Don’t forget the murder of Daniel Pearl, “the Jew”
[NOTE: Yesterday on the thread about the murder – and attempted beheading – of Andrew Wimsatt in Austin, commenter “Marlene” brought up the murder/beheading of Daniel Pearl and wondered whether his being a Jew had anything to do with him being targeted. I replied that it did, and linked to a post I had written on the subject in October of 2023, just a few weeks after 10/7. Here’s the post again, because I think it’s become even more relevant as time has gone on.]
Remember Daniel Pearl? Why do I start this post with him? He was the first terrorist victim – at least the first I can remember – whose death contained that special element of horrific sadism and psychopathic brutality crossed with modern technology, in that his beheading was videoed and purposely broadcast by the perpetrators. This was way before ISIS, but it foreshadowed the behavior of that group. It was something out of a psychological horror movie, and yet it was real.
Pearl was held hostage first, too. And then before the terrorists killed him he was forced to say things such as, “I am a Jew.” That was very very important to the terrorists, although the US seemed to be their main target for the moment.
Here’s an interesting fact that I never knew before, about Daniel Pearl’s mother, which is that she was an Iraqi Jew who fled that country in the 1940s because of persecution and violence:
Pearl was born Eveline Rejwan on November 11, 1935, in Baghdad, Iraq. Her father, Joseph, was a tailor who ran an import business, and her mother, Victoria (Abada) Rejwan, was a homemaker. … When Pearl was 5, she lived through the Farhud, an outbreak of anti-Jewish violence in Iraq following a failed nationalist coup. She and her family hid in their home for days, protected by their Arab neighbors who told rioters that no Jews lived there.
Her family then moved to a suburb of Baghdad but anti-Jewish attacks persisted and she herself witnessed the bodies of Iraqi Jews hanging from gallows in a square. Her father lost vision in one eye after an assault and he had to bribe a police officer to free his two sons after they were arrested on false charges.
In the late 1940s, Pearl worked with an underground Zionist movement that facilitated the emigration of Jews, then illegal, to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. At this time, Pearl began using the Hebrew name Ruth. Around 1948, her two older brothers were smuggled into Palestine from Iraq. In 1949, Ruth’s oldest brother was killed fighting for the Israeli army, which she did not learn about until years later as her father had withheld the information from his family. In 1951, Pearl arrived with her family in Israel as part of the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews.
So the horror of Arab anti-Semitism was one of her earliest experiences, long before the nightmare returned in a very personal way.
Pearl’s mother met her husband Judah Pearl in Israel, and they moved to the US in 1950 for graduate studies. Both were scientists. Ruth Pearl died in 2021, but her husband is still alive at 87, and he was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to Polish-Jewish immigrants who had had the prescience and good fortune to be able to emigrate to Israel.
Daniel Pearl was abducted, held hostage, and murdered by various jihadi groups in 2002, when he was 38 years old. That was over 20 years ago, so you may have forgotten some of the details that perhaps didn’t seem so important at the time. But here are a few:
On February 21, 2002, a video was released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The video shows Pearl’s mutilated body …
The Jew Daniel Pearl. And of course there was the broadcasting, with great pride, of not just the killing but the mutilation. What seemed so unusual back then stopped being unusual a long time ago, because we’ve seen many such videos over the years. And now, with social media, we have refinements such as this: filming the murder of a young man on his cellphone, and sending the video to his mother.
But back to Pearl and the video of his killing. During the video, Pearl was made to say at the outset:
My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish-American from Encino, California, USA. I come from, uh, on my father’s side the family is Zionist. My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.
Jewish, Jewish, Jewish; Israel, Israel, Israel. That was no mere detail to Pearl’s killers. It’s not that they won’t kill non-Jews; they certainly will, and with relish. But it is Jews they wish to eliminate from the earth first. One can argue about what the Koran says about Jews; it says a lot of contradictory things, many of them not good. But you can’t argue about what hadith Hamas chose to put in its charter as inspiration:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him
So do not be surprised when Palestinians and Palestinian sympathizers in Western countries stand in public squares and celebrate the killing of Jews and scream that they want to kill more. As courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali writes:
In short, anti-Semites the world over have been emboldened by this crisis, and Jews are once again being blamed for their own massacre. And I am not remotely surprised. In my childhood, I was steeped in the Islamist movement’s noxious anti-Semitism — which has been on such ugly display this week.
Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, I spent my early years escaping political strife after my father was imprisoned for being an anti-government activist. We moved between countries before settling in Kenya.
The worst insult in the Somali community was to be called a ‘Jew’, not that any of us actually knew one. To be called a ‘Jew’ was so abhorrent, some felt justified in killing anyone who so dishonoured them with this ‘slur’.
As a teenager in Nairobi in the 1980s, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood — the strict Sunni Islamist movement, founded in Egypt in 1928, from which Hamas ultimately descends.
I vividly remember sitting with my female fellows in mosques, cursing Israel and praying to Allah to destroy the Jews. We were certainly not interested in a peaceful ‘two-state solution’: we were taught to want to see Israel wiped off the map.
When I was 16, my school’s teacher of religion was Sister Aziza. She read to us the Koran’s lurid descriptions of the everlasting fire that burns flesh and dissolves skin — the place reserved for Jews.
Sister Aziza described Jews as physically monstrous, with horns coming from their heads, out of which flew devils that would corrupt the world. Jews controlled everything, she told us, and it was the duty of Muslims to destroy them.
It was a lot to take in for a teenager who read Western romance novels in secret, but I believed every word. …
[Much later] I abandoned my religion, but I have never lost my clear-sighted understanding, forged in my childhood, of Islamism’s pathological hatred of Jews, as well as Muslims considered as heretics and non-Muslims in general.
The former Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi — a one-time leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — declared that Muslims should ‘nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred’ of Jews.
One of the most chilling things about the 10/7 terrorist attacks was that for several previous years Hamas pretended to be backing away from violence, and fooled Israel into thinking that actually was true. Now they are bragging about the success of their deception, which caused the Israelis to give them travel permits and also to let down their guard somewhat. According to a Hamas official:
“We made them think Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians [there] and had abandoned the resistance altogether. All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack.”
And they want this to be a worldwide effort. They’ve been preparing the ground for decades: emigrating to Western nations, using propaganda in the MSM, and enlisting many allies in academia (see this). Perhaps they have overestimated their support and overplayed their hand, causing at least some of their erstwhile allies in the Western Left to recoil in horror. Perhaps. But perhaps not. There is no mistaking their intent anymore, nor the lengths to which they are willing to go to achieve it.
9/11 was a wakeup call for a lot of people. And so is this. The question is whether it will be heeded.
We have been getting “wake up calls” since 9/11/2001. Even earlier, if you want to go all the way back to the Jefferson presidency and his war against the musselmen of his day. The ones who expressly stated that their habit of piracy and kidnapping of European men, women and children for the purpose of selling them (at least the ones they did not immediately murder) into slavery was commanded by their “prophet” and his “holy book.” But we have been blithely going on our way, comforted by the delusion that islam is just another “religion” that deserves our respect and toleration as required by “muh constitution.” Of course, there were and are plenty of quislings, like the idiot Bush who asserted, as recently as a few days ago, that islam is a religion of peace! Utter historical ignorance is perhaps one explanation, although one can never rule out other possible motives, including but not limited to financial ones. I hope and pray to the one and only true God of The Bible that we awaken before we are brought to the slaughterhouse, like Pearl and so many others who have been needlessly sacrificed on the altar of “tolerance” for islam.
The list of Muslim attacks on people besides the large 9/11 is just added on by from single murders to dozens at a time. But each is adding to the Jihadists totals.
Islam delenda est.
The crocodile’s (or scorpion’s) greatest strength is the wishful thinking of it’s current prey,
“It is full, it won’t eat or kill me.”
Islam is worse than any crocodile or scorpion, it is never satiated.
This is something I understand only in part. That Islam has a deep and special animus for the Jewish people. Refering to your other post about former President Bush once again saying Islam is a “religion of peace” it is not. There might be peaceful Muslims. There might be elements of Islam that are peaceful. But taken as a whole?
It is about conquest. About making the world Muslim. Or else.
But this special hatred for the Jewish people? beyond the hatred toward Christianity? That is harder to explain.
