Killing Daniel Pearl. You're next
By Alan Caruba
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posted February 25, 2002
The initial shock of the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon is beginning to wear off. That's the way it is with moments of horror, even when they are captured on videotape or films from earlier times. See the image enough and you grow sadly accustomed to it. Or you change the channel.
Since 9-11, the nation has geared up for new attacks on the "homeland", but nothing much has seemed to change. There's a new presidential appointee for homeland security and the airport people now work for the federal government.
We had a case of the jitters from the anthrax scare. The security for the Olympics was so intense there were more troops in Salt Lake City than Kabul. Still, it remains a largely covert war. We know little of it.
Instead, we hear news of spring training for baseball, and, of course, the hype about the Academy Awards is just beginning. There's even word that the recession may well be over by autumn. We're hearing less about Enron. Life in America has regained is normal rhythm.
 “My father is a Jew, my mother is a Jew, and I am a Jew.” |
In Pakistan, however, the Jihad continues. What we were told was that an "American" reporter for The Wall Street Journal had been kidnapped. Then we heard he had been murdered. His killers videotaped his execution; proud of their barbarism, besotted by their pathological hated. His last words, reportedly, were “My father is a Jew, my mother is a Jew, and I am a Jew.”
Here's what you were not told about Daniel Pearl. He was a combination of everything militant Muslims hate. His father, Yehuda, is an expert on artificial intelligence and world famous scholar. He was born in Tel Aviv and, along with his wife, Ruth, they moved to Princeton where Daniel was born. So, Daniel Pearl was an American citizen, an Israeli citizen, and a Jew. You may not have known that.
It is instructive that throughout the wait to learn his fate, few, if any, newspapers mentioned his religion. His Judaism was a death sentence. Even in death, one daily's editorial decrying his murder still could not bring itself to actually publish the word "Jewish." They referred to "his religion."
We are now reliving the dark days of the 1930's in Nazi Germany, forced to revisit them as if we are trapped in a time warp like the movie, "Groundhog Day," but no one is laughing. As one famed victim of the Nazis said, they first came for the communists, then the unionists, then the Jews, and so on.
By the time they got to him, there was no one left to protest. Anti-Semitism is always the calling card of a new despotism. Anti-Semitism and the killing of Jews always precedes a new wave of terror whose purpose is to impose an ideological slavery. It does not matter whether it was Lenin's Communism, the rise of Nazism or the call for Islamic jihad.
In Israel, the barbarians are in the streets. In America, this time the barbarians aren't just at the gates. They are right here, thousands of dedicated militant Muslims and we have no idea who they are or where they are.
Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute not long ago, former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, warned that "Islamic militants have irrational goals, the conquest of the world, and the taming of mankind to rules that are against human nature." Communists, he noted, had similar goals but pursued them "rationally." Islamic militants, however, "may very well choose destruction. And this pathological streak is what makes militant Islam so dangerous. We are faced with enemies that, if they acquire weapons of mass death, will use them. Be absolutely confident of that."
Here's what we know about militant Islam. It enslaved Afghanistan for five years. It involves the duplicity of the Saudis, the vicious Pan-Arab assault on Israel, the threats voiced against America daily by Iran's leaders, Saddam's mad dreams to be the next Saladin, and Daniel Pearl's lonely death.
Are their good Muslims? Out of 1.2 billion people, the answer is surely yes. Are they marching in the streets protesting the actions of their co-religionists? No. Can they save themselves from the countless millions among them who are determined to impose Islam on the world? No. Must we impose our will upon the madness of the Middle East and seek out the enemies in our midst? Yes. We know who the enemy is. Let us give them no quarter.
They intend to destroy us. You're next. 
Alan Caruba is the author of "A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam", available from the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center. He writes a weekly column, "Warning Signs", also posted on the Center's site.
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