Pharyngula

Here in Thailand, Al Jazeera had the news first. The reporter was careful to mention that the Koran preaches equality between men and women, so if the assassination were related to gender, that would be a misinterpretation of scripture.

Posted by: ngong | December 27, 2007 10:27 AM

Here in Islamabad nothing's happened as of yet, in terms of curfews, protests, etc. But In Karachi and Lahore, things are going crazy.

Before the obligatory "this is what happens under religious rule" comment pops up, it's being floated around nearly everyone here in Pakistan that this was more a military-linked action than anyone else. Even if one didn't like her - and trust me, she did quite a bit to further the influence/power of the fundamentalists - it has to be noted this is bad on so many levels.

a) the elections will most likely be cancelled or postponed, with a possible state of emergency returning.
b) an opposition leader was killed
c) She was a Bhutto, which is symbolic, especially in Sindh province.

More later.

Posted by: Adnan | December 27, 2007 10:28 AM

Cyde Weys:

Aside from the "this was terrorism and should be condemned" statement from Musharraf, the timing and also the location (considered to be near the spot where her father was executed by Zia) amongst other things are placing things at his feet, by many over here.

Posted by: Adnan | December 27, 2007 10:32 AM

The reporter was careful to mention that the Koran preaches equality between men and women

Which part was he quoting? This one?

"Men are superior to women on account of the qualities with which God has gifted the one above the other, and on account of the outlay they make from their substance for them. Virtuous women are obedient, careful, during the husband's absence, because God has of them been careful. But chide those for whose refractoriness you have cause to fear; remove them into beds apart, and scourge them: but if they are obedient to you, then seek not occasion against them: verily, God is High, Great!"

Pakistan is a mess and it's going to go down the toilet eventually. It's been swirling around for a long time - and I think our "foreign policy" of supporting a military dictator is going to come back to haunt us. Personally I squirm whenever politicians on C-span are careful to avoid admitting that Musharraf is clearly setting himself up as dictator-for-life. This could be Iran all over again.

Posted by: Marcus Ranum | December 27, 2007 10:37 AM

The cynic in me says:

How much money do we give this country daily to help them kill the opposition leader and keep the military in power?

Posted by: Brendan S | December 27, 2007 10:47 AM

Pakistan has looked like the next Iraq, Afghanistan, or Iran for a while. The whole country seemed to be held together with bubblegum and bailing wire.

Pakistan is also a nuclear power. Could we be seeing the first civil war fought with nukes?

Posted by: raven | December 27, 2007 11:00 AM

Thanks for the update, adnan, stay safe.
A few of Nawaz Sharif's supporters were killed in another incident, this really puts the whole Diebold election thing in perspective for me. Sure, our elections are sometimes shams but so far, except for Bobby Kennedy, no one has died. What a world...

Posted by: Mena | December 27, 2007 11:09 AM

Also, respect and sympathy go out to Ms Bhutto and her family. Brave.

Posted by: Scrofulum | December 27, 2007 11:20 AM

/mena/

Don't forget Paul Wellstone.

Posted by: Galbinus_Caeli | December 27, 2007 11:45 AM

What an amazing positive impact the Bush foreign policy has had on democracy in the region, in just a few short years....

Posted by: George | December 27, 2007 11:50 AM

wow, how attractive islam is!- gosh this makes me seeth with animosity toward religion in general- but anyone who says christianity today is as bad as islam is just wrong- islam has GOT TO GO!

Posted by: robotaholic | December 27, 2007 12:47 PM

robotaholic was apparently in a coma 1969-1997. He's apparently too stupid to understand the reference even if it was spelled out for him, so I won't bother.

But here's a hint, sport. Islam has about a billion adherents. It's going nowhere.

Posted by: Troy | December 27, 2007 1:01 PM

From Spain the impression is that Al Qaeda is not the executioner this time.

Adnan #4 resumes very well the situation there.

