Further to this, Mona Charen ponders the nature of the enemy.
The next to last assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto came… when a man in the crowd got the former prime minister’s attention. He was holding a one-year-old baby – Bhutto said later she thought it was a girl – and tried to hand the child across the sea of bodies. Bhutto said, “He kept trying to hand it to people to hand to me. I’m a mother. I love babies. But the [street lights] had already gone out and I was worried about the baby getting dropped or hurt.” So she turned away and ducked into her armoured vehicle. Just then, the baby’s body, rigged with explosives, detonated.
That is the nature of the enemy. Thursday morning brought news that another bomber has succeeded in killing Bhutto. Early reports suggest that this time the terrorists relied on a suicide bomber and a gunman. Al-Qaida was quick off the mark. “We terminated the most precious American asset which vowed to defeat [the] mujahedeen,” said commander and spokesman Mustafa Abu al-Yazid in a phone interview with Adnkronos International. Whether al-Qaida really did the killing or opportunistically claimed credit is unclear. But there is no doubt that Bhutto represented a modernising movement within the Islamic world and was accordingly seen as a threat by the seventh century zealots who rig babies with explosives.
A vile ingenuity not without precedent.
It’s an absolute monstrosity. And it gives the lie to the notion that these bastards are ‘using their bodies as weapons’ (usually seen as part of a desperation/grievance narrative).
Indeed, even when they strap the bombs to themselves, they aren’t using their bodies as weapons: their real targets aren’t the random civilian passers-by. Rather, the charred, dismembered bodies of those passers-by are the weapons, used against a nation’s polity.
These acts are the product of an ideology of death.