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Benazir Bhutto, the woman who’s been leading Pakistani opposition and gaining notice around the world, was murdered today in Islamabad.
Witnesses said Ms. Bhutto was fired upon by a gunman at close range before the blast, and an official from her party said Ms. Bhutto was further injured by the explosion, which was apparently caused by a suicide attacker.
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Certainly we must pray for stability and sanity to prevail in such an unstable and insane situation. One wonders if the region will ever be free of violence. This is not an open invitation for “blame America” responses.
Thank you, Ivan. I’ll pray.
Oh my. This is not good. It’s not good for the people of Pakistan, for Musharraf, or for the Bush Administration. I suspect one of two things will happen:
1. Musharraf will be over-thrown, either by the people or the military.
2. He will call off the election, which are supposed to happen in two weeks.
This will insight more violence - What a tragedy -
Good point Ivan. It is so strange that Islamic violence is almost always cast as a failure of someone else. Why is that?
It’s partly cultural Xion. I’ve already seen some Pakistani’s saying that the US and the Paksitani military we support are partly to blame. And there are observers that note U.S. support for the mujhadeen and the rise of lawlessness in Pakistan’s border issues. I think folks in the region got used to blaming the colonists (read Western Europe) for their ills and have not rebounded from that experience enough to take responsibility.
Even if there is some truth to the notion that others are to blame, though, resoponsibility really has to lie with the Pakistani government and ruling classes.
What happens next? Some Pakistanis are saying that there will be civil war. Pakistan is a nuclear power. I don’t believe the world can allow it to dangerously destabilize.
From the Muslem standpoint: “Why do we keep on defending, excusing, and blaming terrorism on other nations or historical injustice? First of all, Arab culture’s normal reaction is to refuse to take responsibility and instead find someone else to blame……
Another reason for the silence is that for most Muslims, criticizing jihad, martyrdom or terrorism seems in their minds–rightly or wrongly–to be equivalent to criticizing Islam itself”
Nonie Darwish, Now They Call Me Infidelp. 199
Welcome back, Chas. Hope Greensboro was fun for you.
Nations do the same things people do, and a lot of people will blame someone else rather than look at their own conduct. CoyoteBlue and I are actually in agreement when she states that “responsibility really has to lie with the Pakistani government and ruling classes. They choose this life. They make the decisions to keep the people in the political environment they’re in.
I’d like to think that the Bhutto assassination will give the U.S. pause and not rush into Pakistan (diplomatically, militarily, etc.) too quickly.
I think many American politicians and people generally overstate America’s influence abroad. They also tend to think about foreign affairs in a zero-sum game centered around America. Much of the world goes about its business without one eye on America, even though that might be hard to admit here in the U.S.
I hope the government sits back and analyzes the situation without acting too rashly one way or another.
Keeping out of that fetid excuse of a nation might be the best thing for our country.
Any comments on the fact that Bhutto was a woman? I find it fascinating that she had so many supporters in such an anti-female culture. How did she ever get elected as the first female leader of a Muslim country back in 1988? Obviously her father and mother had great influence, but he was executed and her mother sent to a prison camp. Her brothers were also executed.
Even more enigmatic is the fact that she attended the Jesus and Mary Convent school until the age of 15 and got her higher education in the United States. What did Pakistanis think of that?
Following are a couple of excerpts from The Al Qaeda Reader. It’s generally about democracy and is taken from Ayman al Zawahiri’s The Bitter Harvest.
“Now if this ruler is a Muslim but has transgressed by becoming cruel and despotic, the Sunni madhhabs says that it is forbidden to overcome him.” …
“To summarize: It is forbidden to overthrow a tyrant, but it is a duty to overthrow an infidel”
…
“The current rulers of Muslem countries who govern without the sharia are apostate infidels” …
“These regimes that exchange the sharia of Allah are outcasts from the Muslim umma for the following reasons:” and he gives four quite lenthy reasons.
Elsewhere in the book: “Democracy is the diefication of man…and the rule of the Masses”.
This gives, to me, considerable insight into the turmoil in that region.
