Now I think its sad and terrible that she passed in no way am I unsympathetic to her, her family, friends and even her supporters. I will say that Bhutto committed some shaky acts in the past which not only harmed the country of Pakistan itself but harmed numerous of poor/lower class people especially women and children with her embezzlement, etc.It seems to me that many are painting her as the angelic figure dont get me wrong I have respect for anyone who presues politics HOWEVER lets nots pretend that she did nothing wrong. I think many are looking at this as a Black-n-White issue when its clearly not. I don’t know if Musharraf had anything to do with this or not. Only the Lord knows but Bhutto was facing enemies and oppositions from all sides. If anyone bothered to do some real research on her as well as her family they would see that her family has a history of what would be considered “bad” politics.

Likewise making statements of “why do we support them” or “why are we funding them” is clearly ignorant. And I’m trying to figure out who the “them” is.Sometimes I wonder especially as a woman of color. My rant here is that before people jump on some type of political bandwagon do your homework, do some research. Its truly amazing how much ignorance is floating around out here.

@ABW,
I don’t know if you weigh good or bad. That’s like asking me to forgive a rapist who raped me because after serving time he decides to establish rape support groups/foundations and took measurements to help women in need. The fact still remains that he was a rapist. It is unfortunate at times that no matter how much good you do your bad deeds will always out weigh the good.

I sincerely hope that Bhutto killer(s) are found and prosecuted thoroughly in the court of law and that Pakistan overcomes its internal and external turmoil. This is just one notch on a grand scale of many problems.

Pakistan and Afghanistan has been a hot bed of trouble for a really long time. We, liberally minded people, didn’t really think about them until after 9/11. Truth be told, we should all be ashamed. We did nothing to help the women of Afghanistan when they were being forced out of school and work and into burkhas. We said nothing when they were forced to beg on the street if they had no man “to take care of them” and openly beaten by any male passerby. We said nothing when they were being publicly executed. The women of Pakistan were screaming for years that the Taliban was coming over the border and that they feared they were going to try to take over the government of Pakistan. Again, the west said, and did, nothing.

Pakistan, because of their issues with India and their possession of nuclear technology (and most importantly, the possession of delivery systems for that nuclear technology) make them that “hot bed of trouble”. As A. Q. Khan sits peacefully somewhere untouched by any form of justice after selling nuclear information to anyone who would pay, one has to wonder ,WTF is going on in Pakistan?

Who Killed Daniel Pearl? by Bernard-Henri Levy suggests that the investigative reporter Daniel Pearl was killed not because he was Jewish and American as reported by the media, but because he stumbled onto the real story of Pakistan: the story that al-Qaida and the Pakistani government are linked. Is it true? Does our government know about it? Why are we funding Musharraf? What would it mean if a wild card like Bhutto became the leader of that government? These are the questions we should be asking. The issue of Bhutto being a woman is far down the list of reasons why she is dead.

There’s a big difference between recognizing the power of a symbol, and admiring it. I can respect the impact of a powerful evil person on history without respecting that person, or condoning their actions.

That said, yes, there’s a limit to how far my respect goes, and there does come a point past which I decide someone is too evil to respect even on that basic level. I’m not sure I put Bhutto in that camp yet; I honestly don’t know enough to judge.

I can say this, though — no matter how evil a person is, I don’t believe they deserve to be blown to smithereens. No human being deserves that. Then again, I’m anti-death-penalty, so that kind of goes with the territory.

::snickers at the presidency blogpost:: I wish her luck!

Nojojo, I think we’re going to have to just agree to disagree on some level. While I agree that Bhutto’s presence as a (light) Brown/3rd World/Muslim woman leader has something inspiring in it (esp. to me as a Muslim), it’s a slippery slope we’re talking. Does EVERY example of women (or POCs) in power deserve our respect? No. Not if they are doing evil things for evil governments. Leni Riefenstahl, a woman, was a prominent figure in the Nazi party. Is that admirable?

Condoleeza Rice is an orchestrator of mass murder. Straight up. So was Madeline Albright before her. And Colin Powell. They’ve got their token A-rabs and Moo-zlims too (Spencer Abraham and Zalmay Khalizad). These men aren’t inspiratinos to me — they’re traitors who help white men put a ‘multicultural’ face on the murder of brown children and tthe pillaging of brown peoples’ land. If someone Khalizad b/c he’s a Muslim, or Condoleeza because she’s a woman or because she’s black it would make the assasin a vile racist/misogynyst. It would say depressing things about our world. But it would NOT suddenly transform a war criminal into a hero.

Finally, on a lighter note on this front, my friend’s awesome 10-yr-old daughter is making a ‘bid’ for the presidency of Lebabnon:

http://ibnbintjbeil.blogspot.com/2007/11/for-lebanons-presidency.html

I disagree with Irshad Manji more often than I agree with her. She uses silly and inaccurate terms like ‘feudal fanatics’. She’s not precisely a neo-con, though. I did offer a (mild) disclaimer about the tunnel vision of her piece.

