Pearl wanted a “scoop” by interviewing someone on the “other side.” This also happened to Sean Flynn, son of Errol, during the Cambodian excursion during the Vietnam War in 1970. Flynn, a war correspondent throughout the war, decided he wanted to shoot photos of the Vietcong. So he went out looking for them, and drove into a VC roadblock. They took him prisoner and later executed Sean Flynn in an even more gruesome fashion than Pearl was by his captors. See the book Inherited Risk by Jeffrey Meyers.

I concur wih regard to Pearl’s foolhardiness. I’m not necessarily persuaded as to his amorality. His hoped for “scoop” may even have hastened legitimate police or military capture/prosecution of Sheikh Gilani. Perhaps drawing attention to the matter or at least allowing Pearl to offer authorities: “I met him near ishtanbuk and yakyuk roads, he appears to be active in this area”, or something of the sort.

Danny Pearl video is available at:

judea.org/oped/perl.htm

I’m not posting this as an exercise in the macabre. The video is about 4 minutes long and most of it is (nonviolent) propaganda. Of course view at your discretion etc. but you’ll undoubtedly gain insight into the Muslim well.. mindset.

I’ve heard about but never seen the video and would not view it. First, I certainly am not curious. It is enough to know what was done to him. Second, a person’s death is private — not for everyone’s eyes unless he grants permission which of course he can’t do. Third, there’s a sense in which the act of viewing such a video risks lacking respect, as partaking in the victim’s intended desecration notwithstanding the fact that one is horrified by it. There’s a sense in which just seeing it partakes, similarly to seeing someone’s shame — think of, let’s say, the (much less drastic) case of a woman’s rape captured by chance on video: I wouldn’t want to watch it — wouldn’t want to watch her shame. Of course if one has a reason to see it (someone who works with law-enforcement, for example, or who has the most solemn need otherwise to see it), one views it. I don’t need to see it, nor would I transgress the victim’s or his bereaved family’s dignity by watching it. Again, it’s enough to know what happened to him.

I agree with the blog entry: it’s incredible that a U.S. Jew put himself into mortal danger that way.

If Pearl was hoping that his interview of Gilani would provide him with information to help police arrest Gilani and his cronies, then he was even more reckless than I thought, and was indeed doing the very thing that Gilani suspected him of and ultimately killed him for. However, I don’t know of any evidence that that was Pearl’s intention. He was functioning as a reporter, but as a reporter who sees himself as somehow outside and above the conflict in which his country found itself. Reviewing Mariane Pearl’s book about her late husband in the New York Review of Books (Dec. 4), William Dalrymple writes:

“She describes Pearl as a liberal, intelligent, and charmingly goofy journalist, … whose life work he saw as building understanding between East and West, between Islam, Christianity and his own Judaism.”

It can be inferred from the above description that Pearl’s projected interview of Gilani was part of Pearl’s “life work.” Pearl saw himself as above and neutral to the conflict. He thought he would “humanize” Sheikh Gilani, and in the process persuade WSJ readers that if only we tried to “understand” Moslems and Al Qaeda better, blah blah, we could lessen our conflict with them, blah blah. In short, Pearl was a liberal idiot, who disbelieved in the existence of evil (or thought it could be overcome by efforts at mutual understanding), and so, with reckless abandon, delivered himself into its hands. We can be thankful that in this case it was only Pearl and his family who were harmed by his liberal idiocy, rather than an entire country, as happens when a man of Pearl’s mentality (think of Chamberlain, Rabin, Peres, Clinton) acquires a position of national authority.

The story about Sean Flynn provided by Mr. Smothers reinforces my point. Can you imagine an American reporter during WWII trying to set up an interview, with photos, of German officers? It would have been seen as inconceivable, almost treasonous.

It was I, rather than Mr. Smothers who told the story about Sean Flynn, from the Jeffrey Meyers book. Glancing through a magazine, I saw an article about Pearl by one of Sean Flynn’s fellow journalists in SE Asia. The writer called both incidents, “The chances a reporter takes,” or words to that effect. He saw nothing wrong with what Pearl did, aside from the fact that it is dangerous.

