February 3, 2009, - 12:04 pm
Seven Years Later, Daniel Pearl’s Father Still Doesn’t Get It
By Debbie Schlussel
Seven years ago, this week, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered by Islamic terrorists.
His slaughter was brutal. He was beheaded, and his limbs were cut off like chicken parts. Before that, he was forced by Islamic terrorists to talk about being a Jew.
We all remember this (though the mainstream media sanitized what Islamic murderers actually did to him), and it is a tragedy. But there is at least one man who still doesn’t get it: Daniel Pearl’s father, Judea Pearl.
For some reason, Daniel Pearl’s murder has been elevated above those of 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11, even though the 3,000 were innocent victims on American soil minding their own business. Pearl, on the other hand, was an extremely left-wing, nominal Jew whose reporting repeatedly gave exposure to and legitimization of Islamic terrorists.
Daniel Pearl was killed not minding his own business on an airplane or in an office building, but putting himself at risk chasing more Islamic terrorists to tell their story. But he was a mainstream media reporter–and for one of America’s most prestigious newspapers–so his life, in the mainstream media’s eyes, is far more important than common-folk Americans who conduct America’s commerce and raise families.
And Judea Pearl–in the seven years since his son’s death–has sought to legitimize this same legitimization and appeasement of terrorists, even if he won’t admit it.
In the years since his son’s death, Dr. Pearl has focused on “promoting cross-cultural understanding.” That is the stated purpose of the Daniel Pearl Foundation he set up.
To that end, he raises money for the Seeds of Peace camp, founded by Yasser Arafat’s favorite biographer. The whole idea of the camp is the moral equivalence of terrorism’s victims and its perpetrators. Islamic terrorists’ kids tell off Israeli leftists’ kids for several hours, and then they go canoeing or play volleyball together. Significant numbers of graduates of the Maine camp have become Islamic terrorists and homicide bombers, who kill Jews in Israel. The camp’s most famous grad, Adam Shapiro, founded ISM (International Solidarity Movement), a group which sheltered British Al-Qaeda bombers the night before they blew themselves–and many innocent victims–up at a Tel Aviv bar. (The group was also caught sheltering an Islamic Jihad terrorist.)
A Wall Street Journal reporter friend of mine was aghast, during a visit to Seeds of Peace, when he watched counselors remain silent as Palestinian Muslim campers told Jewish campers that the Holocaust never happened. The Jewish campers, since their parents are leftists and didn’t teach them anything, didn’t have a clue how to respond or even know for sure if the Muslims were wrong. The counselors told the WSJ reporter that they could not intervene because “all viewpoints are legitimate and there is no right and wrong” at Seeds of Peace.
Imagine Osama Bin Laden’s kids and kids of some of those who died on the 9/11 planes and in the towers being sent to summer camp together and being told their causes are equal–or that the terrorists’ cause is superior, and that there is no right and wrong. Raising money for this camp is just one of the many detrimental activities in which Judea Pearl has been involved, in the name of memorializing his slain son.
Would he send his grandchildren to a camp where they made arts and crafts with his son’s killers’ grandchildren, after his son’s slaughter was legitimized in a two-hour long forced dialogue?
Then, there is the series of awards Judea Pearl gives out. Emblematic of the type of recipient, father Pearl gave the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage to Kevin Sites, a Yahoo reporter who did a series of written and video reports called “In the Hot Zone.” But it might better have been called, “In the Dhimmi Zone.” Sites is a vehemently anti-Israel reporter, who frequently attacked Israel for the plight of Palestinians who’ve been living in Lebanon for decades (and the Lebanese won’t let them have the rights of citizens or live outside refugee camps). Sites work is a non-stop, one-sided attack on Israel for every malady in the Middle East. If this is Daniel Pearl Courage, who needs it?
By giving out this award, Dr. Pearl might as well have been giving aid and comfort to those of the same Islamic ideology that killed his son. In giving Sites the award, Dr. Pearl made this ignorant pronouncement telling us that “the hatred that took his son’s life . . . is not between Muslims and Westerners.”:
Um, no. It’s Islam, stupid.
But it doesn’t end there.
Dr. Pearl set up a series of “dialogue” forums, in which he and Islamic propagandist Akbar Ahmed, get paid big bucks (allegedly at least $10,000 each per appearance) to travel the country making speeches about how Islam isn’t extremist and that we can all get along. For an idea of how “we can all get along,” Ahmed excused honor killings when he was on Oprah, claiming they had nothing to do with Islam. Then, there is his year-long video series, “Journey Into America,” in which Dr. Ahmed whitewashed extremist Hezbollah mosque Islamic Center of America, and gushed over Sheikh Hamza Yusuf. Here’s some background on Hamza Yusuf, from my 2004 column on Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam:
Yusuf was under [FBI] investigation [after 9/11] for this speech two days before the attacks: “This country is facing a terrible fate. … This country stands condemned. It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did – and lest people forget that Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands.” Unfortunately, President Bush invited him to the White House, where he was when FBI agents knocked on his California door.
