|
 aniel
Pearl was kidnapped, tortured, and killed because he was an American
Jew who worked for the Wall Street Journal. Don't think for
a minute he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong
time. He was targeted because of what he represented, what he stood
for. These killers are marching to the drumbeat of people who study
us carefully, hate us intensely, and savor the symbolism of their
actions. They struck at the most widely read publication in the
world, a newspaper that had unrelentingly exposed them, that had
revealed the hatred of the Iranian people for their repressive theocratic
regime, and had even discovered a terrorist computer in Afghanistan
and exposed its contents to millions of readers.
This was not
a criminal act; it was part of the terror war. They were saying
to their followers, "this is what we do to the American Jewish
enemies. Join with us and kill more of them."
And they will
do it to all of us if we do not get them first. I trust that the
ritual slaughter of Daniel Pearl will intensify our rage and galvanize
our efforts. For those of us who write, we must write more, and
more clearly, so that no American is in doubt about the urgency
of our national mission and the rightness of our cause. And for
those who command, they must stop their endless bickering about
tactics, abandon the illusion that there must be a political solution
somehow, somewhere,
and get on with the war. The longer we wait, the more of us will
be sacrificed.
I do not know
who killed Daniel Pearl, but I do know that Iran and Iraq are working
feverishly to turn Afghanistan into a replay of Lebanon in the eighties,
where the United States was driven to a humiliating retreat after
hundreds of Americans were killed. If you read the news carefully,
you will see their creatures at work there, day after day. The Iranians
turned hostage taking, torturing, and killing into a national sport,
and they would love to do it to us again.
The best memorial
to Daniel Pearl is freedom for the peoples of the Middle East, and
a chance for them to build civil societies. For them to get there,
we've got to bring down the terror regimes and kill the terrorists
themselves. The president has said it repeatedly: destroy the terror
networks and the states that support or harbor them.
Faster, please.
|