That said, the piece itself addresses adroitly the issue of dewy-eyed Western liberal sadness over this incident. And it subtly raises the point that a dewy-eyed response to this crisis is itself patronizing. The notion that the current situation in Pakistan can be understood via a contextless emotive response that ignores the pain Bhutto caused (or reduces it to ’she wasn’t perfect’) simply because that pain is inconvenient for western liberals’ narrative, is a dangerously, imperially obnoxious one. Manji hinted at that in a way other analyses haven’t.

But (do I really need to say this? As a Muslim man, probably…) NO ONE SAID ANYONE ‘DESERVED TO BE MURDERED. This sort of incident is always tragic. But I’m tired of people who just started studying the country a week ago claim this incident is so much more tragic than the dozen or so other political meltdowns and assasinations in the developing and Islamic worlds. Especially when that claim is based in ignorance.

One instance: It’s fine to admire Bhutto for being a female Muslim leader. I admired this about her tenure myself. But when Western commentators claim “she’s the first Muslim woman leader”, it becomes clear that those commentators they don’t know what they’re talking about:

http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/Muslim_Leaders.htm
http://www.kabobfest.com/2007/12/how-many-muslim-women-leaders-can-you.html

You’ve got a good point again; it’s impossible to take any political figure’s death without many, many grains of salt. Especially when they’re controversial figures who may or may not have done Very Bad Things.

That said, I don’t agree with your suggestion that this is basically Just Another Political Assassination, and unimportant beyond that.

Bhutto is a woman — one of the few female political leaders in the world in recorded human history. That’s an achievement most nations, including the US, haven’t managed to complete. This is important.

Not only that, she’s been the leader of a Muslim state during a time of increasing misogynistic fundamentalism in the region. This is important too.

And she was democratically elected (granted, depends on your def of democratic, and whether you think Jeb Bush was Up To No Good in 2000…) in a time of increasing authoritarianism worldwide.

All this stuff is important, never mind the politics. I’m not trying to take Bhutto’s failures or crimes out of context… but neither can we ignore what she represents.

For me, a non-Muslim black girl living halfway around the world, Bhutto is a motivator simply by virtue of her existence. Lord knows what she’d think of me; I doubt I’d've ever been able to swim in her socioeconomic circles. Plus I get the sense that Pakistan has some color-complex issues of its own in certain respects. But she’s proven that it’s possible to be a woman and gain/keep/employ real political power; and that it’s possible to do so in spite of religious forces that are trying to force women back into a very small powerless box. Let’s face it — American women could really use some role models and motivators on these very issues right now.

And it matters — to me, at least — that she’s brown. (Granted, not very, but every speck of melanin helps! =P) Because not only am I bombarded every day with messages telling me that I’m not emotionally stable, or not able to wield power, or whatever, because I’m female; I get even worse messages because I’m black. I’m genetically inferior. I’m stupid. The people who believe this crap tend to believe in a color-based “pyramid of superiority” in which pale blond people are on top and really brown people — like me — are at the very bottom. In between is a gradient of increasing brownness. Everything below the palest pinnacle of the pyramid is dirt to these people, but they love to pull the divide-and-conquer trick and imply that as a brown person I shouldn’t root for the slightly-less-browns who manage to succeed. I refuse to play that game. Brown is brown, and when any of us succeed, the pyramid crumbles a little more.

So let’s be blunt here. Bhutto was no saint; everyone acknowledges that. But the world needed her — if only to prove that brown female political leaders can be cunning daughters-of-bastards just like the rest of ‘em.

(And yes, I’d be equally angry if somebody offed Condoleeza, for the same reason… and I fucking hate her.)

Well said all around. Thugh I quoted you, my intent wasn’t really to pick on your comments specifically — I know from reading your posts that you are more a nuanced and better informed commentator than most.

I think I’m just tired of seeing the knee-jerk Western (and esp. western liberal) reaction that assumes this is so much deeper a tragedy than your average political assasination.

It’s not.

Bhutto was, in many ways, a HORRIBLE PERSON. She ran a brutally repressive regime and was often the worst of both worlds — appeaser to murderous neocolonialism and dumbfuck ‘jihadism’ both. The fact that Musharraf is a shade sleazier and is more explicitly anti-democratic doesn’t make Bhutto some kind of noble martyr.

The thing is, unlike you, too many of the bloggers that are caterwauling about the assasination won’t mention any of this b/c they clearly KNOW NEXT TO NOTHING ABOUT PAKISTAN. I am SO sick of people thinking that they can asses such complex situations at a glance and then describe them with a glib, ludicrously uninformed word or two about tragedy, women’s rights, and the inevitable meltdown that will follow.

There’s a pretty decent op-ed on this by a Muslim feminist writer at cnn of all places. It focuses more on Bhutto’s appeasement of fundamentalists than on her oppressive policies or her function as borderline-western-puppet:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/12/29/pakistan.commentary/index.html?iref=newssearch