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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The brutal video of Daniel Pearl's murder is worth seeing because it reminds us of just how bigoted and deeply evil our enemies really are.
Jun 12, 2002 | Shortly after watching the video of Daniel Pearl's execution, I pulled out an anthology titled "Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs." There, spread across Page 80 and 81, was the photograph I could still recall nearly 30 years later. It showed a Vietnamese girl running, naked and howling, away from an explosion, her clothes incinerated by napalm. Unsparingly, the photograph shows her bony ribs, her sticklike arms, her gaping mouth, her genitals.
For that picture, an Associated Press photographer named Nick Ut won the Pulitzer Prize for spot news in 1973. Far from being some disengaged voyeur, Ut had been wounded three times in the war and lost a brother to it. And in the United States, his photograph came to symbolize all that was ceaselessly tragic and senselessly destructive about the Vietnam War.
Throughout the pages of "Capture the Moment," in fact, I found many such photographs, all of them deemed worthy of journalism's highest award. There is Edward Adams' photo of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong lieutenant during the Tet Offensive of 1968. There is Greg Marinovich's shot of African National Congress fighters setting afire a spy from the rival Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party.
The two prizewinning photographs from 1994 cumulatively explain why the United States got into and out of the humanitarian intervention in Somalia. The first, taken by Kevin Carter of the New York Times, captures a vulture hunching behind a supine, emaciated child. The second, shot six months later by Paul Watson of the Toronto Star, depicts the body of an American serviceman being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
It would not surprise me if every one of these photographers were widely reviled for being not merely sensationalistic but inhumane. As if to address that very question, "Capture the Moment" explains that Ut took the Vietnamese girl to the hospital and remained in contact with her for many years, that Carter shooed away the vulture and, a few months after winning the Pulitzer, committed suicide, leaving a reader to wonder if it wasn't out of desperation or guilt arising from his own images.
What I kept thinking, all along, is that this is what we, as journalists, do. We intrude. We afflict. We reawaken slumbering anguish. We assault the senses with images worthy of nightmares. And we tell ourselves, not falsely, that we do this out of a belief in the transforming power of knowledge, of what the intellectual historian Anne Douglas called in a different vein "terrible honesty."
The propaganda tape of Daniel Pearl's final words and decapitation deserves to be available on the Internet precisely because it is so shocking, so ghastly, so brutal, so barbaric. Has the Boston Phoenix acted entirely out of moral conscience and journalistic integrity in linking to the video from its Web site, and running still photographs in its print edition, as its publisher Stephen Mindich would have us believe? I doubt it. Three months after Pearl's murder, Mindich's decision smacks of promotional genius as much as First Amendment principle. But what honest journalist, covering a war or catastrophe, can honestly deny the way ambition and social conscience commingle in our souls?
Certainly, Mindich is right in his central thesis. In a way that no article about Pearl's execution or even CBS News' edited, bloodless excerpt of the tape possibly can, the unexpurgated video on the Internet attests to the nature of America's enemy in the war against terror. The most unnerving seconds in the video are not those when a knife is dragged across Pearl's neck or a hand holds aloft his severed head. No, they are those when Pearl, voice shaky, intones the script that reveals the motive.
"I'm a Jewish American," he tells the camera. "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 is named after my great-grandfather, who was one of the founders." After a few cursory comments about the Guantánamo Bay prisoners, Pearl returns to his captors' dogma about America's "unconditional support of the government of the state of Israel" and its "24 uses of the veto power to justify the massacres of children."
