Malala Yousafzai wows Stephen Colbert with magic trick

KPLU presents an advance screening of He Named Me Malala, directed by acclaimed documentary filmmaker David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth).

On October 9, 2012, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was riding the school bus to her home in Pakistan’s Swat Valley when she was shot by a Taliban assassin who had targeted the teenager for her outspoken statements about education for girls on the internet.

Yousafzai appealed to world leaders to imagine their own children suffering the abuses meted out by the Islamic State extremists, who have sexually enslaved girls from minority groups. She was soon sent to a hospital in Birmingham, England, where she now lives, for an extended period of recovery and rehabilitation according to USA Today. She is bold, she is remarkable, she is also just an average girl who likes Brad Pitt and handsome soccer players.

The film opens with a tale explaining that she is named for an Afghani heroine who rallied retreating Pashtun fighters to fight against British invaders at the 1880 Battle of Maiwand, and was killed during the fighting. Her father did something that is rarely done in patriarchal Muslim societies. Then she followed up with a superior card trick, which shouldn’t be spoiled.

“Not much”, Colbert quipped, before Yousafzai said: “I can see I haven’t heard anything yet”.

But for all that her life has been turned upside down, when asked if she has ever been angry about what happened, she says: “Never”. It is scheduled to be released on October 2.