The world knows Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani girl shot in the head by Taliban terrorists because she advocated education rights for girls.
The world should know Medya Ormek, a 14-year-old Kurdish girl who defied Turkish bigotry and risked prison for wanting to teach in her native language.
Malala Yousafzai’s book deal has earned her family $3 million. The United Nations lionized her in the General Assembly, as did President Obama at the White House.
But very few know Medya Ormek, the Kurdish girl barely ten years old when Sadi Gegin, a Turkish prosecutor, threatened to jail her in 2009.
Her crime: she wanted to preserve Kurdish language by teaching it in her home.
Malala and Medya don’t know each other, but I wish they could appear together on the world stage, quoting Patrick Henry: “Give me liberty, or give me death.”
Like Patrick Henry, they love freedom. Both braved danger for going the extra mile for education. Malala, out of commission for a while due to her medical condition, has joined the ranks of freedom fighters again; Medya has never stopped her work to expand the boundaries of liberty.
Kurdish language is shackled to a short chain in Turkey. It is “free” if the prime minister uses it to debut a state controlled television station, as Recep Tayyip Erdogan did when he said, “Bi xer be,” which translates, “May it be auspicious.” But when a Kurdish politician, Ahmet Turk, tried to speak it in the Turkish parliament, on the International Mother Language Day no less, he was quickly halted. Leyla Zana, his colleague, was almost lynched.
No crippling language injunctions were issued for presidents Clinton and Obama when they addressed the same assembly in 1999 and 2009 respectively. English, the native language of a few thousand people in Turkey, enjoys unrestricted freedom while Kurdish, the language of 20 million Kurds under Ankara’s rule, was prohibited for much of country’s history and now is subjected to a very strict regimen.
The world should know Medya Ormek, a 14-year-old Kurdish girl who defied Turkish bigotry and risked prison for wanting to teach in her native language. 
What a bewildering juxtaposition: A Pakistani girl shot for wanting an education is trumpeted internationally—but the cruel tyranny of Turkish government threatening a Kurdish girl with jail time for the same is not even a blip on the world’s radar screen.
Worse yet, the tyrant’s boot brutally trampling on the neck of 20 million Kurds seeking freedom to speak their own language without restrictions is ignored as a mere mirage.
Taliban control in Pakistan would deny Malala an education, but not to boys. Pakistan would become “male friendly,” but will Turkey ever become “Kurdish friendly”?
I am not optimistic. What successive Turkish governments have tried to tell generations of Kurds beginning with Ataturk is no different than what Othello told Desdemona before he smothered her by way of Shakespeare:
“Be thus when thou art dead and I will kill thee
And love thee after.”
Othello didn’t live long enough to name his daughter by another wife Desdemona perhaps, but if Turks manage to destroy the culture of Kurds, the express purpose of their constitution to date, we can be certain of unrestricted love—and also the name of an armored vehicle perhaps.
Live Kurdish and “modern” Turks have never mixed well. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of Turkey, banned the Kurdish language for girls and boys. Medya, the Kurdish girl in Turkey, has been living under the shadow of a Turkish Taliban, a Big Brother if you will, all her life.
Yet, no one is bothered with what Turkey is doing to the Kurds. Ankara counts on American weapons, including drones, to perpetuate its supremacy over us. The first African-American president of the United States has remained coldly indifferent to our plight. Instead of telling his Turkish counterpart to doubt his racism or better yet to discredit it, he told Newsweek he shares a “friendship and the bond of trust” with him.
Emboldened, the Turks are spawning bigotry internationally. While the world’s attention is focused on the Taliban destroyed girls’ schools, at least when Malala was in the United States, Turkey has been quietly backing Al Qaeda inside Syria—urging them to continue Turkey’s racist war against Rojava Kurds.
In Amed (Diyarbakir), where Medya Ormek resides, the case against her hasn’t been dismissed but suspended. But not till her mother and father were hauled to the prosecutor’s office and questioned for the “motives” of their daughter.
