The journalist and the jihadi

Cross-posted, with some revisions, from Protein Wisdom.

Suzanne Fields has an op-ed in the Washington Times today, on the new HBO biopic of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He would have been 43 this week.

I remember how shocked and outraged I was when I learned of the manner of his murder. It turned into sheer hatred when I found out that the monsters had actually videotaped it, and were selling it in bazaars and filesharing it around the ‘net. Not least of what I hate the jihadists for, is the fact that I’m now more or less numb to civilized people getting their heads chopped off by medieval holy warriors, to the applause of vast swathes of our nominal allies. Because of the numbingly numbing numbingness of being numbed by the numbing numbers of beheadings these vipers have perpetrated ever since.

An important point for libs to remember from the Fields article:

The film documents how the Islamists, miserable in their distorted faith, live off a culture of despair born of manufactured misery. Omar Sheikh was privileged. He was born and grew up with middle-class parents in London, attended the London School of Economics where he studied applied mathematics and economics, and played a good game of chess.
“He was not an illiterate jihadi whose mind had been captured by the mullahs; he was a very bright, Oxford-material boy, overturning the notion that education is the solution to terrorism,” says Ahmed A. Jamal, one of the two directors of the documentary. “In his case, he was a formidable terrorist precisely because he was so well-educated.” Indeed, he had the wealth to support his alienation, the reasoning power to rationalize his resentments and the mind to accentuate the negative with cunning, converting his abilities into a perverse nihilism.

Get it, you Voices Of Compassion®? Not everything can be blamed on globalization, or on American hegemony, or on the existence of the Jews--I mean, Israel. The Wahabists don’t have any IMF debt to be forgiven. You can’t erase the threat they pose by treating their threats as grievances. You can’t abase yourself--or us--into their good graces. Your materialist worldview is inapplicable here, in this conflict. It ain't that kind of disagreement.

In honor of Danny, go click around the Daniel Pearl Foundation, and be amazed at the charitable attitude of his widow. And the wonderful sort of fellow Pearl himself was. I’d trade any given busload of multicultists--and any stadium full of jihadists--for one of him back again.