Why did the terrorists want so badly to eliminate Benazir Bhutto? Because, according to one of France’s leading writers and philosophers, Bernard Henry Levy, her very existence posed a threat to everything they stand for – including the proper place of a woman.
“It is a woman, first of all, that they have killed. A beautiful woman. … the exact opposite of those shamed women, hidden and damned creatures of Satan, who are the only women tolerated by those apostles of a world without women … Behind the remains of this great lady, there should be the greatest possible number of heads of State, making her funeral a silent demonstration of the world’s adherence to the values of democracy and peace.”
By Bernard Henry Lévy*
Translated By James Jacobson
December 28, 2007
France – Liberation – Original Article (English)
It is a woman, first of all, that they have killed.
A beautiful woman.
A visible woman – an even conspicuously, dramatically visible woman. A woman for whom it was a point of honor not only to hold meetings in one of the most dangerous countries in the world, but to do it with her face uncovered – the exact opposite of those shamed women, hidden and damned creatures of Satan, who are the only women tolerated by those apostles of a world without women.
With Daniel Pearl, they killed a Jew.
With commander Massoud [of the Afghan Northern Alliance ] , they killed a moderate Muslim, a literate man and a free spirit. With Salman Rushdie , they tried for years to kill a man who dared to say that being human sometimes means to choose one’s destiny.
Well with BB, Benazir Bhutto, they killed a bit of all of this. But they also killed a woman, this woman, who was an intolerable provocation. It was the radiance of her unveiled face, nude, defenseless and magnificently eloquent – they killed her, because it was this woman, because it was her face – at once powerless and with a force that can’t be replicated, because she lived her destiny as a woman who refused the looming curse against the human face of all women, according to these new fascists who call themselves jihadists; thus they killed the one who was the very embodiment of the hope, spirit and will of democracy, not only in Pakistan, but in the lands of Islam in general.
Pervez Musharraf was a counterfeit adversary of al-Qaeda. He pretended to fight them while he played his double game with his occult alliances – his way of keeping his stock of terrorists under his elbow and releasing them one by one in dribs and drabs, all according to the needs of the alliance with his great and complicated American friend – he did their bidding under the table.
Benazir, if she had won, what can one say? If she had lived, simply lived, she wouldn’t have ceased saying at the risk of her own life, her very being, her very presence, that she was their resolute, absolute, irreconcilable adversary; for these people she was a threat – more than just a political one, an ontological one; she would have left them nowhere to hide. They knew this and they killed her.
I am reminded of an afternoon on December 2002 in London, when I investigated the death of Daniel Pearl – and therefore this powder keg, the rear-base for al-Qaeda, even though the forward base was already in Pakistan; Pearl was beautiful, yes; and incredibly courageous in his will to return – whatever the cost – to that country which had already uprooted Benezir’s two young brothers and her father in events redolent with the air of a Shakespearian tragedy. [All were killed under suspicious circumstances during Benazir Bhutto’s two terms as Pakistan President].
Founder and Managing Editor of Worldmeets.US