Word: westernness
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...Partly to counter this problem, Deng Yijian, deputy director of the center, recently announced the launch of an art-education project including lectures on Western classical music. The theater has also promised to offer more affordable tickets for coming performances. "The National Grand Theater is not an exclusive club for the prestigious," says Deng, "but a public cultural infrastructure for everyone." It wasn't for everyone during opening week. But if Deng is right, "the egg" just needs more time to hatch...
Benazir Bhutto's assassination is a body blow to the troubled but strategically vital state of Pakistan. It removes from the scene a secular, liberal, pro-Western leader. It gives momentum to Pakistan's jihadis in their campaign to Talibanize the country, and it edges Pakistan closer toward Islamic revolution. Her death is also, of course, a tragedy for her family, including the three children she leaves motherless. But the horror of Bhutto's end should not blind us to her mediocre legacy, and it is misleading to depict her as any sort of martyr for freedom and democracy...
Bhutto was a notably inept administrator. During her first, 20-month premiership, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation, and during her two periods in power, she did almost nothing to help the liberal causes she espoused so enthusiastically to the Western media. Instead, it was under her watch that Pakistan's secret service, the ISI, helped arm the Taliban and facilitate its rise to power in Afghanistan. And she did nothing to rein in the agency's disastrous policy of training Islamist jihadis to do the ISI's dirty work elsewhere. As a young correspondent covering...
...Western commentators tend to see political Islam as an antiliberal and irrational form of "Islamo-fascism." Yet much of the Islamists' success in Pakistan and elsewhere comes from their ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting Westernized élites--like Benazir Bhutto. Her reputation for corruption was gold dust to these Islamic revolutionaries, just as the excesses of the Shah were to his opponents in Iran 30 years earlier. During Bhutto's government, Pakistan was declared one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and she and her husband Asif Ali Zardari were charged with jointly...
...that is impossible to police. Many Pakistanis - and some U.S. officials - believe Musharraf has been indulging in the most dangerous form of triangulation, balancing U.S. interests with Islamist sympathies to keep himself in power. "Musharraf uses the threat of the extremists to prove his utility and indispensability to the Western world," says Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, a veteran politician and former government minister...