Every year on February 1, Unit 1012
will remember Daniel Pearl. We support the death penalty for terrorists but we
also want people to remember the victims and not just on how they died but on
how they live. We send our condolences to the loved ones of Daniel Pearl by
remembering him every year on the date he died. We will also endorse the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
We will post information about him
from Wikipedia.
Born
|
October
10, 1963
Princeton, New Jersey, U.S. |
Died
|
February
1, 2002 (aged 38)
Karachi, Pakistan |
Cause of
death
|
Murder
by beheading
|
Body
discovered
|
May 16,
2002
|
Resting
place
|
Mount
Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California, U.S.
|
Residence
|
Washington,
D.C., U.S.
|
Nationality
|
American
|
Other
names
|
Danny
|
Ethnicity
|
Jewish
|
Citizenship
|
United
States, Israel
|
Education
|
B.A. in
Communication
|
Alma mater
|
Stanford
University
|
Occupation
|
Journalist
|
Employer
|
The
Wall Street Journal
|
Known for
|
Wall
Street journalism
|
Home
town
|
Encino,
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
|
Title
|
South
Asia Bureau Chief
|
Religion
|
Judaism
|
Spouse(s)
|
Mariane
Pearl (1999–2002; his death)
|
Children
|
Adam
Daniel Pearl, born May 28, 2002
|
Parents
|
Judea
Pearl (father) and Ruth Pearl (mother)
|
Relatives
|
Michelle
and Tamara (sisters)
|
Daniel Pearl (October 10, 1963 –
February 1, 2002) was a journalist with American and Israeli citizenship. He
was kidnapped while working as the South Asia Bureau Chief of The Wall
Street Journal, based in Mumbai, India. He had gone to Pakistan as part of
an investigation into the alleged links between Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber")
and Al-Qaeda. He was subsequently beheaded by his captors.
In July 2002, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national
of Pakistani origin, was sentenced to death by hanging for Pearl's abduction
and murder.
In March 2007, at a closed military
hearing in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stated that he had
personally beheaded Pearl. Al-Qaeda member Saif al-Adel has also been connected
with the kidnapping.
Early life
Daniel Pearl was born in Princeton,
New Jersey, and grew up in the upscale Encino district of Los Angeles,
California, where he attended Portola Middle School and Birmingham High School.
His father, Judea Pearl, is currently a professor of Computer Science and
Statistics, director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory at UCLA, and a Turing
Award recipient. His mother Ruth is of Iraqi Jewish descent. The history of the
family and its connections to Israel are described by Judea Pearl in the LA
Times article, "Roots in the Holy Land".
Danny, as he was known throughout his
life, attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, where he stood out as a
Communications major with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a member of the Alpha Delta
Phi Fraternity, a co-founder of a student newspaper called the Stanford
Commentator, as well as a reporter for the campus radio station, KZSU.
Pearl graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in Communications, after which he
spent a summer as a Pulliam Fellow intern at The Indianapolis Star. Following
a trip to the then-Soviet Union, China and Europe, he joined the North Adams
Transcript and The Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts, then
moved on to the San Francisco Business Times.
Pearl began at the Wall Street
Journal's Atlanta bureau in 1990, moving to the Washington, D.C., bureau in
1993 to cover telecommunications, and then to the London bureau in 1996. He
wrote articles such as the October 1994 story of a Stradivarius violin
allegedly found on a highway on-ramp, and a June 2000 story about Iranian pop
music. His most notable investigations covered the ethnic wars in the Balkans,
where he discovered that charges of one alleged genocide committed in Kosovo
were unsubstantiated, and the American missile attack on a supposed military
facility in Khartoum, which he proved to be a pharmaceutical factory.
Later, he met and married Mariane Van
Neyenhoff. Their son, Adam Daniel Pearl, was born in Paris, France on May 28,
2002, almost four months after Pearl's death.
