He was an American, a Jew -- a trophy
Will militant Islam's apologists finally put an end to their own 'misconceptions'?
Mark Steyn
National Post
There was a young lady of Niger
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
The smile on the face of the tiger is the video recording of the death of Daniel Pearl. What an accomplished production it sounds. According to Pakistani authorities, somewhere between five and eight persons were present to choreograph and record the murder of The Wall Street Journal reporter. They wanted to get it right, and, from their point of view, they did. The Arab News describes the video thus:
"As he finishes the statement, a hand appears from behind and grabs his head, while another hand appears and with a sharp-edged weapon cuts his throat."
In an artistic touch, the camera zooms in for a close-up of Pearl's severed head. See? He is an American and a Jew. We hit the jackpot! And then we cut his head off. A pity the filthy Hollywood infidels have closed their Oscar nominations, or we'd be a sure thing for Best Foreign Short.
Three weeks ago, Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent of Britain's Independent, offered a familiar argument to Pearl's kidnappers: Killing the American would be "a major blunder, an own goal of the worst kind," "the best way of ensuring that the suffering" -- of Kashmiris, Afghans, Palestinians, whatever -- "goes unrecorded." Others peddled a similar line: If you release Daniel, he'll be able to tell your story, get your message out.
Somehow we keep missing the point: the story did get out; the severed head is the message. By now, the tape has been duplicated, and re-duplicated, and copies are circulating through the bazaars and madrassahs. It's a recruitment video -- join the jihad, meet interesting people, and behead them -- and a training video, too: this is how you do it -- the statement, the knife, the defilement of the corpse. But in a more profound sense it's a boast, an act of self-congratulation, a pat on the back for a job well done: the smile on the face of the tiger.
Daniel Pearl reckoned he could ride the tiger: he was promised a meeting with an Islamofascist bigwig, so he got in a car with intermediaries he thought he knew. George Jonas wrote a brilliant column the other day on the delusions of those who think they can "establish a 'dialogue' with fanatics" or, as some of Pearl's friends put it, "bridge the misconceptions." The "misconception", presumably, is that these men are ruthless, violent, depraved. As surely we know by now, the only misconception is that that's a misconception.
Pearl thought he had won their trust, that they had accepted him as an honest broker, recognized his genuine sympathy for Muslim suffering, were willing to treat with him as one human being to another. But in the end they saw none of that: To them, he was an American, a Jew, a trophy. So they set a trap. According to one witness in a Karachi court, Omar Sheikh boasted two days beforehand that they were about to seize someone who was "anti-Islam and a Jew." By the time Robert Fisk issued his plea for mercy on February 4th, Pearl was already dead.
In Saturday's Independent, Fisk reflected on the death of the man described as his friend: "But why was he killed? Because he was a Westerner, a 'Kaffir'? Because he was an American? Or because he was a journalist?" Anyone spot the missing category? It's the one Omar Sheikh used, and the one acknowledged by Daniel Pearl in his last words: "Yes, I am a Jew ..." Fisk can't bring himself to use the word in the entire column. Full disclosure: After noodling incoherently around possible reasons for the murder, Fisk settles on a "shameful, unethical headline" over an "article by Mark Steyn" in Pearl's own Wall Street Journal. It was about Fisk's bloody beating by an Afghan mob in Pakistan last December, after which he said that, in their shoes, "I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find." It's not their fault, he insisted, their "brutality is entirely the product of others." As Fisk sees it, the mob who attacked him were "truly innocent of any crime except being the victim of the world." In The Wall Street Journal, I called this "Fiskal responsibility -- it's always the Great Satan's fault."
Insofar as there's any connection between the mugging of this vain buffoon and the murder of Daniel Pearl, it's this: History repeats itself, but, in this instance, the usual order -- tragedy's recapitulation as farce -- has been reversed. Is it too much to hope that militant Islam's apologists might finally put an end to their own "misconceptions"? Islam is not "the victim of the world," but the victim of itself. Omar Sheikh is a British public schoolboy, a graduate of the London School of Economics, and, like Osama and Mohammed Atta, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. Give 'em an e-mail address and they use it for kidnap notes. Give 'em a camcorder and they make a snuff video.
Let's assume that all the chips fell the jihadis' way, that they recruited enough volunteers to be able to kidnap and decapitate every single Jew in Palestine. Then what? Muslims would still be, as General Musharraf told a conference the other day, "the poorest, the most illiterate, the most backward, the most unhealthy, the most unenlightened, the most deprived, and the weakest of all the human race." Who would "the victim of the world" blame next? The evidence of the Sudan, Nigeria, and other parts of Africa suggests that, when there are no Jews to hand, the Islamofascists happily make do with killing Christians. In Kashmir, it's the Hindus' fault. There's always someone.
Musharraf is by far the most interesting character to emerge in that part of the world in some time, and those of us who've long backed him (see my column of October 21st, 1999) as Pakistan's least worst option have been impressed by his actions since September 11th. As I wrote recently, the British should never have created Pakistan (it was a typical botched job by that silly old queen Mountbatten). Nor should the British have created the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service whose "rogue elements" (a term covering about 97% of employees) have their fingerprints on at least some of the outlying parts of the Pearl crime scene. Nor should Pakistan's charming, urbane, westernized elite -- a ruling class whose only deficiency is that they're incapable of ruling -- ever have acceded to the Islamicization of Pakistan's British-derived legal system, under which, for example, Muslims who behead Muslims face the death penalty but Muslims who behead non-Muslims don't. No matter how zealously the Pakistani police pursue Daniel Pearl's murderers, in law his life is of less value than theirs.
This then is Musharraf's moment. Will he allow his country's darkest forces to maintain his people in their squalor? Or will he do as Ataturk did after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? If Pakistan did not exist, it would not be necessary to invent it. But it does exist, so it's necessary to reinvent it, to reverse the vast catalogue of errors made by every wretched administrator from Lord Mountbatten to Nawaz Sharif. At the very least, the General needs to dismantle the ISI and announce immediately that the Islamic biases of the justice system are being abolished and that all individuals are equal before the law.
The Americans will provide certain incentives for him to do this. If Musharraf demurs, Washington will make other arrangements. It's his choice: He can try to ride the tiger, or resolve to kill it and hang it in his trophy room.
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