Carrol
Counterpunch, February 26, 2002
American Journal
Daniel Pearl: Should His Editors Have Sent Him There? By Alexander Cockburn
Daniel Pearl's dispatches reminded me somewhat of Peter Kann's in the days when he was the Journal's most light-heartedly stylish reporter, before assuming the imperial purple and becoming the company's CEO. It was Kann, back in the late 1970s, who traveled to Afghanistan, reported that the place was a dump covered with flies and that it was hard to understand why any Great Power would want any truck with the place.
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Pearl's style was totally alien to the bloodthirsty rantings of his editorial colleagues. He sent excellent dispatches questioning the claims of the Clinton administration that it had been justified in the 1998 destruction via cruise missile of the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries plant in the Sudan. Again, he and fellow WSJ reporter Robert Block entered some effective reservations about allegations of Serbian genocide in Kosovo. In fact Slobodan Milosevic might make use of them in mounting his vigorous defense in the US-sponsored kangaroo court in the Hague against charges of genocide. Pearl and Block stigmatized the Serb armed forces as having done "heinous things", while also writing that "other allegations-indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead-haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging."
The killing of Pearl was just as monstrous as the September 11 onslaughts that killed 3,000 innocent people who bore no responsibility for the actions of their government. But as David North, of the Trotskyist Fourth International wrote on the World Socialist (http://www.wsws.org) website on February 23: "On the very day that Pearl's murder was confirmed, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that US troops had mistakenly killed 16 anti-Taliban Afghan fighters, but refused to apologize. It does not require exceptional political insight to realize that in the decision to murder Pearl, the desire for revenge was a major subjective factor."
North then remarked that the outlook of the Pakistani terrorists is not so different from that of that Thomas Friedman, the repellent columnist of the New York Times, also recently recruited as a kind o Kuralt of globalization by PBS's Lehrer News Hour. North cited a recent Friedman column which praised Bush's Axis of Evil speech in these terms: "Sept. 11 happened because America lost its deterrent capability. We lost it because for 20 years we never retaliated against, or brought to justice, those who murdered Americans ...innocent Americans were killed and we did nothing. So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened... America's enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that."
North very properly comments: "By changing only a few words, the Pakistani terrorists could use Friedman's argument to justify their murder of Pearl: "We have failed to retaliate against America ... innocent Arabs, Afghans and Moslems were killed and we did nothing ... America took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened." The thought patterns of the pompous and belligerent American columnist and the Islamic terrorist have far more in common than either imagine. Both think in terms of ethnic, religious and national stereotypes. Both believe in and are mesmerized by violence."
Leave the last beautiful, true words to Daniel Pearl's widow:
"Revenge would be easy, but it is far more valuable in my opinion to address this problem of terrorism with enough honesty to question our own responsibility as nations and as individuals for the rise of terrorism. My own courage arises from two facts. One is that throughout this ordeal I have been surrounded by people of amazing value. This helps me trust that humanism ultimately will prevail.
"My other hope now -- in my seventh month of pregnancy -- is that I will be able to tell our son that his father carried the flag to end terrorism, raising an unprecedented demand among people from all countries not for revenge but for the values we all share: love, compassion, friendship and citizenship far transcending the so-called clash of civilizations."
full: http://www.counterpunch.org/