Here’s an on-target column by Australian Pamela Bone on the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the misogynistic Dark Ages mentality that drives Islamist violence: Assassinated because she was a woman.

ARE women across the world mourning Benazir Bhutto? They should be. Not because she was a saint; she wasn’t. She was at least a beneficiary of the billions stolen by her husband from the people of Pakistan. Nor did she do anything much for Pakistani women during her two periods of leadership, declining even to try to repeal the infamous Hudood laws whereby rape victims can be punished for adultery.

She should be mourned not because of what she was but because of what she symbolised. Her death was a political assassination, not an honour killing, as some have said.

Nevertheless it was a reminder of what we face. Bhutto was murdered because to her enemies she was Westernised, a traitor to her culture and an American stooge. She was murdered because she had vowed to bring secularism and democracy to Pakistan. She was murdered because she was all these things, and a woman.

“I know I am a symbol of what the so-called jihadists, Taliban and al-Qa’ida, most fear,” she wrote in her autobiography, Daughter of the East. “I am a female political leader fighting to bring modernity, communication, education and technology to Pakistan.”

Yes, fear is the right word. The fear of women, of women’s freedom, and most of all, of women’s sexuality, runs through Islamism. It is a large part of Islamist hatred of the West. “The issue of women is not marginal,” writes the Dutch scholar Ian Buruma. “It lies at the heart of Islamic occidentalism (anti-Westernism).”

It is the “deep, ignored issue”, writes Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism. Why, I wonder, is it mainly men who are making these points?