Anna Bigelow

Taseer’s assassin shot him multiple times at point blank range in a public market and then waited to be detained, allegedly expressing pride in his actions to the media that quickly surrounded him. It is the issue of blasphemy and the symbolic nature of a much-publicized case involving Aasia Bibi, a Christian woman accused of maligning the Prophet Muhammad, that brought Taseer so centrally into the public eye in recent weeks.

At the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, Obama spoke eloquently of the shared losses of India and America. But that eloquence was sadly absent as Obama struggled to respond clearly to the students at St. Xavier’s College who asked him pointblank for his views on jihad and for his reasons for not calling Pakistan a terrorist nation.