Why Did the WSJ Send Pearl?

Daniel Pearl's dispatches reminded me somewhat of Peter Kann's in the days when he was The Wall Street Journal's most lightheartedly stylish reporter, before assuming the imperial purple and becoming the company's CEO. It was Kann, back in the late 1970s, who traveled to Afghanistan, reported that the place was a dump covered with flies and that it was hard to understand why any Great Power would want any truck with the place.

Ironically, since his captors charged him with being an agent of the American Empire and of Zionism, Pearl was not afraid to file reports contradicting the claims of the State Dept. or the Pentagon, or even of the mad dogs on the Journal's editorial pages whose ravings fulfill on a weekly basis the most paranoid expectations of a Muslim fanatic. Just about the time they were killing Pearl, had they paused to buy a copy of The Wall Street Journal, his killers would have found a reprint on the editorial pages of a particularly feverish article from Commentary, in-house periodical of the American Jewish Committee, stating flatly that to be opposed to Israel was to be anti-Zionist, and to be anti-Zionist was to be anti-Semitic. It's the familiar two-step logic of the Israeli lobby: oppose the sale of Apache helicopters to Sharon or the bulldozing of Palestinian homes means you are a coconspirator in the Holocaust.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page wrote, the day after news of Pearl's death was confirmed, that it showed "evil" was still stalking the world, "evil" being the current term of art for "awfulness beyond our comprehension." Now, these editorial writers have spent years writing urgent advisories to whatever U.S. president happens to be in power that the most extreme reactionary forces in Israel must be given unconditional backing. It would take any Islamic fanatic about 15 minutes in a clips library to demonstrate that if bombs are to be dropped on Palestinians, peace overtures shunned, just settlement rejected, then The Wall Street Journal's editorial page is on board, full throat.

Why was it left to Pearl's wife to offer herself to the kidnappers in lieu of her husband? Why did not the WSJ's editorial page editor, Paul Gigot, proffer himself? Or, if he had protested that his credentials were not yet sufficiently seasoned, since he has only recently plumped his behind into the editorial chair, why not bring Robert Bartley out of retirement, send him to Karachi for discussion of the relationship of editorial writing in The Wall Street Journal to overall moral responsibility for U.S. policies in the Middle East and South Asia? So if that WSJ editorial writer who invoked "evil" had been honest, he might have written, "It may well be that Danny Pearl was killed because his murderers held him responsible for positions on the Middle East conflict and on Islam oft expressed in these editorial pages. If so, then he died for principles that we honor and will always uphold." Or something of that sort, while simultaneously emphasizing that reporters are not editorial writers and that Pearl bore no responsibility for the editorials.

Might it not have occurred to Pearl's editors, those who assigned him to South Asia, that the fact that he was an Israeli citizen might have put him in extra peril, given the fact that he was seeking to contact an extremely dangerous crowd of Muslim terrorists in Karachi? The fact of his citizenship only emerged after his death, in a report on Feb. 24 in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, by Yossi Melman: "Professor Yehuda Pearl, father of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, has told Ha'aretz that he fears that making public his son's Israeli citizenship could adversely affect investigative efforts by Pakistani police to apprehend the killers and track down the murdered reporter's body. In a telephone conversation from his Los Angeles residence, Professor Pearl expressed regret and anger over the revelation by the Israeli media of his family's 'Israeli connection.' The U.S. media, which was aware of the information, complied with the family's request not to make it public." Then Melman concluded with this minor bombshell: "The American media was asked to comply with this request after information was obtained that confirmed reports that the 38-year-old reporter was dead."

It seems to me almost certain that those Pakistani terrorists would have killed any reporter for a U.S. news organization who had the ill fortune to be seeking an interview at that particular time. Robert Fisk, of the London Independent, has probably written more pieces sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than almost any other mainstream reporter. Yet that didn't prevent him from nearly being beaten to death by Afghans in a frontier town a few weeks ago.

On Feb. 23, Fisk wrote: "In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we can be seen as Kaffirs, as unbelievers. Our faces, our hair, even our spectacles, mark us out as Westerners. The Muslim cleric who wished to talk to me in an Afghan refugee village outside Peshawar last October was stopped by a man who pointed at me and asked: 'Why are you taking this Kaffir into our mosque?' Weeks later, a crowd of Afghan refugees, grief-stricken at the slaughter of their relatives in a US B-52 bomber air raid, tried to kill me because they thought I was an American."