Sometimes reporters were criticized for going to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Mr. Auster’s argument that it would have been treasonous to interview German officers during WWII was made, to no effect. Some liberals had trouble seeing Communists as enemies, even when they were in heavy combat with the US Army.

David wrote,

“Some liberals had trouble seeing Communists as enemies [during the Vietnam War], even when they were in heavy combat with the US Army.”

Or, they saw them as enemies but — as Mr. Auster suspects might have been the case with Pearl — viewed members of the journalistic profession as above the fray, morally and professionally enjoined from “taking sides” when in the process of doing journalism, regardless of what their personal views might be. Of course, what Hanoi Jane Fonda did went way beyond that, putting her more in the league of “Taliban John” Walker, Lord Haw-Haw, Tokyo Rose, and Axis Sally and she should’ve gotten what Taliban John got. Thank goodness there are veteran’s groups who haven’t forgotten as the rest of society seems to have, and still picket her appearances. These veteran’s groups will never forget, God bless them!

Sorry to David about that false ID. But I’ll leave it as is, because if I fixed it I’d have to change David’s comment as well.

A correspondent wrote to me that people get angry at him when he says that Pearl was asking for trouble.

That is remarkable. The people who deny that Pearl acted foolishly and recklessly are like the people who say that if a woman goes around wearing provocative clothes in a rough neighborhood, she bears no responsibility for anything that may happen to her. There is some weird moral libertarianism at work here, which sees no connection between the human subject, who is completely unconditioned and free, and external reality.

The argument I just made is similar to the one Robert George made about David Brooks’s argument for gay marriage.

http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_11_23_corner-archive.asp#020341

There is also the problem of the impoverishment of the American intellect. People seem genuinely unable to hold two different thoughts in their head at the same time. Thus, to say that the woman in provocative clothes was asking for trouble is _perforce_ to acquit the rapist of guilty. It seems impossible for many people to imagine that the woman was foolish _and_ the rapist was a ferocious criminal.

I think what Mr. Cella is talking about is related to the loss of the transcendent, which brings a loss of meaning. The wholeness of a phenomenon or a creature is larger than any one thing that can be said about it. But with the loss of transcendence, only one thing can be true at a time. Either you’re an oppressor, or you’re a virtuous victim, and so on. This is not to deny the principle of non-contradiction, but rather to affirm that any existent or phenomenon consists of more than one thing, but is a multilayered reality.

Exactly. There is no sense of perspective. There is little appreciation of the plain fact that our mortal range of perception is quite limited.

To continue my thought, insofar as Pearl was a nationally “neutral” journalist who didn’t believe in evil and enemies, and insofar as he was insanely careless, he brought on his own disaster. Insofar as the people who kidnapped and murdered him are concerned, they are evil monsters. One statement does not contradict the other, because they relate to different aspects of the same event. But modern people have lost the ability, which is key to our human rationality, of seeing several things at the same time.

This also bears on the other side’s horror of admitting inborn racial differences, or even the existence of races at all. They can’t conceive that such an admission is absolutely consistent with respect for everyone’s humanity, dignity, and full range of human and civil rights, but are convinced it is tantamount to setting up gas chambers. Therefore it’s a branch of knowledge that can’t be permitted but must be vigorously suppressed. Or, it’s related to the Yale-or-Jail mentality that reigns in some quarters on the Left — if a Negro-American isn’t a double-major in physics and ancient Chinese literature or something at Yale or Harvard, he cannot possibly look forward to anything but a life of the most squalid misery (imposed on him, of course, by none other than evil white people). State or Community colleges, the various skilled trades (which so many white people prosper in, and often enough become quite wealthy from), or other traditional upward-mobility stepping-stones simply do not exist for them. There’s no in-between imaginable for many of these liberals.