Abduction
On January 23, 2002, on his way to
what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani at the Village
Restaurant in downtown Karachi, Pearl was kidnapped near the Metropole
Hotel at 7:00 pm by a militant group calling itself the National Movement for
the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty.
The group claimed Pearl was a spy
and—using a Hotmail e-mail address—sent the United States a range of demands,
including the freeing of all Pakistani terror detainees, and the release of a
halted U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government.
The message read:
"We give you one more day if America will not meet our demands we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan."
Photos of Pearl handcuffed with a gun
at his head and holding up a newspaper were attached. There was no response to
pleas from Pearl's editor, nor from his wife Mariane.
Beheading
Nine days later, Pearl was beheaded.
On May 16 his severed head and decomposed body were found cut into ten pieces,
and buried—along with the jacket of a tracksuit Pearl was wearing when
photographed by his kidnappers—in a shallow grave at Gadap, about 30 miles
north of Karachi. When the police found Pearl's remains, Abdul Sattar Edhi, one
of the most active philanthropists in Pakistan, arrived promptly on the scene,
personally collected all ten body parts, and took them to the morgue. Pearl's
body was returned to the U.S., and was interred in the Mount Sinai Memorial
Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. No autopsy was performed as the
subsequent video made obvious the sequence of events leading to Pearl's death.
Daniel Pearl stating his identity in the
video produced by his captors. The text reads Arabic: اسمی
دانیال بیرل، انا یھودی امریکی English: My name is Daniel Pearl, I am an American Jew
|
Video of
his murder
On February 21, 2002, a videotape was
released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.
The video shows Pearl's mutilated body, and lasts 3 minutes and 36 seconds.
During the video, Pearl said:
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.
In addition, Pearl was required to
condemn American foreign policy. However, his parents have stated that this was
propaganda, and that Pearl was in fact "a proud American, and he abhorred
extremist ideologies." The family also listed some signals from Pearl in
the video which shows he disagreed with what he was forced to say.
Following these statements, Daniel
Pearl's throat was slit, and his head was severed.
The ending of the video concludes with
the captors demanding the release of all Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay,
and warns that if their demands are not met, they would repeat the scene
"again and again."
Arrests
Pearl's father expressed concern in
February 2002 that his son's Israeli citizenship would have an adverse effect
on the investigation.
Three suspects were caught after the
IP address of those who sent the ransom e-mail was traced by the Karachi
police. The arrests were carried out after investigation by Pakistani detective
Mir Zubair Mahmood, assisted by an FBI computer expert. The mastermind of the
kidnapping, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, surrendered to a former ISI officer, Brig.
Ijaz Shah, who concealed Sheikh's whereabouts from the Karachi police for a
week. Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had been in an Indian prison in connection with
1994 Kidnappings of Western tourists in India, and had been freed by the Indian
government in exchange for passengers aboard hijacked Indian Airlines Flight
814 in December 1999.
On March 21, 2002, in Pakistan, Ahmed
Omar Saeed Sheikh and three other suspects were charged with murder for their
part in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. They were convicted on July
15, 2002, and Sheikh was sentenced to death. Sheikh has appealed the sentence,
but hearings in his case were postponed over 30 times, and no definitive date
had been set.
In his book In the Line of Fire,
then-President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf stated that Sheikh was an agent of
MI6, who at some point became a double agent.
On March 10, 2007, Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, an alleged Al Qaeda operative reported to be third in command under
Osama bin Laden, claimed responsibility, before his Combatant Status Review
Tribunal, for the murder of Daniel Pearl. He claimed to have beheaded him. In a
confession read during his Tribunal hearing, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said
"I decapitated with my blessed right hand the head of the American Jew
Daniel Pearl, in the city of Karachi, Pakistan. " This confession repeated
word for word the phrasing leaked in 2002 from his interrogation in a
clandestine CIA interrogation center.