Pearl's style was totally alien to the bloodthirsty rantings of his editorial colleagues. He sent excellent dispatches questioning the claims of the Clinton administration that it had been justified in the 1998 destruction via cruise missile of the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries plant in Sudan. Again, he and fellow WSJ reporter Robert Block entered some effective reservations about allegations of Serbian genocide in Kosovo. In fact, Slobodan Milosevic might make use of them in mounting his vigorous defense in the U.S.-sponsored kangaroo court in the Hague against charges of genocide. Pearl and Block stigmatized the Serb armed forces as having done "heinous things," while also writing that "other allegations?indiscriminate mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead?haven't been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo. Ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility. Now, a different picture is emerging."

The killing of Pearl was just as monstrous as the Sept. 11 onslaughts that killed nearly 3000 innocent people who bore no responsibility for the actions of their government. But as David North of the Trotskyist Fourth International wrote on the World Socialist website on Feb. 23: "On the very day that Pearl's murder was confirmed, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that US troops had mistakenly killed 16 anti-Taliban Afghan fighters, but refused to apologize. It does not require exceptional political insight to realize that in the decision to murder Pearl, the desire for revenge was a major subjective factor."

North then remarked that the outlook of the Pakistani terrorists is not so different from that of Thomas Friedman, the repellent columnist of The New York Times, also recently recruited as a kind of Kuralt of globalization by PBS' NewsHour. North cited a recent Friedman column that praised Bush's "axis of evil" speech in these terms: "Sept. 11 happened because America had lost its deterrent capability. We lost it because for 20 years we never retaliated against, or brought to justice, those who murdered Americans... [I]nnocent Americans were killed and we did nothing. So our enemies took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened... America's enemies smelled weakness all over us, and we paid a huge price for that."

North very properly comments: "By changing only a few words, the Pakistani terrorists could use Friedman's argument to justify their murder of Pearl: 'We have failed to retaliate against America... [I]nnocent Arabs, Afghans and Moslems were killed and we did nothing... America took us less and less seriously and became more and more emboldened.' The thought patterns of the pompous and belligerent American columnist and the Islamic terrorist have far more in common than either imagine. Both think in terms of ethnic, religious and national stereotypes. Both believe in and are mesmerized by violence."

Sweaty Red Feet

Chalk up another milestone for sex ed. The University of California at Berkeley has put a "male sexuality" class on ice after the campus newspaper, The Daily Californian, published allegations that as part of their course students were taken to a strip club where they watched their instructor have sex, and also participated in an "orgy" at a party. A female sexuality course is also under review.

It seems these courses have been available under the university's "democratic education" or "de-cal" programs, which are sponsored but not funded by the university. They are organized and run by student instructors and can be taken for credit toward graduation. Other courses include Blackjack, useful for those set on careers as croupiers east of the Sierras in Las Vegas, and (for dissidents) Copwatch, which instructs students "how to safely and effectively assert their rights when interacting with police."

Christy Kovacs, a Berkeley freshman who was enrolled in the male sexuality course last semester for two units, told the Sacramento Bee that some students in the class were involved in an orgy at a party where some partygoers also took Polaroid pictures of their genitalia to show that their bodies were not disgusting, Kovacs said. The shots were viewed at the party in a "respectful way."

Another student, Jessica McMahon, disclosed to The Daily Californian that students in the male sexuality class chose as their final project a trip to a gay strip club. Students apparently watched instructors strip and have sex. Kovacs says her class also had an instructive excursion to the Garden of Eden strip club. There, a member of the group who was not a student or instructor stripped onstage. "They didn't even take off all their clothes, and there was no sex," the earnest Kovacs continued to the Bee reporter. "It was a class bonding experience," not to mention "positive."

This business of introducing yourself at a party by proffering a Polaroid of your genitals has distinct possibilities, particularly for fetishists. As news of the Berkeley ban came in I happened to be leafing through the analysis of a man code-named "Beta," the foot fetishist in Sexual Aberrations, written by Freud's sometime pal, Wilhelm Stekel. "I must mention," Stekel writes with perhaps excessive enthusiasm, "Beta wasn't in the least animated by women's ankles, legs or lovely shoes." No, the dirty beast "wanted to see the shoe fit tightly" and "is promptly enlivened by the sight of corns and envies every chiropodist he sees. He likes only male feet: red, swollen, dirty, sweaty and inflamed feet."

Beta craved to view and smell only the feet of the poor, not out of class solidarity but because their economic condition meant they had badly fitting shoes in which they worked hard all day: "On warm days, he goes to the Danube where poor working men may be found in droves, bathing their sweaty, swollen feet. It is the sight of these large, red feet which then gives him a thrill. He rushes home to masturbate."

One can imagine Beta politely introducing himself with a Polaroid of those feet. Ms. Kovacs, following in Beta's wake as she witnessed his activities, would presumably have commented that it was all uplifting and entirely respectful of feet, which, after all, have feelings too.