Pakistan opposition leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated Thursday in a suicide attack that also killed at least 20 others at a campaign rally, aides said.
She was shot in the neck and chest by the attacker, who then blew himself up, said Rehman Malik, Bhutto’s security adviser.

“The surgeons confirmed that she has been martyred,” Bhutto’s lawyer Babar Awan said.
This comment reflects the difference in attitudes between our two cultures.

In ours she would have been murdered or assassinated, in theirs she was martyred. To her enemies the assassin is the martyr.

I will never understand, much less respect a culture in which mass murder is considered to be a legitimate part of the political process. Yet in a large percentage of the Muslim world it seems to be an accepted practice.

On the other hand, I suppose that any time you take a stand against a violent opponent, you must be willing to die for your cause. Therefore the term martyr may well be appropriate even if it sounds odd to my ear.

It sounds odd to say this but, at least in this case the killing makes a certain amount of sense, because it was not generic. Instead it was aimed at a specific political target.

President Pervez Musharraf will always have violence at his finger tips even if it’s not controllable. He deals with the frontier by letting the local warlords run things and by not pursing the people who use terror as an everyday tool.
He is a dictator who rules not by law but by force of arms. He regime is corrupt, his army and local police are either afraid of, or collaborating with, known terrorists.

In the well demonstrated brilliance of the current administration. The US sends him more and more money. Based on skewed political beliefs, unkept promises and outright lies.

I don’t know why any of this bothers me. We have our own corrupt administration to deal with. One that backs some of the world’s worst dictators and uses high volume terrorism to force the change of any regime they don’t approve of.