Posted by: The green frog | December 27, 2007 1:28 PM

Most victims of terror by Salafist and Shiite religious extremists are Muslims - because they belong to the wrong sect or ethnic group, or espouse political values or conduct cultural activities (e.g. teaching girls) antithetical to radical Islamist tenets. (Bombings of Shiite mosques in Pakistan, mass murder of Muslims in Darfur by Janjaweed, murders of Muslim teachers in southern Thailand, slaughter of Shia by Taliban.) That doesn't mean that there is not a religious imperative behind these attacks. Which, in that context, is also ideological. Sayyid Qutb identified supposedly apostate Muslim rulers as a hindrance to global Islam. One theological innovation of Salafist extremism, justifying terror against co-religionists, their redefinition of non-Salafis as non-Muslim.

This does not mean that all Muslim-on-Muslim conflict is primarily driven by religion; much is not. For example, Bangladesh-Pakistan in the 1970s was national. But violence by Islamists is largely religiously motivated. (To understand this, first there must be a distinction made between the larger faith of Islam and, within that, the minority religio-ideological tendency of Islamism. And some observers on both the left and the right fail to make that distinction.)

To suggest that this is not about religion is like saying the Catholic-Protestant wars of Europe were not about religion. Of course these were also about politics and nationality, and a number of other things as well.

Posted by: Colugo | December 27, 2007 1:45 PM

But violence by Islamists is largely religiously motivated.

This is obfuscating things. Violence is a method of political struggle. In other contexts we call this "war", "insurrection", etc.

The greatest violent acts of the 20th century -- eg. the firebombing of Tokyo -- had nothing to do with religion.

Sure, religious differences, due to their dogmatic and arbitrary nature, fuel the breakdown of civility, but the Islamic world has shown no lack of civility when measured against the Western, and Asian standards.

We all suck.

Posted by: Troy | December 27, 2007 3:12 PM

Good points, TinyFrog.

(We should have fire-bombed the scatological bastard who named a teddy bear "Pooh".)

Posted by: Kseniya | December 27, 2007 4:10 PM

#23: In islamic societies, religion and politics are unseparable - it's virtually two sides of the same coin. As for the religious aspect, it's pretty much the usual fight between die-hard jihadists and almost-secular-progressives. Think of it as Westboro Baptist bombing Elaine Pagels.

Posted by: forsen | December 27, 2007 5:43 PM

In a complicated political situation it is often useful to look at who gets more power from the action.

Case A: Fundamentalists did it

Bhutto has said and done things against them (Red Mosque) and she is a bad example for women in politics. We hate her so we kill her.

Case B: Musharaf did it

Bhutto has put herself against the Fundamentalists and was a direct adversary to Musharaf in the secular part of society. Killing her in a way that points to the Fundamentalists gets both of his two "enemies" out of the way. Bhutto's supporters might get more radicalized in an anti-Fundamentalist belief that Musharraf makes good (US) money supporting.

----------------

I think Musharaf has more to gain from this assasination than the Fundamentalists. But I would like to know what other people think.

PS: I am a born Atheist in a region were there have been numerous wars over religion and politics (Balkans). Please don't see things so simple (Sunnis vs Shias, Catholics vs Protestants etc) the socio-economic reasons usually weight a lot more. We are not in the Middle Ages any more (although from what I read here that is what the American media is trying to make people think there - people that will never even meet a person of another faith).

PPS: first post here I hope I didn't mess up the english language too bad.

Posted by: Gartos | December 27, 2007 7:00 PM

Every day there's a suicide bombing and the murderers think they're going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and the PKK (the Stalinist "Workers' Party of Kurdistan") had suicide bombers, too -- not to mention the kamikaze.

Belief in an afterlife is not at all required for a suicide bombing. All that's required is a belief that there is an ideology that is worth not just killing but dying for.

Here's hoping that the USA shows Pakistan and the world the proper way to do this:

* Charges of treason against public officials where there is evidence of malfeasance for the sake of a hostile power.
* Public trials with solid rules of evidence.
* The convicted executed by firing squad.

The death penalty is "the proper way to do" anything? You have a lot left to learn, young padawan.

Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | December 27, 2007 7:36 PM

Gartos # 36,
yes, Cui bono? is always worth asking. Who really had the strongest motive? Getting the right answer takes a lot of background knowledge though, and still falls short of being evidence. On application of Bayes' Theorem, I would stay out of Pakistan altogether.

Posted by: John Scanlon, FCD | December 27, 2007 9:17 PM

The US didn't firebomb Tokyo because the Japanese named a teddy bear "Jesus".

My larger point is that these people are assholes first, and their religion is an expression of that cocknozzlery. All cheap Gods are made in Man's Image, essentially.

*Christians* in that part of the world recently stoned to death a young member of their community. Not to mention the recent battles in the church in Jerusalem between Greek Orthodox and Armenians . . . broken up by the Palestinian authorities.

(if I could, not that it matters, I should clarify that I think our military's tactics in area-bombing Japan were inhumane but not necessarily inhuman, given the available and understood options at the time and place)

Posted by: Troy | December 27, 2007 9:36 PM

This is how terrorists solve thier problems, if they just would not be stupid anymore, they would be successful. She was trying to help them, can't they see the world has changed, it isn't a 1000 years ago, they can't act like this anymore. No fundementalism, and if they going to do it fine, but can't they do it with out killing people. Why would your God want you to kill, I am sure that contradicts many things in the Koran, which they probably don't even read, and translate certain things from it to benefit them and thier stupid cause.

Posted by: Redf | December 27, 2007 11:40 PM

I should add that it could also be the Rads trying to pin it on Musharref, one can rarely tell for sure in these situations.

Posted by: coathangrrr | December 28, 2007 12:37 AM

Sure, our elections are sometimes shams but so far, except for Bobby Kennedy, no one has died.

Bobby Kennedy? A minor incident of no historical importance. Ditto for the SCOTUS putting GWB into office. And killing them after they take office (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy) doesn't count.

And let's be sure not to mention Allende, Mussadegh, Lumumba, or any other foreign leaders our own government has helped assassinate or overthrow.

Posted by: truth machine | December 28, 2007 2:17 AM

Racer X: Ok then, as an atheist who was raised Muslim and is a Pakistani and a woman: coathangrrr is absolutely right as far as the political history of the country and its results are concerned. As far as who the worse offender is, is that really even a pissing contest worth getting into? No amount of killing on one 'side' makes killing on the other any more acceptable.

Posted by: Nadia | December 28, 2007 3:52 AM

Every day there's a suicide bombing and the murderers think they're going to paradise. The one billion atheists in the world need to ridicule the heaven belief, and all other supernatural stupidity.

How about ridiculing natural stupidity? Bhutto was killed by a bullet in the neck.

Posted by: truth machine | December 28, 2007 5:57 AM

Ignorant shitheads like him like to think they know what's going on, but their tiny broken minds are just rationalizing. Their exposure to the realities is, at best, second or third hand.

Nice. First you claim I'm ignorant and only have second or third hand "exposure to reality"(what am I stuck in the Matrix?). The you go on to show that you have no first hand experience with the region. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don't speak Arabic and that the extent of your knowledge of the Quran is mistranslations of 9:123.

I am certainly not arguing that there are no militant assholes in the middle east, what I'm arguing is that is our goal is to stop people from dying in the region we can be much more effective by restraining the U.S. government than by bombing civilians to get at a few bad apples.

Posted by: coathangrrr | December 28, 2007 8:22 AM

Al-Q have claimed responsibility for this, according to the BBC this morning.
An "unnamed leader" phoned an Italian news agancy and claimed the destruction of a "priceless American asset" .....

... should I say, how "convenient" ;

keeps Bush happy, Musharaf happy, and Al Qaeda happy (even if they had nothing to do with it).

Posted by: negentropyeater | December 28, 2007 8:45 AM

What evidence do you have that the various translations are all faulty? Further, how do you deal with the fact that these "mistranslations" are the ones favored by the Arabic-speaking Salafists?

