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March 1, 2002/Adar 17, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 24
Sacred freedomEditorialHe will be memorialized as an American and a Jew, but Danny Pearl was really just another intrepid reporter doing his job.He was working a dangerous beat in a scary part of the world. As Wall Street Journal South Asia bureau chief, Pearl was on assignment in Pakistan covering a facet of the ongoing war in Afghanistan. Like most reporters who are committed to uncovering the facts and telling the truth, he prided himself on his objectivity. He was not part of the story, he would have insisted, even as the grisly events of his Jan. 23 kidnapping unfolded. He was a reporter, charged with writing news, not making it. But his abductors saw otherwise, using Pearl as a pawn in the high-stakes terror game he was so valiantly working to report. They targeted him as an American, as a symbol of democratic values they reject. They targeted him as a Jew, his religious identity and Israeli parentage perhaps another provocation for their barbarous murder. And they targeted him as a reporter, a member of the American press eager to tell a story, easy to lure to danger with the promise of new information. Pearl has been described as a good listener. His curiosity and persistence made him the consummate journalist, the one who always had one more call to make, one more person to contact. "He probably would have done a good job telling (his abductors' story)," is how one former source described Pearl's skill and dedication to his craft. It is an ultimate irony that this gifted storyteller had no chance to tell this story. On Feb. 21 his captors released a videotape of his murder. Pearl's wife Mariane, also a journalist and now seven months pregnant with their first child, said that for Pearl the freedom to uncover the facts and seek the truth was as sacred as freedom itself. She called on the world to continue to fight against terrorism. Pearl's family maintained hope until the very end that he would be rescued and return home safely. His father, who like his late son is a musical enthusiast, had told the press that when Danny came home the family would celebrate with Handel's "Hallelujah" chorus. Instead, the solemn chanting of the Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer of mourning, brings this journalist's story to a tragic conclusion. |
