THANE ROSENBAUM

Danny Pearl

IN THE MIDDLE EAST, where martyrdom is measured only in human sacrifice, where human bombs are indistinguishable from human remains, where the sound of an explosive is both an anthem and an alarm, where the future of the Palestinian people is mortgaged all too cheaply for the price of shrapnel, and where a slice of pizza can be a final meal or what’s still grasped at the end of a severed arm—in short, in a region so grisly, why is the murder of Daniel Pearl a special reminder of what it means to be a Jew in an unspeakably horrible post– September 11 world?

“I’m a Jewish American. I come from a . . . on my father’s side . . . a family of Zionists. My father’s Jewish. My mother’s Jewish. I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. In the town of B’nei Brak in Israel, there’s a street called Haim Pearl Street, which was named after my great-grandfather, who was one of the founders.”

Those are not my words. They were the final words of Daniel Pearl. But they weren’t his words, either. He was forced to say them by his captors right before he was decapitated. And all of it was videotaped, not as a ransom note, because their hostage was dead, but as a scripted ritual murder, complete with a script for Pearl to recite, a passion play performed by those far too passionate about who this particular victim was.

Since these were the words of the murderers, it’s fair to ask what was intended by this communication. Surely they could have killed Pearl without the cameras rolling, without his having to read these molesting lines of dialogue before his head was severed and held aloft like a trophy. Why did his murderers go through all this choreography when a simple bullet would have done nicely? In lieu of giving Pearl his last rites, they treated themselves to a party over his spilled blood.

There has been much written about the ethical and journalistic values that were either tarnished or elevated by making the entire video of the execution available over the Internet. I don’t have a strong view of whether The Boston Phoenix performed a morally transgressive act, or whether they simply, in relying on the killers’ own archival instincts, reported the news in the most graphically accurate way possible.

What I do know is that such matters of taste and judgment are ultimately a distraction from a more central point. The video offered a new development in the Daniel Pearl story. Its newsworthiness was not that a murder had taken place. That was old news. Daniel Pearl was dead. That we already knew. But what we didn’t know, and perhaps this was something we needed to know, was that Pearl’s murder wasn’t designed as a simple death, not just another routine casualty in an exponentially escalating Middle East, Persian Gulf body count. These men were obviously hardened killers, desensitized to human loss. They are not natural tear-shedders. Had Pearl pleaded for mercy, it surely wasn’t forthcoming. They were inured to death, and yet somehow this death among others was a special one, rousing them from the complacency of their usual endeavors, enough to make a show out of it.

Daniel Pearl’s murder had to be recorded and preserved, if not for posterity, then as a kind of prurient, hard-porn reminder of the special hate for Jews that animates the consciousness and convictions of his murderers. The video, more than anything else, speaks not only to the execution, but goes beyond it, to an entirely different type of crime, one done to the spirit—the murder of the soul. It is this crime, as much as the decapitation, that depravedly speaks to what was inside the hearts of the men who killed him.

But first, a lesson from another era worth recalling at this time. The Nazis, in addition to everything else that might be said about them, were geniuses at genocide. They knew that the body was beside the point. In order for there to be a true final solution, it wasn’t enough to merely exterminate Jews physically. It was equally necessary for them to be divested of dignity, to be reduced to hollow men and women, empty of spirit and life. All those forced separations, the branding of those yellow stars, the humiliation that came from shaved heads and numbered arms, the prolonging of imminent death. These acts of torture were yet another dimension in the Nazis’ death strategy: the defilement, the extinguishing of hope, the erasure of identity, the starvation of the spirit. Soon the soul would die; the body would follow. Had the Nazis killed no one, but instead had endlessly dehumanized Six Million Jews, would they not have been guilty of mass murder and genocide?

The Daniel Pearl execution video, and the shamefully barbaric acts that it recorded, is damning evidence of a similar pathology: the impulse to kill his spirit before even bothering with his body, to force him to reveal the only name, rank, and serial number that these people cared about—his Jewish parentage. And while he was indeed an American, he was going to receive a Jewish death. Make no mistake about it: Before he was killed, Daniel Pearl was first branded. And even after his death, the humiliation continued in the showcasing of his severed head.

The knife may have slit Pearl’s throat, but the words that were forced out of his mouth were equal in their violence, an act of spiritual murder that preceded his physical death. He did not speak these words of Jewish identity proudly, because they were not his words. He would have perhaps chosen to say something else altogether. Instead these words were given to him as an alibi for his murderers, justification for their cause and the manner in which they carried it out. There was no remorse, but rather giddy and purposeful satisfaction.

This is the way it always is with murderous anti-Semitism: The persecutors are obsessed with their ideology or religion, and it reaches a boiling point of fanaticism. But they’re not all that particular about the passions of their victims, whether they too are obsessed, in this case, with being Jewish. To the Nazis it didn’t matter whether the gas was going into the lungs of practicing Jews or Jews who had never stepped foot inside a synagogue. These were deaths without any reprieve or pardon. All that mattered was that the victim was Jewish, regardless of how tenuous their connection was to the tribe, or how adamantly they claimed to fit in elsewhere.

It is not surprising that the Pearl family wished to highlight Danny’s humanistic, universal impulses as a way to convince his killers that they had the wrong man. But his killers didn’t care. Actually, they had the right man. It must have been a tremendous coincidence for them to learn that the Pearls had a street named after them in Israel. Indeed, his murderers had hit the hostage jackpot: a Jewish-American journalist with Zionist roots. But they would have killed him anyway, even if he had never been to Israel, even if he didn’t know what a Zionist was. Daniel Pearl transcended the ranks of a mere prisoner. His murderers marked him for death because of one central truth in his biographical data: Stripped down to his essence, Daniel Pearl was a Jew.

But imagine this, if Daniel Pearl had been an American journalist and a practicing Catholic, would they have required him to recite his relevant church affiliation? And would they have had him beheaded? Whether one chooses to see the tape or not, the gory message is clear: all Jews are now Daniel Pearl.