a death in pakistan

It would have been nice to ring in the new year on a positive note. Alas, our top story for the last week, with 226 votes and a whopping 757 comments, was “Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto Assassinated at Rally.” In the thread, Islam got a pretty thorough shellacking. But one member, quackpot, argued that Muslims had no monopoly on terrorist violence: “Of the terrorists attacks in Europe last year, about half were Muslim-related. The other half were by various separatist groups.” A similar point was made by dissent, who suggested that Bhutto’s killing was less about Islam and “more likely to be about politics and power, something I find fascinatingly absent from most of the comments of the Muslim-bashers commenting here.” Thinker, however, was having none of this: “Not all Muslims on the planet today are terrorists but almost all terrorists are Muslims.” A spate of additional Bhutto-related stories also made our Top Twenty. For starters, there was “Benazir Bhutto’s Assassination: What Killer Video Footage Reveals,” with 107 votes and 39 comments. (The latter post offered neither a link to the video footage nor any evidence for its assertions, but at least one clip of the shooting can be found here.) There was also “Giuliani speaks out about Bhutto and Military Funding,” in which the presidential contender pointed to the assassination as one more proof that the United States needs to “go on the offensive.” MisterX took Giuliani’s comments with a grain of salt: “Well, it’s a good springboard for Rudy to flash the terrorism card again.” But the ex-mayor had his supporters as well, such as libsRfunny, who insisted that “Rudy is much truer to his word than, say, Hillary Clinton or pretty much any other Democrat candidate.” And finally, “Doctors were pressured to give Govt. view of Bhutto’s Death” bagged 122 votes and 60 comments. Nobody seemed too hopeful that investigators would get to the bottom of this one.