This tweet from the US ambassador to the UN is mind boggling:
Excuse me? A man whose head was sawed off on video, specifically because he was a Jew, reminds us about how to break "cycles of violence?"
This incomprehensible leftist gobbledygook would be worthy of derision of it was spouted by some leftist professor at Berkeley. But for the US ambassador to the UN to publicly write this is breathtakingly naive and, really, offensive to Pearl's family. It is almost as if she is saying that Daniel Pearl would still be alive if he had only been more interested in "accountability and reconciliation" with Al Qaeda and Pakistani Islamists.
Is this what the US has become? Is the official position of the US government that all that is needed for world peace is for Westerners to be more sensitive to the feelings of murderous Islamists?
If Jew-hatred is part of a "cycle of violence" then anti-Semitism must be partially Jews' fault.
This indicates that the official American position is no longer one of pride and leadership, but one of apologetics and beseeching to be loved by our enemies, who hate us because we just aren't working hard enough at reconciliation.
This is outrageous and scandalous, and in a sane world Power should be forced to resign by the end of the day. No one that says anything this sickening should represent the United States to the world.
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FRONTPAGE MAGAZINE:
THE REAL UNLEARNED LESSONS
OF DANIEL PEARL'S MURDER
January 24, 2012 by Bruce Thornton
The killing of Pearl concentrated much of what Andrew McCarthy calls the “willful blindness” of many in the West to the Islamic roots of the perpetrators’ violence. At the time, most of the media mainly decried Pearl’s death because he was a reporter. Worse yet were the comments that scolded the terrorists for not understanding that American journalists are neutral observers whose impartiality could help them get their story out.
The professional corruption of the mainstream-media was revealed in a New York Times statement, with its claims that journalists are objective (mostly false) and have no loyalties to their own country and people (mostly true), and that the murderers had a legitimate “cause” and “grievances” (moral idiocy and cowardice).
Most commentary also ignored the Koranic-inspired anti-Semitism of the words Pearl was forced to say in the execution video: “My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California U.S.A. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel. Back in the town of Bnei Brak there is a street named after my great grandfather Chaim Pearl who is one of the founders of the town.”
The claim that Pearl was a C.I.A. agent was obviously a pretext; his real offense was being a Jew, a race the Koran calls “laden with Allah’s anger,” destined to suffer forever “abasement and poverty” and eventually to be transformed into “apes and swine.” In emphasizing Pearl’s Jewish ancestry and Zionist connections, the terrorists were conforming to the genocidal ambitions of many Muslims, from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has vowed to “wipe Israel from the map,” to the Muslim Brother affiliate Hamas, whose charter quotes the hadith proclaiming, “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say ‘O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’” As for the beheading, that too has its justification in Koran 8.12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads.”
Then and now, this religiously inspired, rank anti-Semitism is rationalized as a response to Israel’s so-called “occupation” of Muslim lands and oppression of the Palestinians. In 2010, General David Petraeus testified to Congress that the Israeli-Arab conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel.” Rather than Islamic ideology, Petraeus asserted that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question” accounts for terrorism: “al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support.”
But Petraeus was simply repeating received wisdom, examples of which are legion, ranging from historian Tony Judt’s claim that European Muslim immigrant anti-Semitic attacks are “a direct outcome of the festering crisis in the Middle East,” to French foreign minister Hubert Védrine’s assertion that immigrant violence and crime arise from “compassion for the Palestinians” on the part of Muslims, who “get agitated when they see what is happening.”
This trope of “resistance” to unjust “oppression” continues to rationalize brutal murders such as Daniel Pearl’s, leading to what his father, Judah Pearl, called the “normalization of evil.”
Thus those who, like the New York Times, believe that Islamic terrorists have legitimate “grievances” consider terrorist murder and suicide bombing attacks as an unfortunate but understandable tactic given the disproportion of military power between them and their oppressors.
As Judah Pearl pointed out in 2009, this mentality was on display in Jimmy Carter’s despicable libel Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid: “It is imperative,” Carter wrote, “that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel.” In Carter’s calculus, terrorism isn’t inherently evil, but rather a legitimate tactic of the weak. This rationalizing of terrorism finds its most repugnant expression in the “cycle of violence” formula, which ignores moral responsibility and blurs the distinction between the violence of terrorism and that used to prevent it.
Bill Moyers indulged this evasion on PBS when he elevated the genocidal Hamas to a “resistance” movement and opined that “each [side] greases the cycle of violence, as one man’s terrorism becomes another’s resistance to oppression.”
But Carter’s and Moyer’s excusing of terrorist violence has long been codified in the United Nations, where in 1974 Resolutions 3236 and 3237 recognized the terrorist Palestinian Organization as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people; and in the Geneva Convention’s Protocol I, which extended legal combatant status and POW protection to virtually anyone fighting in a conflict, including terrorists.
Ten years after the murder of Daniel Pearl, too many people in government and the media still deny the roots of jihadism in traditional Islamic doctrine, still practice journalism rife with political and ideological bias, still refuse to acknowledge the genocidal anti-Semitism of many Muslims, still indulge a specious moral equivalence that rationalizes terrorist violence as “resistance,” and still look to an international legal community that has repeatedly exposed its ideological corruption. And these unlearned lessons still hamstring our response to jihadist terror.
Daniel Pearl
Daniel Pearl
How he was murdered
Daniel Pearl's last news story
Daniel Pearl Foundation
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