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Date Posted: 16:38:51 05/12/03 Mon
Author: schwabra
Author Host/IP: dialup-171.75.108.111.Dial1.Cincinnati1.Level3.net / 171.75.108.111
Subject: Rememberances


Just after 7 p.m. on January 23, 2002, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl got into a car outside the Village Restaurant in downtown Karachi. According to friends, Danny was feeling good. He had lined up a scoop: an interview with Islamic radical Ahmed Omar Sheikh, whom Danny suspected held the key to the case of Richard C. Reid, the al Qaeda recruit who tried to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner with plastic explosives in his shoes.

Fazal Karim, one of the men in the car with Danny that night, was arrested last May. He told police that Daniel Pearl appeared calm as he was driven around Karachi for several hours, even when he was made to change vehicles.

After all, Danny must have thought, a militant in hiding has to cover his tracks, lest the reporter lead the police to his hideout. The long, circuitous drive, the change of vehicles, was all standard cloak-and-dagger fare for a veteran journalist like Daniel Pearl.

Finally, late in the night, the car drove down a dirt road to a nursery situated in the middle of a vast field. Danny was told to get out, and was taken into a cinder-block storehouse.

At what point did Danny realize that he was no longer a journalist in pursuit of a story, but a Jew in a trap set by Islamic terrorists? When his "escorts" locked the metal door behind him? When he surveyed the 10 X 15-ft. room and realized that his prize interviewee was not there? When they tied him to a chair? When, six days later, three Arabs from Yemen arrived with a satchel filled with assorted knives?

It appears from Fazal Karim's testimony that Danny was optimistic until the end. One of the Arabs spoke to Danny in a language Mr. Karim did not understand, but Danny's face seemed to light up. According to a Western official privy to Mr. Karim's account, "Danny seemed to get some sort of encouragement that he was near release."

Immediately after that, Danny was videotaped saying: "My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am a Jew." He read a statement criticizing the United States. Then, rather than releasing him, his executioners put a blindfold over Danny's head and decapitated him. Afterward, the Arabs ordered Mr. Karim and the other guards to cut Danny's body into pieces.

Humanism is the philosophy "that emphasizes the dignity and worth of the individual, with the basic premise that people are rational beings who possess the capacity for truth and goodness."

Jews believe that human beings were created in the image of God, which most Jews take to mean that all human beings are essentially good. Peel away the misguided notions of this or that system, and you have a good, decent, kind human being who would not deliberately choose evil.

But it's precisely the ability to choose evil that is the uniqueness of human beings. "Created in the image of God," as the sages inform us, means that human beings were created, like God, with free choice. Animals act from instinct. Humans have the unique ability to choose between good and evil.

The starting point of each human being's free choice varies, according mostly to his or her upbringing. Thus, I suspect that none of the readers of this article would murder for money -- even a lot of money. It is simply beyond our choice box, given the values our parents inculcated in us. But many of us would cheat on our income tax; others of us would not bother to report a bank error in our favor; while some of us would gladly pocket the extra change a supermarket cashier mistakenly gives us. Each of these scenarios poses a choice to the average, ethical human being. "Choice" implies it could go either way.

We are created by our choices. The person who chooses not to report a bank error in his favor will go on to choose to cheat in small ways, which will grow to bigger, more egregious deceptions. Enron executives are not born swindlers; they got there by a myriad of graduated choices.

But once they are there, do not trust them with your money! A person or a nation who has chosen perversity becomes perverse. "The capacity for truth and goodness" which humanism credits to all people can be deactivated by consistently choosing evil. The result is evil people, evil groups, evil nations.

When President Bush speaks about the "axis of evil," humanists shift uncomfortably in their seats. The word "evil" to a humanist is like the word "God" to an atheist. It is simply not part of his or her belief system.

Evil is a reality, not a matter of taste or relative values. "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter" is a repudiation of any meaningful values. Such mesmerizing of our moral capacities is the ultimate legerdemain of evil; if you can't see it, you can't fight it.

Humanists, who usually inhabit the liberal end of the political spectrum, are quick to array themselves against those they call "fundamentalists." Such "fundamentalists" are usually painted as Bible-thumping, religious fanatics. But "fundamentalism" also refers to "a point of view characterized by rigid adherence to fundamental or basic principles." What could be more rigid than adhering to the belief in the essential goodness of man after the Holocaust? After the Ramallah lynching? After the beheading of Daniel Pearl?

IF THEY KNEW US, THEY WOULD LOVE US

Professor Judea Pearl of UCLA marked the yahrzeit of his son by writing an article published in the Wall Street Journal (February 20):


The murder weapon in Danny's case was aimed not at a faceless enemy or institution, but at a gentle human being -- one whose face is now familiar to millions of people around the world. Danny's murderers spent a week with him; they must have seen his radiating humanity. Killing him so brutally, and in front of a video camera, marked a new low in man's inhumanity to man. People of all faiths were thus shocked to realize that mankind can still be dragged to such depths by certain myths and ideologies.

Personally, I am shocked that two years after the Ramallah lynching, 58 years after the Holocaust, and 74 years after the Hebron massacre, that we could be "shocked to realize that mankind can still be dragged to such depths."

The whole world saw the video of Arabs murdering two hapless Israeli reservists who took a wrong turn into Ramallah a year and a half before Daniel Pearl's kidnapping. The Arab mob disemboweled their victims and danced with their entrails.

In Jewish history, both former and recent, there are no "new lows in man's inhumanity to man," only old lows, repeated and recycled. In fact, the way Danny was murdered, by decapitation, was the murder mode of choice during the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-49, when nearly 100,000 Jews were slaughtered.

In his grief, Professor Pearl finds it hard to comprehend why, after spending a week with his gentle son, seeing "his radiating humanity," his captors did not repent of their hatred. After knowing him for a week at close range, how could they have killed him?

The Jewish tendency to trust in the humanity of those who hate us is as old as Jew-hatred itself. In the Hebron Massacre of 1929, 67 Jews were tortured and brutally murdered by their Arab neighbors who had lived next door to them for decades. The story of Ben Tzion Gershon was typical.

Ben Tzion, who had worked for years as a pharmacist in the Hadassah clinic in Hebron, was known for his acts of kindness to his Arab neighbors. He was so sure of their gratitude, so compassionate for their plight, that he opened his door to an Arab woman feigning labor pains on the first night of the rampage. The mob, hiding in the shadows, rushed in, tied up Ben Tzion, and gang-raped his wife. When he pleaded with them, calling them by their names to stop, they replied, "If you don't want to see it, you don't have to," and proceeded to poke out his eyes. In front of the Gershons' two daughters, their neighbors dismembered both Ben Tzion and his wife. The story was testified to by one of the daughters, who lived for a week before dying of her wounds. The other daughter spent the rest of her life in a mental institution.

Danny Pearl's captors knew him for six days. Ben Tzion Gershon's murderers had known him -- had benefited from his kindnesses -- for decades. The assumption that if they only knew how good, how humane we are, they wouldn't hate us is a tenet of humanistic fundamentalist that its proponents hold despite all the historical evidence to the contrary.

Trusting the compassion and essential goodness of our enemies is a naiveté Jews cannot afford. In today's Israel, surrounded by Arabs committed to eradicating the only non-Muslim state in the Middle East, trusting in the humane intentions of our "peace partners" is worse than naiveté; it is sheer madness.

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