KARACHI, Pakistan – A day after her father was gunned down by an Islamist extremist, a grieving Shehrbano Taseer wrote on Twitter,** “A light has gone out in our home today.” It wasn’t long before the 22-year-old realized something else: Her father’s death had lit a fire in her.
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In the months since, the **daughter of the late Punjab province Gov. Salmaan Taseer has emerged as one of Pakistan’s most outspoken voices for tolerance. Through her writing and speaking, she warns any audience who will listen of the threat of Islamist extremism, and impatiently waits for her father’s killer to be brought to justice.
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**“These extremists, they want to tell you how to think, how to feel, how to act,” says Taseer, a slim, elegant young woman with intense brown eyes. “It has made me more resolute that these people should never win.”
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**“I’d never lost anyone in my life, not a friend or anyone,” **she says. **“For everyone else it was the governor and their leader and this man, and it was this big, sexy story and it was so sensationalist. But for me, it was my father.”
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Taseer majored in government and film at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and is by profession a journalist. She spends much of her time now writing columns and traveling in and beyond Pakistan to speak about Islamist extremism.
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On Twitter, Salmaan Taseer openly taunted and trashed extremists, once tweeting that he’d never back down on the blasphemy issue, “even if I’m the last man standing.”
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When she singles out a politically marginalized community, either on Twitter or her other outreach, **Taseer recalls how well her father treated that group, how he was often the only public official to visit their homes after an attack or publicly speak on their behalf.
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Once, **Salmaan Taseer took his daughter along on a visit to meet Mukhtar Mai, a Pakistani woman whose case attracted international attention because of allegations that she was gang-raped on the orders of a village council. The governor asked Mai to put her hand on his daughter’s head, so that Shehrbano Taseer could gain the same courage to stand up for her rights.
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**“I said, ‘I don’t care what he said, and I don’t care how he said it. He didn’t deserve to be shot and killed for it,’” Taseer says.
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**Unlike many Pakistani politicians, she’s willing to criticize the role Saudi Arabia has played in funding numerous hardline Islamist schools in Pakistan. And she’s quick to note that the United States as well as Pakistan says little about it — after all, it needs Saudi Arabia’s oil.
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**Pakistan has a tradition of dynastic politics. The most famous political family has been that of the Bhuttos, which spawned former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, also assassinated by Islamist extremists. Salmaan Taseer was a member of the Bhutto-led Pakistan People’s Party.
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Shehrbano Taseer says she views Pakistan as an enticing challenge akin to a Rubik’s Cube because of its many, convoluted problems. But she says she has no plans to run for office. **“It’s such a dirty profession,” **she says, laughing.
Sherry Rehman, a People’s Party lawmaker **who also has been threatened for speaking out against the blasphemy laws, says Shehrbano Taseer will “chart her own future.”
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“**She’s found a torch to carry, and she will do it,” Rehman says. “It’s what her father would have wanted.”
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Taseer is frustrated with the Pakistani justice system’s delays in processing the case of Qadri, her father’s confessed killer.
Pakistan’s courts have very low conviction rates, even in terrorism cases. Qadri’s confession may not be enough to persuade a court to punish him, considering the threats facing any judge who dares pass such a judgment.
Taseer wants the former bodyguard to spend his life in prison, in solitary confinement.** A death sentence is “too easy,” and a conviction would send a warning to other would-be assassins, she says.
**“In Pakistan, we have very few brave and honest leaders,” she says. **“We need our heroes alive.”
http://www.sfexaminer.com/news/2011/06/slain-pakistanis-daughter-takes-his-cause
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**just recently … Shehrbano Taseer was present at Pakistan’s 1st International Social Media Summit was held at Avari hotel in Karachi from June 10-11 2011. The two day event hosted international blogger panelists and digital media experts alongside several key local faces from the Pakistani new media space.
here is the link to the pics: **http://tribune.com.pk/multimedia/slideshows/187543](http://tribune.com.pk/multimedia/slideshows/187543)
**this is wht she said regarding the event: **“During the Japan earthquake and tsunami, for many people Twitter became the mode of sharing news with their family and others. Just imagine that the videos put up by common people in Japan followed by the tsunami received 17 million views in one night. Citizen journalism is good for Pakistan. In the mainstream, all that sells is gore. In my father’s case they took his comments which were about humanity and turned them into something religious.”
“So I will say that these kinds of events should be held in our beloved country Pakistan, in western countries these summits are the routine matters but in Pakistan obviously it is something new and different. Our various media organizations should play their roles for making social media an effective voice of masses.”
" She was of the view that social media has provided our youth with the forum where they can discuss various failures and weak points of government and no one can stop them."
**“Through blogs and tweets, new generation of Pakistanis push for change”
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"What a courageous lady … after so many hardships and struggles she stands firm!
I always admired her for her bravery!!
good luck to her!! … 
as long as we have young brave and open minded ppl like her… we have nothing to be afraid of!
inshaAllah we will make it! … after the dark night always comes the dawn!!
Pakistan Zindabad!