At a 1995 ISNA [Islamic Society of North America] conference, Yusuf delivered this speech: “The Jews would have us believe that God has this bias to this little small tribe in the Middle of the Sinai desert and all the rest of humanity is just rubbish. I mean that this is the basic doctrine of the Jewish religion and that’s why it is a most racist religion.”
Judea Pearl’s speaking tour partner thinks this guy is just swell.
After all of this, Judea Pearl had the nerve to write in The New Republic:
Moral relativism died with Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, on January 31, 2002.
It did? Wake up, buddy. Dude, you’re one of the top moral relativists. And you make good coin for doing it.
In today’s Wall Street Journal, Judea Pearl wrote an op-ed that is partly completely clueless and where it is in the know, completely hypocritical.
In the piece, “Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil,” he claims:
Neither he, nor the millions who were shocked by his murder, could have possibly predicted that seven years later . . . this ideology of barbarism would be celebrated in European and American universities, fueling rally after rally for Hamas, Hezbollah and other heroes of “the resistance.” Or that another kidnapped young man, Israeli Gilad Shalit, would spend his 950th day of captivity with no Red Cross visitation while world leaders seriously debate whether his kidnappers [DS: HAMAS] deserve international recognition.
Huh? He is shocked–shocked!–that Muslims around the world actually do what they’ve done for centuries and what their sheikhs tell them to do at mosques and on Islamic law shows on Al-Jazeera. Many of us–myself and many, many others–warned for years of exactly these very predictable things (I’ve been writing about the dangers of Islam since I was a teenager and about my undercover exploits since 1998), while Dr. Judea Pearl was busy running around the country for the last seven years regurgitating false fantasies about dialogue with and understanding of Islam (for $10K a pop), raising money for moral equivalency summer camps for kids, and giving out award to pan-jihadist internet reporters. That he thinks these things post-9/11 (not post-Daniel Pearl), which had already happened pre-9/11, are such a shock, just shows how out of touch this guy, Judea Pearl, is.
Those around the world who mourned for Danny in 2002 genuinely hoped that Danny’s murder would be a turning point in the history of man’s inhumanity to man, and that the targeting of innocents to transmit political messages would quickly become, like slavery and human sacrifice, an embarrassing relic of a bygone era.
Dr, Pearl, you’ve been watching to many Coca-Cola commercials (“I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony . . .”) and Rodney King videos. Who the heck thought this guy’s murder was a turning point for anything positive? It was just another announcement of Islam’s evil to non-Muslims, specifically Jews and Westerners–a death knell this guy’s own father just refuses to hear.
In his column, he goes on to lament that:
The media have played a major role in handing terrorism this victory of acceptability. Qatari-based Al Jazeera television, for example, is still providing Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi hours of free air time each week to spew his hateful interpretation of the Koran, authorize suicide bombing, and call for jihad against Jews and Americans.
Guess who did one of the first, most sympathetic Western media interviews with Qaradawi, declaring this extremist a “moderate” who takes the “middle path”?
I’ll give you a hint: His name was Daniel Pearl and he reported for the Wall Street Journal. And he was the same guy who set out to meet Al-Qaeda terrorists to give their side of the story. Their side of the story, which he hadn’t planned on, was his body chopped into several parts.
In the past, Dr. Pearl also said:
Danny was the first that was abducted and targeted not for what he wrote or what he intended to write, but for what he represented in the eyes of these extremists. And then that started a trend.
No, your son’s death was not the start of a trend. It was a news-hyped blip on a long-standing trend that has gone on for centuries. He never heard of Leon Klinghoffer? Or Robert Dean Stethem? Etc. Their killers were Muslims. They were murdered for being Jewish–in Klinghoffer’s case–and American.
In the pre-death video, Daniel Pearl was specifically required to say he was a Jew and a Zionist. And his killers were Muslims.
It’s that simple. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist–or even a computer scientist, like Judea Pearl–to figure that out.
Maybe one day, he will figure it out. But I don’t share the fantasies and dreams about Dr. Pearl that he has about Islam.
Daniel Pearl’s dad asks in his WSJ piece,
When will our luminaries stop making excuses for terror?
To him, I ask:
WHEN. WILL. YOU?
As you point out, cross-culturalism is a code word for anti-americanism. It combines all the disgusting aspects of the diversity movement with anti-americanism in international politics.
Believe it or not, there is actually a cross-cultural ‘profession’ with a professional group (sic) called SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Training and Research(sic)).
These people are, for the most part, pretty stupid, and lack the intelligence to excel in a true profession such as medicine or law. They sit around telling everyone who will listen about how they are victimized, because they ‘don’t fit into’ some stereotyped cultural group. And somehow they manage to blame this on George Bush and his Republican predecessors.
They list all kinds of cross-cultural misunderstandings, most of which are the result of insults to their fragile egos (and accompanying fragile intellects), and of course all of these misunderstandings are the results of anglo-saxon, mostly male, intolerance of other cultures.
They manage to carry this into international politics. There are entries on the website promoting cross-cultural contact with Iran, and naturally it is a fault of the dominant white culture that we do not have productive cultural dialogue with Iran, Cuba, or any of the other sewer countries.
This profession (sicd) is on the march to destroy our country and its traditions. Beware of them.
c f on February 3, 2009 at 2:11 pm