Mistranslation was a bad way to put it but the fact of the matter is that there are exceedingly few groups, if any, that think the Quran impels them to go and spread Islam by force to non-Islamic areas. And generally Salafist groups endorse interpretations which mave been translated, not translations, of the Quran that are in line with their political aims. But most of all, those groups are a minuscule part of the Islamic world, even in places that the western media makes out to be packed with radical militants. So I don't "deal with" it at all, whatever that might mean. My point is that the person I responded to didn't understand what he was talking about and didn't know the region, the religion or the language and relied upon claims made by others, all of which he accused me of being guilty of.

Posted by: coathangrrr | December 28, 2007 9:22 AM

> If you really think that the Islamic world
> has been worse than the West in the last hundred
> years then you should check out the history of
> Europe. I mean, how many dead from in Europe and
> from European Ideologies in the last hundred years?

What later became Islamism was created as a tool of German imperialism and its Ottoman ally in WWI, so it was a product of European Ideology. To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European right-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected.German nihilist thinkers were influencing French monarchist and catholic ones, and those were influencing the likes of Qutb. If anything, Islamism is the by-product and the heir of Europe's bloody history.

> Shit, the death toll from Western interventions in the
> last twenty years is easily two orders of magnitude
> larger than the actions of Islamists.

Looking at the civil wars in Sudan, Algeria and Somalia alone, not to speak of the numbers of Iraqis killed by the insurgents, and Afghans killed by the Taliban, I doubt this.

Posted by: johannes | December 28, 2007 10:09 AM

As coathangrrr says, compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West over the last hundred years; nobody on the Muslim side comes close to Uncle Adolf -- and he's only one of the West's legion of non-Muslim bad boys.

For example:

Let's say you choose to count the secular Ba'athist Saddam as a full-blown Osama-style Islamofascist -- which is wrong as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle Eastern dictators we've propped up, hated and feared Osama and his Caliphate dreams -- and thus count all the people he's killed, even those killed in the course of the Iran-Iraq War (which Reagan and Cheney and Rummy encouraged, by the way, just as they turned a blind eye when Saddam was "gassing his own people", i.e. the Iraqi Kurds). Saddam's death toll, using the highest estimates known, those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the quarter-century he was in power (and there are indications that HRW inflated this figure). Meanwhile, over a million people have died in the last four years as a result of Bush's invading and occupying Iraq.

I'm actually being nice to The (Non-Islamic) West here: I'm not counting the regimes of China under (the secular Communist) Mao and Stalin's (secular Communist) Soviet Union, which together may well have offed far more people than Hitler, if you go by the highest estimates (which to be fair are also in question).

Posted by: Phoenix Woman | December 28, 2007 11:14 AM

Phoenix Woman,

coathangrrr was speaking of the actions of Islamists, not of their root causes.

If the presence of foreign troops is a catalyst for violence or not is a difficult question to answer. Western Europe was occupied by US, Canadian and British troops for decades in the post-WWII era without being particulary violent during this time, Venezuela and post-Apartheid South Africa have very high levels of violence without a foreign occupation.

Posted by: johannes | December 28, 2007 11:34 AM

"To make a clear distinction between Islamic and European left-wing thought seems to be pointless, because they were all connected."

I corrected that part for you. You see, Hitler was a leftist. Follow the link if you wish to understand the actual intellectual history behind his National Socialism. He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time. Something conveniently forgotten by the left.

Phoenix Woman your one million dead is a fabrication. The Lancet study is a joke. I also find your whole line of argument pointless. So what, the philosophy of Islam has only resulted in around 60 million deaths in India and the Armenians and the Muslim slave trade, etc. vs. the 100 million for the Communists and the 14 million of the National Socialists, or X million of the Christians.

I've read the Qur'an and I find the religion to be violent, intolerant, unproportionate, and false. Even the supposedly tolerant portions are disconcerting in their ambiguity, vagueness, and scarcity.