In graduate school I took a seminar on Muhammad and the rise of Islam. Wrote a long paper on Christian and Muslim relations during the lifetime of Muhammad. Think I learned some things. Basically at first relations between Muhammad and Christians (and Jews) were not that negative. Hey they are ahl al-kitab People of the Book(s) (the Torah and the Gospels – which is about how much Muhammad understood the Jewish scriptures and the New Testament).
But one can discern over time relations became increasingly negative as this new prophet claimed he has a supreme revelation that corrects and overturns Judaism and Christianity. Surely they’ll agree he is a prophet! Nope. Some Christians did. But the more he and his revelation were rejected the more relations soured to the point where they were regarded as the Enemy.
Without doing more research I suspect that is where this special animus comes from. We know the fledgling Islamic movement encountered Christians and Jews in the Arabian peninsula. Some (especially Christians) converted. Most did not.
Palestinianism is only the tip of a larger spear which is Islamism. The need to convert and subdue the world.
“September 11, 2001, was not the day America began the long war. It was the day America became aware of the long war pagan enemies had been waging against us for decades. We took casualties here and there, but we told ourselves — particularly after we prevailed in the long, expensive Cold War — that history was over. The struggle between good and evil had culminated. We had won. There was no real opposition to the Western democracy we embodied, except some scattered nutballs who blew up the occasional building or shot up the occasional airport. Those casualties were less than a rounding error. We could take that kind of damage without noticing it, without changing anything. We were at peace. Or so we thought.
“Our enemies did not think so. We had enemies, even if we were too busy enjoying ourselves to acknowledge it. 9/11 threw the truth in our face.
“History wasn’t over. History will never be over. And the fight against evil will never be over.” ~ Kurt Schlicter
Read the whole thing.
I do remember Daniel Pearl. RIP.
If you have been paying attention and not been distracted by the always new shiny thing, Islam’s atrocities aren’t a surprise.
The media doesn’t want you to remember or know about Islam’s basic behavior.
“September 11, 2001, was not the day America began the long war. It was the day America became aware of the long war pagan enemies had been waging against us for decades. We took casualties here and there, but we told ourselves — particularly after we prevailed in the long, expensive Cold War — that history was over. The struggle between good and evil had culminated. We had won. There was no real opposition to the Western democracy we embodied, except some scattered nutballs who blew up the occasional building or shot up the occasional airport. Those casualties were less than a rounding error. We could take that kind of damage without noticing it, without changing anything. We were at peace. Or so we thought.
“Our enemies did not think so. We had enemies, even if we were too busy enjoying ourselves to acknowledge it. 9/11 threw the truth in our face.
“History wasn’t over. History will never be over. And the fight against evil will never be over.” ~ Kurt Schlicter. Read the whole thing.
In my little university town there is an Islamic center surrounded by a high fence. The university, a state institution, loves foreign students, mostly mid-easteners, because they are full-pay. We are thus supporting a nasty ideology, Islam, an ideology largely hateful, NOT a religion. It is disguised as a religion because of America’s tolerance of all faiths. So, Houston, we have a problem. The Judeo-Christian world needs mid-eastern oil and thus enriches populations that hate us.
I personally hate Islam and wish we could drive all Muslims out of the US.
Unfortunately … no
@ Cicero > “The Judeo-Christian world needs mid-eastern oil and thus enriches populations that hate us.”
I note how hard the Left (fronted by the Democrats) fights against any Republican efforts to decrease that dependency.
An appropriate pair of memes from Sarah Hoyt today.
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/798274651_1111477121213316_9341526544213315_n.jpg
https://accordingtohoyt.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/d950518aef904b1e8c4469894dc7a6f427b4bef1f25c7e14024e17101ccd0a4c.png
Re: Islam and Peace
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The relationship between the word Islam and peace is primarily linguistic and theological, though interpretations vary. The term Islam is derived from the Arabic root s-l-m, which shares etymological origins with salam, meaning peace. This root also conveys meanings of submission, surrender, and safety ….
Some scholars and critics argue that Islam strictly means submission or surrender to God, and that linking it directly to “peace” is a modern interpretive choice rather than a literal translation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam
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I had assumed that W’s “religion of peace” claim was a pragmatic attempt to avoid putting the US at odds with the entire Muslim world after 9-11.
