All the while, the screen displays scenes of supposed Palestinian victims of Israel -- infants with head wounds, a sobbing mother, a young man on his funeral bier. There comes the famous footage of a Palestinian boy and his father huddling amid a shootout in Gaza during the early days of the al-Aksa intifada. President Bush is shown shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Almost as an afterthought, bombs explode, presumably from the American campaign in Afghanistan.

To see this film is to have little doubt that Daniel Pearl, while he may have been kidnapped as an American and a journalist, was slain as a Jew. And that recognition, that awful truth, as Mindich argues, has not adequately sunk in. For understandable reasons, Pearl's family and his employers at the Wall Street Journal made little or no mention of Pearl's religion and Israeli heritage while there was still hope for his negotiated release. Before and after Pearl's death, his wife and now widow, Mariane, has repeatedly emphasized his openness, his universalism. The statement released by Pearl's family, after they learned of his death, memorialized him as "a musician, a writer, a story-teller, and a bridge-builder ... a walking sunshine of truth, humor, friendship and compassion."

Who could doubt all that? And who could doubt the distress of Mariane Pearl after CBS aired its video excerpt, when she said, "It is beyond our comprehension that any mother, wife, father or sister should have to relive this horrific tragedy." Rarely have I heard a rationale as loathsome as Mindich's contention that "if Daniel had his choice, he'd want it seen."

I'm sure that when I showed up at the doorstep of a family in Piscataway, N.J., a few mornings before Christmas 1977, knocking on a front door that was decorated like a giant, beribboned gift box, their choice would surely have been not to talk to a reporter about how their teenaged son had been shot to death the night before on his job as a drive-in bank teller. I'm sure the parents of a college student murdered during spring break in Fort Lauderdale felt the same way when I had to call them up on deadline for a comment.

But this is what we do. And just because Daniel Pearl was one of us, and we grieve for him in the way we rarely grieve for all those strangers we write about, is no reason to obscure the hideous truth of his murder. Nobody is being forced to click on that link. Nor is anyone likely to again be passively faced with it the way viewers of CBS News were.

Human nature wants us to forget the horrors we have seen, which is why they revisit us in our sleep, when our defenses are down. Cerebrally, we understand that al-Qaida is a hateful and ruthless foe, and just as cerebrally we want to achieve distance from what that means. Let us not forget, either, that in large parts of the Muslim world it is still assumed that the tape is some American or Israeli forgery, just as it is widely believed that the Mossad attacked the World Trade Center.

But when I look on Nick Ut's photograph today, all the revisionism about the Vietnam War instantly falls away, and I understand anew why it sickened this country. And just as surely, when I hear the quavering in Daniel Pearl's final, forced words and see the residual anguish on his death's head, when I am thrust up against the joyful sadism of his executioners, I know exactly why this war must be fought.

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