Danny Pearl
Why he was killed.

By Michael Ledeen, NRO contributing editor & resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author, most recently, of Tocqueville on American Character
February 22, 2002 8:40 a.m.

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.