Now I’m not so sure.
We keep trying to be conciliatory with Islam in the hopes it will moderate. It doesn’t seem to be working.
@Rick67: But this special [Islamic] hatred for the Jewish people?
I thought your explanation hit the mark well.
I read Muhammad as a megalomaniac, who came to believe he was the Final Prophet of the Jewish and Christian traditions. When the Jews rejected him, he didn’t take it well. Thus his later “revelations” became vicious towards the Jews.
It’s interesting how Muhammad’s revelations from Allah could conveniently reflect his personal desires.
For instance, Quran 33:37 tells an odd story about how, according to the 9th C historians Ibn Sa’d and al-Tabari, Muhammad became attracted to the wife of his adopted son, Zaid. So Zaid divorced his wife and Muhammad married her. Happy ending!
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So when Zaid totally lost interest in “keeping” his wife, We gave her to you in marriage, so that there would be no blame on the believers for marrying the ex-wives of their adopted sons after their divorce. And Allah’s command is totally binding.
–Quran 33:37
https://quran.com/al-ahzab/37
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How bizarre! I can’t imagine that marrying the ex-wife of one’s adopted son was a burning moral issue among Arabs, or any people for that matter, such that God had to clear it up by giving Muhammad a younger wife.
But I can believe Muhammad would see it that way.
The question was whether an adopted son was really a son. If he were, marrying one’s son’s wife would be sinful. So Muhammad had a revelation to invalidate adoption. To this day, adoption is not recognized in Islamic law.
— huxley
It mostly was pragmatic. It’s easy to forget how hysterical some of the reactions at the time were, there were Americans actually calling for an immediate attack on Mecca, for ex. Bush correctly wanted to tamp that down at home and reassure the ‘neutral’ portions of the Islamic world.
But it is also that Coke commercial/John Lennon song tendency that permeates the educated Boomer class. (Not all Boomers, but the ones in the politically/socially dominant class.) Bush II was less affected by it than some, but it’s like a fish not noticing water, it permeates. It’s reflex. Bush was affected, and a lot of his appointees and family retainers were very much bound up in one side of that.
As a result, Bush found himself opposed from both sides. The rest of his social class were put off by his lack of globalist eagerness, the proto-MAGA wing of the Right thought he was too accommodating of the same.
— neo
I’ve commented before that 911 doesn’t get the memory it deserves in large measure because it is so very inconvenient to so many people. It ruins the globalist, post-historical dream that animates the elite Left, it makes the entire dream a lie. So they desperately want to recast it, redefine, make it go away. We’ve seen that in action for 25 years now.
We should also note, though, that there is a substantial faction on the Right that also finds 911 inconvenient. The Buchanite Right wants to bring the troops home and let the rest of the world look out for itself, 911 makes a mockery of that. I’ve seen many comments and columns and so forth about Iraq and Afghanistan, written by right-leaning pundits and commentators, that excoriate ‘trying to spread democracy’ and don’t even mention 911. Just ignore it, as if we went into Afghanistan and Iraq on some idealistic whim.
911 ruins everything. It makes the hopes and dreams of both John Lennon’s Imagine and the Buchanite/isolationists hopeless. Same deal with October 7. The reflexive impulse of the bipartisan Western ruling class is the same: make it go away!
But it refuses to go away.
There are reports (from one of his sons, I believe) that in the years before h being murdered, Lennon became much more conservative politically and began to wish that “Imagine” would just go away…
@Kate: The question was whether an adopted son was really a son. If he were, marrying one’s son’s wife would be sinful. So Muhammad had a revelation to invalidate adoption. To this day, adoption is not recognized in Islamic law.
I’d need some cites for all of that, especially the general statement that adoption is not recognized in Islamic law.
The Quran verse seems clear, unless it was mistranslated:
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We gave her to you in marriage, so that there would be no blame on the believers for marrying the ex-wives of their adopted sons after their divorce.
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In any event it still strikes me as Muhammad’s ex post-facto justification for taking a younger wife. It’s convenient when you’ve got God in your back pocket to back you up.