On March 19, 2007, Ahmed Omar Saeed
Sheikh's lawyers cited Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession in defense of their
client. They said they had always acknowledged that their client played a role
in Pearl's murder, but they had always argued that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was
the actual murderer. They plan for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession to play
a central role in their appeal of their client's death sentence.
According to an investigative report
published in January 2011 by Georgetown University, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation used vein matching to determine that the perpetrator in the video
of the killing of Pearl was most likely Mohammed, notably through a
"bulging vein" running across his hand. Federal officials had been
concerned that the confession obtained though waterboarding would not hold up
in court and used this forensic technique to bolster their case.
It was announced on March 19, 2013,
that a suspect was captured in connection with the murder and was in police
custody. Pakistan's Inter Services Public
Relations Directorate confirmed the arrest by a paramilitary unit known as
the Pakistan Rangers.
Aftermath
A collection of Pearl's writings (At
Home in the World) was published posthumously in 2002, demonstrating his
"extraordinary skill as a writer" and his "eye for quirky
stories—many of which appeared in The Wall Street Journal's "middle
column".
The Daniel Pearl Foundation was
formed by Pearl's family and friends, to continue Pearl's mission and to
address what they consider the root causes of his death, in the spirit, style
and principles that shaped Pearl's work and character. Daniel Pearl World
Music Days has been held worldwide since 2002, and has promoted over 1,500
concerts in over 60 countries.
Pearl's widow, Mariane Pearl, wrote
the memoir A Mighty Heart, which tells the full story of Pearl and more
about his life. The book was adapted into a film starring Dan Futterman as
Daniel Pearl, Angelina Jolie as Mariane Pearl, Irfan Khan, Archie Panjabi, and
Will Patton.
On September 1, 2003, a book titled Who
Killed Daniel Pearl? was published, written by Bernard-Henri Lévy. The
book, which the author characterized as an "investigative novel",
stirred controversy for some of its speculative conclusions about the killing,
for some of its characterizations of Pakistan, and for the author's decision to
engage in an exercise of fictionalizing Pearl's thoughts in the final moments
of his life. Lévy was criticized for the book. This book is being adapted into
a film directed by Tod Williams and starring Josh Lucas, focusing on the last
few days of Daniel Pearl's life.
HBO Films produced a documentary
called The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Daniel Pearl. It
premiered on HBO on October 10, 2006. The documentary chronicles Pearl's life
and death, and features extensive interviews with his immediate family. It is
narrated by Christiane Amanpour, and was nominated for two Emmy Awards.
Pearl's parents edited and published a
collection of messages sent to them from around the globe, entitled I Am
Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl
(Jewish Lights Publishing, 2004). At one point on the video, Pearl said:
"My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish," after which
Pearl added one obscure detail, that a street in Israel's Bnei Brak is named
after his great grandfather, who was one of the founders of the town. The
family has written that it understands this last detail authenticates Daniel's
own voice and demonstrates his willingness to claim his identity. Judea Pearl
has written that at first this statement surprised him, but he later understood
it to be a reference to the town-building tradition of his family contrasted
with the destructive aims of his captors. Judea Pearl then enlarged the idea by
inviting responses from artists, government leaders, authors, journalists,
scientists, scholars, rabbis, and others. All wrote personal responses to what
they thought upon hearing that these were Pearl's last words. Some responses
were one sentence while others were several pages.
The book is organized by five themes:
Identity; Heritage; Covenant, Chosenness, and Faith; Humanity and Ethnicity;
Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World) and Justice. Contributors include Theodore
Bikel, Alan Dershowitz, Kirk Douglas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Larry King, Amos Oz,
Shimon Peres, Daniel Schorr, Elie Wiesel, Peter Yarrow, and A.B. Yehoshua.
Posthumous
recognition
In 2002, Pearl posthumously received
the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College and in 2007, the Lyndon
Baines Johnson Moral Courage Award from the Houston Holocaust Museum.
