Muslim girls’ right to education must also be brought into relief in France, which bans Muslim girls donning the headscarf—the one Malala wears—from attending public schools. Many believed that the 2004 law, which instituted a ban on “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliations in French state schools, was specifically targeting Muslim girls wearing headscarves, and through them, the country’s Muslim minority. The secular republic ostensibly banned the headscarf to safeguard France’s laïcité. But many intellectuals and public figures couched the ban in a rhetoric of gender equality whereby the secular law saves women from the tyranny of their religious communities. Lest we forget, the headscarf controversy itself dates back to 1989, as Joan Scott shows in The Politics of the Veil, when three French Muslim girls (of Moroccan origin) who refused to remove their headscarves were expelled from their Middle School in the Parisian suburb of Creil. Canada will not grant them honorary citizenship, but the King of Morocco himself will intervene to convince them to remove their headscarf when entering a classroom. But, as Scott shows, in a clear demonstration of their personal conviction, they continued to wear the hijab in the school’s hallways and courtyards. Their struggle did not go down in history as a story of Muslim girls’ fight for equal education. Nor did that of fifteen-year-old Cennet Doganay (of Turkish origin) who shaved her head to be able to attend class. Following the ban in 2004, Doganay tried to substitute a beret and a bandana for her headscarf, “but they still refused to let her into class." The BBC, who reported her story, did not ask her to blog about her experience.

There is something about Malala, and it is not the “white savior complex,” or not only that. It is the erasures that are enacted by her global circulation as an iconic brown, Muslim girl. Malala screens from view the Laporshias and Cennets in our midst. There is something about her hypervisible presence that further enacts a symbolic violence against the poor, black, and brown bodies, in our midst in Europe and the United States. These bodies are constantly erased from public, undeserving as they are of collective “white” middle-class attention and care. These bodies are ordered to enact their own self-erasure: by being quite, not blogging about injustice; by hiding their difference, not flaunting their scarves; by accommodating dominant social values, not subverting them. Would a million prizes for Malala wash away the hefty price of an American or European education?

Yes, Philadelphia may not be the Swat Valley, but one has to wonder, given the history of mass school shootings in the United States that have taken the lives of American children and teenagers. The Pakistani government, following Malala’s shooting, ratified the Right to Education Bill; the United States has yet to pass a law on gun control. Yes, the girls of Creil were not shot in the head. But the comparison is not meant to suggest similarity. The juxtaposition of these differently-situated young brown female bodies is necessary if we are to grasp the connections between the injustices they face. Mapping these connections does not equalize experiences; it reveals how education is a common discursive thread, differently-deployed, across these stories. It forces us to contemplate the terms of “girls’ right to education,” of which Malala has become the poster child. It impels us to specify the subject of these rights, and to identify those whose exclusion is masked in the process.

Exclusion is universal; it is historical and contextual. In Jim Crow America, black girls were not allowed in public (white) schools. In Taliban-dominated Swat Valley, girls are not allowed in public (boy) schools. In republican France, veiled girls are not allowed in public (secular) schools. In many places around the world, from Philadelphia to Santiago, poor girls (and boys) are not allowed public schools altogether. Schools are places where the exclusionary logics of racism, republican secularism, Islamism, and neoliberalism, as different as they may be, become manifest. Schools are the locus where such exclusions are enacted, learnt and normalized. Schools are where children become versed in the grammar of national culture. They are where “others” are taught that they are unwelcome into the fold of the nation, society, and community.

Exclusion is not a Taliban-created exception. It is all around us. And there is something about Malala, as a poster child for girls’ right to education that is meant to make us think otherwise. There is something about an internationally-endorsed, officially-supported, generously-funded, Nobel-prize nominated, and branded campaign for education, starring a brown Muslim girl, that sharply contrasts with recent student protests in Quebec, Chile,France, the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom (among other places). There is something deeply wrong when gender is deployed as the sole source of inequality that must be addressed (albeit in far-away places). There is something deeply wrong when transnational state feminism displaces class inequalities, deeply felt in the languishing state of public education, onto the body of a Taliban-shot sixteen-year-old girl. Such a displacement undermines Malala’s just cause against religiously-inflected social injustice by making it exceptional, by severing its links to global demands for equal and free education. If feminism is not to be co-opted by a neoliberal discourse, as Nancy Fraser recently argued, we must be aware of the fetishization of gender inequality that makes moot all other inequalities.

Western governments have used the figure of the victimized brown woman in the past to justify overseas action, intervention, expansion. Here, they are also using it to whitewash and legitimate the withdrawal of the state from the public domain. As if this child’s small body, stretched and overblown by awards and honors, is supposed to hide the ever-shrinking state; as if Malala’s inflated body will cast a large enough shadow over the growing pool of bodies the state has abandoned.