God Bless You, Daniel Pearl Date: Saturday, March 02 @ 04:42:09 Topic The Planet Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature; but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapor, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this. --Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662 Excerpt from The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com Why Daniel Pearl Died By Richard Cohen Tuesday, February 26, 2002; Page A21 "Ah, Co-hane," the PLO official said, examining my passport and pronouncing my name in the Hebrew manner. This was Beirut in the 1980s, during the civil war, and I was asking permission to visit the PLO-controlled refugee camps in the south of Lebanon. "Co-hane," the official repeated. I held my breath. Finally, he looked up. "You are most welcome," he said. The "issue" was never again mentioned. But the "issue" was most certainly raised with Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan. We may never know precisely why Pearl was snatched and killed -- whether it was because he was a Westerner, an American, a reporter, a Jew or some combination of them all. But until we know better, we must take his killers at their word. Pearl was kidnapped because he was "anti-Islam and a Jew." So said Fahad Naseem, a suspect in the case. Nothing I know about Pearl suggests he was anti-Islam. But he was most definitely a Jew. According to some accounts, on the videotape that the killers made of what apparently were Pearl's last moments, he was forced to say, "I am a Jew. My mother is a Jew." Well, so is mine. And I am an American and a journalist as well, so you can understand why I am consumed with anger and sadness at the death of this young man whose widow is carrying his child. But I don't think I am being irrational when I say that the hideous murder of Daniel Pearl was not just the work of "barbarians" -- the phrase du jour to describe his killers -- but the inevitable result of policy. Throughout the once-tolerant Islamic world, anti-Semitism -- hatred of Jews -- has become both common and acceptable. To some, this will seem unsurprising. After all, there is a connection between Judaism and Zionism. But while most Zionists are Jews, not all Jews are Zionists -- and even those who are pro-Israel are not the subhuman caricatures of the Islamic world's anti-Semitic media. This caricature -- devious, diabolical, intent on world domination and in total control of the world's financial system -- appears so often in the Islamic world's press that it can be, and maybe was, used to justify the murder of an innocent man. Throughout the region, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 were blamed on either Jews or Zionists. One prominent Egyptian newspaper, al-Ahram, flat-out said the attack was the work of "the Jews and the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad." Other newspapers reported that no Jews went to work that day, or that Jews were seen cheering the collapse of the buildings. The Saudi newspaper al-Watan ran a two-part series back in December headlined "The Jewish Sense of Superiority in the World." It revealed, as anti-Semites have over and over again, the secret plans of the Jews to "implement their strategic hellish plans to take over the world." Just precisely how these all-powerful and devilishly clever people were somehow nearly exterminated during the Nazi era might present something of a problem to anti-Semites. Not to worry: The Holocaust never happened. Last year, for instance, the often-lauded Qatar television channel al-Jazeera held a panel discussion titled "Is Zionism worse than Nazism?" Some prominent Holocaust deniers were allowed to participate. Of course, both sides of the question were presented. The standard response from the respective governments when the issue of anti-Semitism is raised is that a free press can sometimes be a pain. But none of these governments permits a free press. The Saudis certainly don't, and while the Egyptians make a pretense of press freedom, the fact remains that the editors of the leading dailies are appointed by the government. Just six days after Sept. 11, President Bush went to Washington's Islamic Center to send a message: "Islam is peace." He distinguished between the perverted and perfidious religious zealotry of Osama bin Laden and mainstream Islam. "The face of terror is not the true face of Islam," the president said. The decency, the guts, to make a similar repudiation of bigotry are precisely what is lacking in most Islamic or Arab leaders. Neither the Saudi nor the Egyptian regimes slap down their local anti-Semites, and neither, of course, does Yasser Arafat, whose own organization has trafficked in vile stereotypes of the sort once used by the Nazis. It could be that Daniel Pearl would have been killed no matter what. It could be that it was enough that he was American. But it was not his nationality that seemed to matter to his captors; it was his religion. Anti-Semitic kidnappers killed Pearl. Cowardly governments enabled it to happen. © 2002 The Washington Post Company Included excerpt from The Washington Post: Why Daniel Pearl Died http://www.washingtonpost.com This article comes from Palace Planet http://www.palaceplanet.net/ The URL for this story is: http://www.palaceplanet.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=55