They have killed a woman. A beautiful woman. A visible, indeed a conspicuously, spectacularly visible woman.

A woman who made a point not only of holding rallies in one of the world's most dangerous countries, but did so with her face uncovered, unveiled -- the exact opposite of the shameful, hidden women, the condemned creatures of Satan, who are the only women tolerated by these apostles of a world without women....

They killed a Jew, Daniel Pearl. They killed Ahmed Shah Massoud, the great guerilla leader against the Taliban, a moderate Muslim, a cultivated man and free spirit. They tried for years to kill a man, Salman Rushdie, who dared say that to be a man is also sometimes to choose your own destiny.

And now they have killed Benazir Bhutto -- killed her because she was a woman, because she had a woman's face, unadorned yet filled with an unswerving strength, because she was living out her destiny and refusing the curse that, according to the new fascists (the jihadists) floats over the human face of women. They killed this woman incarnation of hope, of spirit, of the will to democracy, not only in Pakistan, but in all the lands of Islam....

The best, the most beautiful way of responding would have been for Angela Merkel, George Bush, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy to have gone immediately to Pakistan for her funeral.

We should have seen, standing behind Benazir's body, as they once did behind Anwar Al-Sadat's and Itzhak Rabin's, the largest possible number of government leaders and heads of state, to make the funeral a global demonstration on behalf of the values of democracy and peace.

We would have wanted the French president to interrupt his vacation to bid farewell to this great lady, now a martyr, on her last voyage. But no. The man who just rolled out the red carpet for Moammar Gadhafi contented himself with a short communiqué, not responding to those who had begged him to find a gesture or at least words which would honor this assassinated heroine. Beyond Mr. Sarkozy, the entire community of democratic heads of state has been astonishingly moderate, prudent, indeed pusillanimous.

Still.

From now on Benazir Bhutto will be much more than a chief of state. She has become a symbol. She has become, as did Ahmed Shah Massoud and Daniel Pearl, a standard bearer.

All those who have not yet given up on freedom in the land of Islam must gather behind that standard. Her name must become another password, bloody but beautiful, for those who still believe that the good genius of Enlightenment will win out over the evil genius of fanaticism and crime.

It is for us, citizens of Europe and the United States, to mourn, to display the grief that our leaders have, at least for the moment, shamefully avoided.