Maybe it’s too easy to take shots at the celebrities who, almost daily, are guilty of saying and doing stupid things. But in this case the sin is so grave that a response is necessary.
I speak of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s latest project, a movie based on the memoir A Mighty Heart by Marianne Pearl, the widow of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
Angelina is going to play Marianne, while Brad is making insulting proclamations about how important the film is going to be. To wit, last week Pitt characterized the goal of the film thusly: “We hope the film can increase understanding between people of all faiths and portray the story and the people involved as honestly as possible without anger or judgment.”
Just to clarify: Daniel Pearl was a young investigative journalist writing for the Wall Street Journal from Pakistan, who in 2002 was lured to an interview, kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists, bound, beaten, terrorized and finally beheaded — all with cameras rolling. In the last moments before Daniel Pearl was brutally decapitated, his killers demanded that he identify himself. Not as an American, not as an infidel, not as a journalist. He was forced to define himself one way and one way only — as a Jew — and then his head was removed from his body. There are tapes of this gruesome scene — and they’re going cheap.
Nevertheless, along comes the great do-gooder-duo known as Brangelina to really give us an education. We are now supposed to spend $10 at the local Cineplex so we can see through filtered lens how to “understand” the killers. We are supposed to watch the people who ended Daniel Pearl’s life “without anger or judgment.”
Newsflash for Pitt: We know what happened to Daniel Pearl. A group of murderous, hate-filled barbarians targeted Daniel Pearl and killed him because he was a Jew. You’re probably a bad candidate for an expert in the Pearl killing if you don’t get that already.
No one needs a movie to understand evil. Besides, the film about Daniel Pearl was already shot — by the terrorists. — Abby Wisse Schachter is editor of the New York Post’s Opinion Books.