Andrew McCarthy, a consummate realist regarding Islamic militants, over at NRO Corner writes on the question of Who killed Benazir Bhutto The real Pakistan is his answer as follows:
..from Andrew McCarthy at NRO’s The Corner. Who killed Benazir Bhutto? The real Pakistan, he writes, a country where Osama bin Laden has at 46% approval rating. He compares the Pakistan of western fantasy, against the reality on the ground:
There is the Pakistan of our fantasy. The burgeoning democracy in whose vanguard are judges and lawyers and human rights activists using the “rule of law” as a cudgel to bring down a military junta. In the fantasy, Bhutto, an attractive, American-educated socialist whose prominent family made common cause with Soviets and whose tenures were rife with corruption, was somehow the second coming of James Madison.
The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman — indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.
The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters — warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today’s global jihad against America.
The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today’s boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.
In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if.
Thank you for that Peter — a sobering look at the realities we face with a nuclear capable Pakistan.
I’ll never forget where I was when I learned of the assassination.
That poor gal!
Anybody here, seen my old friend Benazir?
Can you tell me where she’s gone?
etc etc etc
I appreciate your sharing that from the Al-Qaeda, Chas. *sigh* And to think our President is that naive to think Islam is a peaceful faith. Methinks Robert Spencer has great insight on this violent religion, but they all need our prayers for the true salvation of Jesus. He can be read at Human Events every week.
#12 Peter Leavitt: In that real Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto’s murder is not shocking. There, it was a matter of when, not if. Sad, but true, Brother. It is evident daily we see the corruption in people’s lives who reject the love of our Creator. I have a collection of real good websites that contain info concerning Islam and how to deal with it, if it is within our duty to do so.
I reckon that the more we see of islam’s work, it somehow reminds me that Jesus may be coming back sooner than we realize. What do you folks think of this?
Kudos to Mr. Harrison Scott Key for the original post.
From the : OOOOPS, I forgot a word Dept.
From the Al-Qaeda Reader. Sorry Chas
I read Spencer in Human Events every week. I think events in the world (including, but not limited to Middle East) point to the Lord’s return. However, it isn’t for us to speculate, but as the parables in Matt. 25 say, “Be about the work.”
Chas, I too am a HE reader. HE and NR and WoW.
Benazir now faces rejection by One with even more power than the electorate of Pakistan.
The thing that irks me most about Pakistan is how all our money provided to them is not used to combat AlQaeda (which they dont seriously deem a threat). Instead they buy weapons to prepare for war against India. Pakistan has not provided a single soldier in Afghanistan.
When we allegedly had Bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains he escaped across the Afghan/Pak border due to friendly (or bribed?) Pakistani allies.
A rather unpleasant downside to multilateralism.
Pakistan is the War On Terror’s Cambodia: an allegedly neutral country with an Islamic Ho Chi Minh trail funneling men and weapons back to fight and kill US forces.
Anyone recall the “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists!” of yesteryear??
Al-Qaeda assassinated Ahmad Massoud, leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, a day before 9/11.
Now, they’ve assassinated Benazir Bhutto.
I hope this is not a precursor to another attack.
Lester, I foresee a whole buncha jobs suddenly for Blackwater in Pakistan.
A tad surprising that Benazir didnt have better security.
Can’t believe she was loopy enough to stick her head up through the sunroof!
Like Robert Kennedy she is yet another victim of Islamic terror!
Sawgunner - I forsee that not even Blackwater can protect the bigwigs in Pakistan. There’s not much a squad of former special ops bodyguards can do when a sniper or suicide bomber gets past local security forces on the take who look the other way.
A post repeated from another thread, FYI:
I read a Mona Charen article today which said:
“The next to last assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto came on Dec. 13, when a man in the crowd got the former prime minister’s attention. He was holding a 1-year-old baby — Bhutto said later she thought it was a girl — and tried to hand the child across the sea of bodies. Bhutto said, “He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother. I love babies. But the [streetlights] had already gone out and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.” So she turned away and ducked into her armored vehicle. Just then, the baby’s body, rigged with explosives, detonated.”
That’s what we are dealing with in the Middle East with Islamofascist jihadists.
Bhutto represented a modernizing movement within the Islamic world and thus was seen as a threat by the militant Islamists who make lethal “baby bombs.”