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It has been nearly eight years since Ruth and Judea Pearl were confronted by the most unspeakable horror that any parent can contemplate. But rather than retreat into grief and anger, they have instead ensured that the flame of their son’s memory, and everything he stood for, has continued to burn with undiminished urgency and relevance. Because of their work, and the work of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, Danny’s life continues to illuminate our world.
Daniel Pearl’s legacy is a powerful one, precisely because he embodied so many of the best values and convictions of our country and of the Jewish faith and people, with which he courageously identified himself in the final moment of his life. They are the values that were taught to him by his parents—the values that animate this great university in which he was educated—and the values that informed his decision to pursue a career in journalism.
I am speaking of the values of freedom of thought and expression, of curiosity and tolerance; and the conviction that people from different backgrounds, cultures, and faiths can not only live together and work together in peace and prosperity but that our world is made a richer, more meaningful place by virtue of doing so. It is the belief that the things that bind all of us together as human beings—history, humor, music, love, and friendship—are capable of transcending whatever differences divide us.
Our responsibility in gathering tonight, I believe, is not only to celebrate the values that defined Danny’s life—but also to confront the terrible reality of his death, and the forces that were responsible for it.
The reason that Danny Pearl died so young is not because of a tragic accident, a sudden illness, or a natural disaster. It is not because of a random act of violence, or common criminality. It is not because of a misunderstanding or a miscommunication.
What ended Danny’s life was a deliberate and calculated act of evil. He was murdered by men who knew what they believed, and who knew what they were doing. What animated and inspired them was not terrorism, which is merely a tactic, but a specific worldview and ideology.
It was the fanatical ideology of Islamist extremism that motivated Daniel Pearl’s killers—an ideology that not only justifies but glorifies and rejoices in shedding the blood of innocents, and that I believe represents the most direct and dangerous threat in the world today to the quintessentially liberal values that Danny Pearl stood for, and that America was founded to stand for.
At the heart of the ideology that motivated Danny Pearl’s killers is not religion but the same totalitarian impulse that we have seen appear and reappear, like a pestilence, across numerous countries and cultures and eras, intensely so during the past hundred years.
It is a belief that the most brutal imaginable violence can eradicate personal freedom, political freedom, and religious freedom and bring about a society in which women are treated as chattel, homosexuals are stoned to death, and Christians, Jews, Hindus, and other religious faiths are marked for oppression if not extinction, and in which everyone is terrorized into conformity as it is defined by a deranged minority.
This is the worldview that caused the murder of Daniel Pearl. It is the pathology that is also responsible for the deaths of countless other innocent men, women, and children, of every religion and race and on almost continent, over the past 30 years—from Bali, Indonesia, in 2002, to Mumbai, India, in November of last year, and from Madrid in 2004 to here in the United States on September 11, 2001.
As a country that is founded on truths that we hold to be self-evident, about the fundamental equality and dignity of all people, it is difficult for us to grasp how significant numbers of our fellow human beings could fall prey to an ideology whose tenets are so self-evidently insane. Yet we know from history that such pathologies are not only capable of taking root but of inspiring millions of people in even the most civilized and developed nations to commit the most horrific crimes of mass murder.
Part of the perversity of evil is that, the greater its depravity, the greater is our temptation to avert our eyes from it, to look away, to convince ourselves that we cannot possibly be seeing what we are in fact seeing. Indeed, that is one of the reasons such evil persists.
Of course all of us would like to live in a world governed by reason. But the fact is, there are hatreds and pathologies so strong that they cannot be negotiated, or reasoned, or bribed, or loved out of existence. They must be confronted, fought, and defeated—or else they will defeat us. And so it is with Islamist extremism.
Islamist Extremism and the Murder of Daniel Pearl
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© 2009 Commentary Inc.
