While I'd prefer to keep things lite here, the death of Margaret Hassan, and the fact that it was not represented on the front page of the NY Time electronic edition, has me quite troubled.

I understand that there is the possibility that reporting the death of a woman at the hands of terrorists on the front page might be construed as a matter of "bad taste" or "sensationalism," but to bury the story so far down that one has to do a search of her name to come up with it does a disservice not only to the memory of Hassan, but also to readers. It sends a contradictory message--that the death of a woman in such circumstances must be reported, but perhaps is not such a priority as the death of a man in the same circumstances.

I heard about it in a sound byte on the Today Show. No details, just the fact that she was killed.

If we consider the priorities of today's Times splash page, the merger of Sears and K-Mart is far more important and more tasteful a subject than the death of Margaret Hassan.

Her death should indeed be listed as a headline in the Times. Yet again, we failed to effecitvely deal with terrorists, and Western women are, from this day forward, going to be targeted as quickly and dispatched as easily as men.

We are forgetting that, in the minds of the terrorists, this is a Holy War and we are Crusaiders out to impose a way of life on them that they do not want. When people feel they are under seige by colonizing influences out to destroy their culture and belief system, what feels right is to turn the clock back. Hitler tried to do this by extolling the virtues of the Knights Templar and the mythic Glory Days of the so-called Aryan race. The Muslim fundamentalistis do this by extolling the simple, black and white virtues of Islam of the Middle Ages. We, then, are the hairy unclivilized Crusaiders with their unveild women tramping along behind them--the Infidels who do not respect women and do not respect God.

We are not just dealing with people of a differnet culture--we are dealing with people of a different historical time period.

Keeping that in mind, it doesn't matter then that Western women are, perhaps there to do charity work and to help the Muslim people. They are, after all, merely the consorts of Infidels. In this thinking there is no point of reference for the life of a woman like Margaret Hassan.

To bury her fate on the electronic back pages of the New York Times could, in a sense, be seen as a Western way of demonstrating that we, too, have no reference point in our world of freedom and liberty for the horrific death and of a woman of good works.