Judea Pearl: Western media too objective
Father of beheaded journalist criticizes film comparing son with his murderers; ‘Danny and the people who killed him are not on the same level’ Pearl says
LOS ANGELES - Judea Pearl is going to war; a war against 'objectivism', against those who attempt to explain and justify the other side, no matter what that other side is.
Laying on his desk is the latest documentary about his son, a piece entitled "The Journalist and the Jihadist", directed by Rasham Sharma and Ahmed Jamal.
The piece depicts the life of Wall Street Journal reporter, and Judea’s son, Daniel Pearl - who was kidnapped in January 2002 while working in Pakistan, and beheaded on February 14 - alongside the life of Omar Sheikh, the man who planned Pearl's kidnapping.
Pearl while being held by captors (Photo: AP)
The film, which will be broadcast Saturday night on the Documentary Channel, compares the home lives of both men, bringing their two worlds closer until their tragic meeting in early 2002.
The first was raised in a warm, Jewish family in California, the second, in an expensive boarding school in England. The first played violin and prepared for his bar mitzvah, while the second felt growing rage throughout his teenage years, which he released in bar-fights at the local pubs.
According to Pearl, the directors are making the same value judgments about the murderer and the victim. "They dealt with the issue with silk gloves and missed the chance to explain what Danny represents and what Omar Sheikh represents."
"There's no doubt that Daniel and Omar Sheikh are not two parallel stories. This is a war between East and West, between the open world that Daniel represented to the closed world, which closes more and more every day," Pearl said.
The bereaved father is worried about people's tendency to view his son merely as someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, who fell victim due to chance or carelessness.
He said it was time to make a distinction between the Western world, in which there is racial tolerance, freedom of expression and human rights, and the world of Sheikh, which has 80 million viewers of Al-Jazeera and similar stations.
“These viewers, even if they don't justify the actual murder, understand and sympathize with its motivations.
"There's excessive objectivity. It took us a lot of time to explain to the directors that these are not two sides to the same coin. The first version of the film compared between Daniel and Omar in a neutral manner, as if they were merely two people with different perspectives,” Pearl said.
Where does this tendency towards excessive objectivity come from?
"In the Western world, sadly, it's become a routine. The West doesn't understand that this is a par-excellence cultural war. (They believe) every opinion has an opposite opinion that is equally valid, ethical and historical.
"If we've learned anything from Danny's tragedy, it's that there is no moral relativity. Danny and the people who killed him are not on the same level, they're not on the same side in the next world."
The movie "The Journalist and the Jihadist" replicates Daniel Pearl's last days, before the kidnapping.
He was determined to undertake one last journalistic mission before he and his wife, Marian, pregnant with their child, left Karachi: An interview with Sheikh Jilani, a terrorist leader whose organization was suspected of having transferred funds to Al-Qaeda.
The final mystery
He met with a man named Bashir, who tempted him to go into a restaurant in order to establish contact with Jilani. Pearl didn't know that Bashir was actually the now-notorious terrorist Omar Sheikh.
Prior to the meeting, Pearl even managed to consult with the security officer at the American consulate, who warned him to stay in a public place. For some reason, Pearl did not heed the warning, and got into a cab with Omar Sheikh, at which point he disappeared.
Pearl’s father said he was confused about how Sheikh managed to convince his son to get into that cab. “It’s a mystery. I guess the journalist in Danny overcame the cautious man in him,” Pearl said.
A few days later, photographs began arriving to the news agencies: Pearl, sitting bound, a gun held to his head. A short while after the terrorists transferred a list of their bombastic demands to the United States,
Daniel Pearl was brutally murdered and his body bisected.
His son, Adam, was born a few months later.
