The short piece by Daniel Pearl’s father Judea [thanks Peter Nolan below], in yesterday’s Guardian has spurred me on to start blogging again. The article, The Death of Relativism, was a response to the Michael Winterbottom film about his son’s life, which stars Angelina Jolie as the journalist’s wife, Mariane. Choosing his words with great precision, he expresses his irritation that the film, A Might Heart, suggests a moral equivalence between the al-Qaeda terrorists who murdered his son live on camera and the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay.
He quietly dismantles Winterbottom’s own facile contention that the film’s message is that there are “extremists on both sides”. The following passage dismisses such platitudes:
“Drawing a comparison between Danny’s murder and the detention of suspects in Guantánamo is precisely what the killers wanted, as expressed in both their emails and the murder video. Indeed, following an advance screening of A Mighty Heart in Los Angeles, a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said: ‘We need to end the culture of bombs, torture, occupation, and violence. This is the message to take from the film.’
Yet the message that angry youngsters are hearing from such blanket generalisation is predictable: all forms of violence are equally evil; therefore, as long as one persists, others should not be ruled out. This is precisely the logic used by Mohammed Siddique Khan, one of the London suicide bombers, in his video. ‘Your democratically elected government,’ he told his fellow Britons, ‘continues to perpetrate atrocities against my people … [We] will not stop.’
Danny’s tragedy demands an end to this logic. There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts. Moral relativism died with Daniel Pearl, in Karachi, on January 31 2002.”
I have always believed it is possible to condemn the abuses in Guantanamo and oppose detention without trial in Britain without suggesting that al-Qaeda is the same as the US or UK governments. Those on the left who take these matters seriously should clip or print out Judea Pearl’s article and read it until they understand.
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