Posted by: Brian Macker | December 28, 2007 6:35 PM

Brian Macker: "You see, Hitler was a leftist. Follow the link if you wish to understand the actual intellectual history behind his National Socialism. He pretty much made the same arguments as the rest of the left at the time."

While Hitler and the Nazi elite certainly regarded themselves as socialists, they were not leftists. While the early party had a prominent left wing dominated by the Strasser brothers, much of the radically socialist policy positions and tendencies within the party were discarded by Hitler. (The larger interwar German fascist/radical nationalist scene was even more diverse, with "national bolsheviks" and volkish socialists.) In practice, Nazism was a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, but above all a plunder state rewarding supporters from robbed Jews and war booty. A stronger case can be made for the left wing nature of early Italian fascism with its Sorelian national syndicalist roots, but really only from 1919-22 (or 1915 if you want to trace it to the Milan fascio). Fascists generally claimed to be "neither right nor left" or "third positionists." In any case, I don't recommend Jon Jay Ray overly simplistic analyses of the origins and ideology of fascism; instead, I would suggest Roger Griffin, Stanley Payne, and Zeev Sternhell.

Posted by: Colugo | December 28, 2007 6:56 PM

If Bush and crew had tried to wrap up better in Afghanistan just before the Iraq II invasion, we could likely have beaten down Al-Qaeda more effectively and would be having less trouble from AQ and Taliban in Afghanistan and Waziristan in Pakistan.

Excellent point.

Sure, we would have to deal with Saddam eventually

Why? What was Saddam doing that, say, Qaddafi hadn't done earlier? What threat was Saddam to the US?

Posted by: Tulse | December 29, 2007 12:03 AM

Phoenix Woman your one million dead is a fabrication.

So is global warming according to this troll.

Posted by: truth machine | December 29, 2007 7:42 AM

> Fascism is way different than totalitarian
> Islamic philosophies and to say different is dishonest.

Coathangrrr,

this is why I said right-wing, not fascist. Integrist and reactionary thought predates true fascism, and will probably survive it.

> And the death toll from U.S. sanctions on Iraq was around 500k.

This was an UN Embargo, not an U.S. one. As not all nations in the UN - or even in the security council - are 'western' (however you define 'western' - China and Russia will probably not fit) it hardly fits the definition of 'western intervention'.
This said, a nation doesn't need to do trade with the U.S. to keep its citizens reasonably supplied with food and medicine. Cuba, Yugoslavia and South Africa have survived years of economic sanctions and embargoes without much loss of human life.

> To be fair, one of the reasons the Europeans and
> Americans have such a lead is because they have
> much more efficient weapons, so it is a lot easier
> for them, they just have to press some buttons to
> kill people while the Islamists have to do it in person.

If you want to kill people in near genocidal numbers, Kalashnikovs, IED charges, RPGs and even the right combination of Machetes and drugs defeat high-tech weapons anytime.

> You see, Hitler was a leftist.

Brian Macker,

just see what Colugo has said, I have very little to add.

> compare the death tolls of Islam versus The West
> over the last hundred years

Phoenix woman,

you are right over the last hundred years, the last twenty years are another matter.

> as Saddam, as did and do all the other Middle
> Eastern dictators we've propped up,

Pro-soviet tiersmondist dictatorships like baathist Iraq and Syria were hardly propped up by the west in the cold war years.

> Saddam's death toll, using the highest estimates known,
> those of Human Rights Watch, was 290,000 over the
> quarter-century he was in power

Hardly credible, if you remember the war with Iran, with was started by Iraq and fits the definition of muslim on muslim violence pretty well.

> Use of the term "insurgents" is a habit of the
> U.S. media; in much of the rest of the world they
> are called "the resistance" to the U.S. invasion.

truth machine,

it took the (anti)German left a long time to convince the German media to call those Iraqis who mostly kill other Iraqis "insurgents", "militias" or "irregulars" rather than "the resistance". I think the use of more neutral terms rather than one that glorifies mass killings is a progress.

Posted by: johannes | December 29, 2007 12:06 PM