Wednesday, January 30, 2008
This week marks six years since Daniel Pearl was murdered. His father writes in today's Wall Street Journal:
...One of the things that saddens me most is that the press and media have had an active, perhaps even major role in fermenting hate and inhumanity. It was not religious fanaticism alone.
This was first brought to my attention by the Pakistani Consul General who came to offer condolences at our home in California. When we spoke about the anti-Semitic element in Danny's murder she said: "What can you expect of these people who never saw a Jew in their lives and who have been exposed, day and night, to televised images of Israeli soldiers targeting and killing Palestinian children."
At the time, it was not clear whether she was trying to exonerate Pakistan from responsibility for Danny's murder, or to pass on the responsibility to European and Arab media for their persistent de-humanization of Jews, Americans and Israelis. The answer was unveiled in 2004, when a friend told me that photos of Muhammad Al Dura were used as background in the video tape of Danny's murder.
Al Dura, readers may recall, is the 12-year-old Palestinian boy who allegedly died from Israeli bullets in Gaza in September of 2001. As we now know, the whole scene is very likely to have been a fraud, choreographed by stringers and cameramen of France 2, the official news channel of France. France 2 aired the tape repeatedly and distributed it all over the world to anyone who needed an excuse to ratchet up anger or violence, among them Danny's killers.
The Pakistani Consul was right. The media cannot be totally exonerated from responsibility for Daniel's murder, as well as for the "tsunami of hate" that has swept the world and continues to rise...
Charles Enderlin is going to run out of people to sue. Pearl concludes:
...But the Bible also offers us a foolproof test for discerning false prophets from true ones. The test is not based on the nature of the reported facts, but on the method and principles invoked in the message. Translated into secular, modern vocabulary, the true journalist will never compromise on universal principles of ethics and humanity, and will never allow us to forget that all people, including our adversaries, need be portrayed with dignity and respect as children of one God.
Accordingly, to distinguish true from false journalism, just choose any newspaper or TV channel and ask yourself when was the last time it ran a picture of a child, a grandmother or any empathy-evoking scene from the "other side" of a conflict.
I propose this simple test as the "Daniel Pearl standard of responsible journalism." Anyone who reads Danny's stories today, and examines the way he reported the human story behind the news, would agree that adopting the proposed standard for the profession would be a fitting tribute to his legacy.
I'll take respectful issue with Dr. Pearl here. I don't think that the Western media has any problem with this, in either humanizing the enemy or dousing the flames of anger. On the contrary, the media, East and West, is all too willing to humanize our adversaries when the "perpetrators" are perceived as white or Western and their opponents anything else. But I'm not sure it's really the Western media that Dr. Pearl is aiming for here.
Maybe we are the "other side" that is never shown compassionately by journalists. This would reconcile with the Pakistani Consul General's comment. This would also reconcile the stories covered by Daniel Pearl. Daniel was probably the only major journalist covering the jihadist attacks on Christians in Bosnia that preceded the Serbian counter-attacks. The first actions were ignored by the press, while the retaliations were deemed crimes against humanity.
If, as Dr. Pearl states, journalists had shown the victims of Bosnian jihadists holding severed heads for the camera as a "grandmother or empathy provoking scene" a correct diagnosis of the situation could have shown through the turmoil.
We ARE the other side that isn't shown. We have to ask ourselves why that is so.