Dissenting Opinion: Pearl Murder Was No Martyrdom

Sorrow is clarifying, but not immediately. In proximity to death and destruction, it is easier to feel sharply than to think sharply; and for this reason mourners rely on rituals and liturgies, on the conventions of grief. There are times when brilliance is not the most important thing. If platitudes provide comfort, then let there be platitudes, at least while the wound is fresh.

So it was without rancor that I noted the platitudinous manner in which Daniel Pearl's superiors at The Wall Street Journal, Peter Kann and Paul Steiger, responded to the shocking news of his murder. They reached for what the emotional folkways of America could give them. Their statement of February 22 strived for dignity. It surpassed its objective: what Kann and Steiger said was excessively dignified, in a way that might be harmful to a proper analysis of the outrage in Karachi.

"His murder is an act of barbarism," they asserted, "that makes a mockery of everything that Danny's kidnappers claimed to believe in."

Regard this sentence closely. The slaughter of this good man was certainly a barbaric action; but the precise sin of which Kann and Steiger have accused Pearl's killers is hypocrisy. The editors of the Journal denounced them as bad Muslims!

It goes without saying that cold-blooded murder is a violation of every religion's teaching, but what is most horrifying about cold-blooded murder is surely not that it is a sin. Indeed, what is true about the death of Daniel Pearl is the very opposite of what Kann and Steiger said about it. Kann and Steiger are correct to suggest that the origins of this deed are to be sought in a system of belief, but they have it backwards. The slaughter of Daniel Pearl did not make a mockery of what his slaughterers believe. It was the perfect expression, the inevitable consequence, of what his slaughterers believe.

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