Witnessing a Murder

By: Wayne Robins On the Line Column

On my computer, I watched a video of Daniel Pearl being murdered. The link was provided by the Boston Phoenix's Web site (http://www.bostonphoenix.com). The alternative weekly newspaper and its publisher, Stephen M. Mindich, have been scorned by all the usual guardians of taste and propriety. (For the record, I am a free-lance contributor to the music section of the Boston Phoenix.) I am also, and it is relevant here, a Jew.

I watched the full video twice, to make sure that what I had heard and seen were true: Daniel Pearl, in a calm, clear voice, exhibiting more courage than I have ever seen, admitting to his Pakistani captors he was a Jew. He is asked to repeat and affirm that he was a Jew and that he had visited Israel, where a street is named after one of his forefathers. Soon, one of the butchers is holding Pearl's severed head by the hair and bobbing it for the camera.

Sober but shortsighted pundits weighed in heavily against the Phoenix. "At bottom, the link and the photos failed to advance the story: We knew that The Wall Street Journal reporter had been brutally murdered. ... It's nothing more than a snuff film," wrote Mark McGuire of the Times Union in Albany, N.Y.

No, it is absolutely not a snuff film. It is a wake-up call. While the president restructures the Department of Defensiveness and Dysfunction, many of us have been seduced into underrating the genocidal -- anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish -- impulse of the enemy.

Mainstream newspaper Web sites, of course, have shown nil interest in the video. Ken Sands, interactive editor of The Spokesman-Review (http://www.spokesmanreview.com), in Spokane, Wash., was typical: "I wouldn't go so far as to say, not in a million years'' would he link to the video, "but maybe 999,999 years."

J.D. Lasica of the Online Journalism Review (http://www.ojr.org) sees this as dangerous thinking: "What news organizations should not do is default into their classic gatekeeper mode of deciding they alone know what's best." Speaking of online sites in particular, he said: "We're mature, we're informed, we can decide for ourselves whether we can stomach it."

Praise, or at least grudging respect, for the Phoenix is hard to find. But it's out there. Jan Herman, who produces "The Juice" Web log on MSNBC.com, wrote: "For the first time in my life, after seeing that video, I understand in my gut what I have always thought I understood in my head. ... After seeing the video, I now tremble with the same foreboding that two weeks ago two Holocaust survivors told me they were feeling: 'It can happen again; it has already begun.'"

"It" is the Second Holocaust, written about so eloquently (and controversially) by Ron Rosenbaum of The New York Observer, now archived on the weekly's Web site (http://www.nyobserver.com) and debated heatedly among American Jewish intellectuals these last few months.

Daniel Pearl was not decapitated so we could turn our heads away. Or is it now our journalistic instinct to ignore hard truths? Pearl was killed for being a Jew. The agonizing video sends a profound message, and so we must send one back: Never forget, never forgive, never again.