Benazir Bhutto, RIP

Benazir Bhutto, the first woman to be prime minister of an Islamic country, was murdered in cold blood today by a suicide bomber in Rawalpindi. The NYT has a decent, covers-the-bases obituary here. Whilst, you can find the details of her murder here. Via Gateway Pundit, we have a claim of responsibility coming from Al-Qaeda, but I'm not quite so sure it's to be trusted.

A spokesperson for the al-Qaeda terrorist network has claimed responsibility for the death on Thursday of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.

“We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahadeen,” Al-Qaeda’s commander and main spokesperson Mustafa Abu Al-Yazid told Adnkronos International (AKI) in a phone call from an unknown location, speaking in faltering English. Al-Yazid is the main al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan.{...}

Whether that's actually true or not, I don't know, but suicide bombing is definitely Al-Qaeda's m.o., so I wouldn't be surprised if they're responsible. As much as Bhutto complained about the security Musharraf's administration offered---and the resulting conspiracy theories that abound regarding the attack on her procession back in October---I highly doubt he had anything to do with it.

Neither do I have any clue about what her assassination means for the future of Pakistan. I'm not going to pretend to, either, because, in all honesty, Pakistani politics is always a crapshoot, and I'm of the general opinion that anyone who claims to be the soothsayer of the moment in regards to Pakistani politics is full of it. They don't know what will happen. They can only guess. And they'll most likely be wrong when it all shakes out.

The only commentary I'm going to offer in regards to Bhutto's heinous assassination is that I find it curious that while it's been much heralded that she was the most powerful woman in Pakistani politics, and in Islamic politics in general, it hasn't been mentioned at all that, perhaps, her gender might have had something to do with why she was murdered. There hasn't been one ounce of speculation that I can see in any of the articles I scanned on Google News, that the fact that she was a woman put her at greater risk from Islamic nutjobs. Why, even in the Al-Qaeda claim of responsibility, the only reasoning the Al-Qaeda commander offered was that she was an ally of the United States and had promised to help defeat terrorism.

I don't know whether this is a MSM whitewash job, to avoid the reality of the situation, as they do so spectacularly most of the time, or if, really and truly, her gender had nothing to do with it. That she was simply murdered for who she was, what she represented and what she stood for. If that's the case, well, isn't it rather extraordinary that Islamic nutjobs---who feel they have to be protected from women, lest they be tempted toward sin, and subsequently subjugate them every day of the week, and twice on Fridays, all over the globe---inadvertently achieved a measure of Western-style gender equality and murdered Bhutto simply for her politics. They didn't murder her because she was with a man to whom she was not related. They didn't murder her because she had the gall to get behind the wheel of a car and drive herself where she needed to go. They didn't stone her because they believed she was an adulteress. They murdered her for her politics.

It doesn't make her murder any less heinous. But what's not being said is rather significant: that Bhutto was their equal and she deserved to be murdered the same way as any man with whom they disagreed.

That, at least, is something in a culture where she easily could have been murdered for not covering her hair.

Posted by Kathy at December 27, 2007 12:42 PM | TrackBack