American minimalist composer Steve
Reich wrote his 2006 work Daniel Variations, jointly commissioned by the
Daniel Pearl Foundation and the Barbican Centre, which interweaves Pearl's own
words with verses from the Book of Daniel.
On April 16, 2007, Pearl was added to
the Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach
as the first non-Holocaust victim. His father gave his consent for the
induction in order to remind generations to come that "The forces of
barbarity and evil are still active in our world. The Holocaust didn't finish
in 1945." Journalist Bradley Burston criticized the addition of a
post-Holocaust victim to the memorial, saying "it diminishes the
uniqueness of the Holocaust".
In 2010, the International Press
Institute named Pearl one of its World Press Freedom Heroes.
On December 10, 2007, President George
W. Bush and Laura Bush invited Ruth and Judea Pearl, parents of Daniel Pearl to
the White House Chanukah reception, to light the menorah that once belonged to
Daniel's great grandparents, Chaim and Rosa Pearl, who brought it with them
when they moved from Poland to Israel in 1924 to establish the town of
Bnai-Brak.
Vice-President of Ladonia, Lt. Col.
Osborne Wrigley-Pimley-McKerr III has expressed his "greatest
sympathy" for Pearl.
The late former mayor of New York City
Ed Koch had his own tombstone inscribed with Pearl's words: "My father is
Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.
Institutions
and awards in Pearl's name
Shortly
after Pearl's death, his parents founded the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
The foundation's mission is to promote cross-cultural understanding through
journalism, music, and dialogue. The honorary board of the Daniel Pearl
Foundation includes Christiane Amanpour, former President Bill
Clinton, Abdul Sattar Edhi, Danny Gill, John L. Hennessy, Ted
Koppel, Her Majesty Queen Noor of
Jordan, Sari Nusseibeh, Mariane Pearl, Itzhak
Perlman, Harold Schulweiss, Craig Sherman, Paul Steiger, and Elie Wiesel.
The Daniel
Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA was established by the foundation in 2002. Christopher
Hitchens delivered a lecture on March 3, 2010. Other lecturers have
included Anderson Cooper; David Brooks;
Ted Koppel; Larry King; Jeff Greenfield; Daniel Schorr
and Thomas Friedman. Soka University of America's student news
magazine, titled the Pearl, is named in honor of Daniel Pearl.
On May 19,
2010, U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press
Act, which protects US journalists around the world. The act is also designed
to use tools from the Secretary of State to ensure that freedom of press is upheld
in other countries.
- Institutions named for Pearl:
- The Sammy Ofer School of Communications at IDC Herzliya introduced the Daniel Pearl International Journalism Institute (DPIJI), a new partnership between IDC Herzliya and the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
- Awards
- In 2005, The Wall Street Journal, in conjunction with the École de Journalisme de Sciences Po, gave the first Daniel Pearl Prize to Louis-Étienne Vigneault-Dubois from Canada, at a ceremony held on June 10 in Paris.
- In western Massachusetts, with help from the newspapers there for which Pearl worked early in his career (the North Adams Transcript and the Berkshire Eagle), friends of Pearl established the Daniel Pearl Berkshire Scholarship, awarded annually beginning in 2003.
- Since 2003, Stanford's Department of Communication has awarded a paid summer internship with The Wall Street Journal, known as the "Daniel Pearl Journalism Internship."
- In 2008 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' bi-annual ICIJ awards were renamed the Daniel Pearl Awards for Outstanding International Investigative Reporting.
- Schools named for Pearl:
In May
2007, the Communications Technology Magnet School at Birmingham High School was
renamed the Daniel Pearl Journalism and Communications Magnet.
- In July 2009, Daniel Pearl Magnet High School (DPMHS) became a stand-alone high school in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).
- In East Brunswick Township, Temple B'nai Shalom renamed their Hebrew School 'The Daniel Pearl Education Center' after Pearl. Additionally, the Synagogue has created a "Daniel Pearl Education Scholarship" in his honor.
No comments:
Post a Comment