Lower Manhattan was still a toxic ash heap after the 9/11 attacks, the United States had invaded Afghanistan, and jingoistic talk of retribution for the savage attack had reached a fever pitch.
Pearl’s murder, seemingly motivated by his faith and work for a Western media outlet, was more salt in an already open wound.
In Europe and the United States, the killing reinforced the idea that the West was not merely engaged in a regular armed conflict but involved in a global power struggle over the kind of order humanity should live under.
The West was open. Ideas ran freely through the universities and the press. Religious diversity was tolerated, and liberalism, in the broadest sense, ruled the day.
In contrast, resentful hordes in Western Asia longed for a life of darkness, ruled not only by the Koran but also devoid of the beauty of science, secular scholarship, and the Enlightenment.
Did college antiwar protesters and ageing hippies want to side with the former or the latter? After Pearl, the question was whether Jews were part of the guilty conscience of the imperialist West.
Many more journalists would die in US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, reinforcing the myth that the War on Terror was not about territory but a defence of democracy from forces that would drive us back to the Dark Ages.
The pursuit of knowledge and free debate, after all, distinguishes the modern from the archaic. Journalism, the practice of reporting facts as they are, without concern for whether presidents and preachers are offended, thrives in an open society.
A journalist’s death at the hands of militant Islamists like Daesh or Bashar al-Assad’s Ba’athist regime in Syria signalled not just that oppressors prevent reporters from telling the truth, but rather that the press is an ideological opponent in a war for the world, representing a politics that must be crushed. Reporters with notepads are no different from soldiers with guns.
For liberals and leftists such as Christopher Hitchens, who supported America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq and Western military intervention against Islamism in general, this rationale was central. They weren’t supporting George W. Bush and his band of neoconservatives despite their liberalism, but because of it.
Daniel Pearl’s compelled admission that he was Jewish also signalled to many Jews that they were not only targets of the jihadists but also linked with Western identity. For many assimilationists in the United States, this was a subtle victory.
Since the outbreak of war in the Gaza Strip in October 2023, more than 200 journalists have been killed. While Palestinian forces have taken the lives of Israeli reporters in the conflict, the vast majority of these casualties have resulted from an Israeli military campaign that many believe to amount to a full-scale genocide.
To put this bloody toll into perspective, The Guardian reported in 2023 that 285 reporters had been killed covering Iraq, a slightly bigger number than in Gaza, but over twenty years rather than a year and a half.
However, the recent killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif and his colleagues has most brought to light that this is not just a consequence of a kill-anything-that-moves nihilism but a deliberate assault on the very openness of Israel, a Middle Eastern country that has always flaunted its Western, democratic credentials.
“Amid global outcry, IDF says Al Jazeera reporter it killed was receiving Hamas salary,” blared a Times of Israel headline. Bashing the US paper of record as blind to Hamas treachery, the pro-Israel advocacy group HonestReporting said in a headline, “Anas al-Sharif Was a Terrorist but The New York Times Doesn’t Care.”
There’s a familiar cheapness to this rhetoric. Anyone who dies–the hospital worker, the reporter, the child looking for food–must be a part of the vast terror network.
Think of the US soldier depicted in Full Metal Jacket, explaining how he distinguishes a Vietnamese civilian from the enemy Viet Cong: “Anyone who runs is a VC. Anyone who stands still is a well-disciplined VC.”
Worse, for many activists in the West watching the situation in Gaza, the killing of journalists seems like the cover-up necessary for any crime against humanity.
I have been covering this attack on journalism since the war began, mostly for the American outlet and media watchdog, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. I recently noted that a Committee to Protect Journalists report found:
“A total of 108 journalists were imprisoned in the Middle East and North Africa, almost half of those detained by Israel.” That means Israel’s jailing of journalists significantly overshadows the press repression in places like Egypt (Amnesty International, 7/25/24) and Iran (Reporters Without Borders, 9/11/23), both of which have far bigger populations than Israel.
I also said:
Press freedom in Israel has been on the decline since the invasion of Gaza began in October 2023. In that time, the government has pushed a boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), moved to privatise public broadcasting (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24) and increased censorship (+972, 5/20/24). The country has banned the broadcaster Al Jazeera (5/6/24).
All of this underscored that “Israel’s killing and jailing of journalists, as well as its domestic clampdown and censorship of the press, is arguably at the centre of the global crisis in press freedom.”
And as I reported in FAIR, these advocates, including HonestReporting, have hurled the Hamas association at journalists, often with thin evidence.
When Daniel Pearl uttered his confession and fell to his captors, Anas al-Sharif had just turned five years old. Al Jazeera was still getting started, and its English-language division had yet to launch.
Al-Sharif was born in a Gaza refugee camp, while Pearl was born in the lush and affluent town of Princeton, to a mother from Iraq and a father born in Mandate Palestine.
Pearl graduated from Stanford University, the most prestigious university on the West Coast, located in one of the nation’s most exclusive towns, where his legacy is still regularly honoured.
Al-Sharif studied at Al Aqsa University, which the Israeli military has destroyed. Pearl is considered a martyr in the West, and al-Sharif is seen as a victim by some, yet still treated like an enemy suspect.
It is this very last point that might make Anas al-Sharif more similar to Daniel Pearl than others realise.
When Pearl and others died reporting on the War on Terror, they weren’t simply mistaken for intelligence assets; their identity as Westerners and, in Pearl’s case, a Jew, meant that they were enemy combatants, and their desire to report aggravated their offences rather than added them to a protected, neutral class of public messengers.
When the Israeli government identifies someone like al-Sharif as Hamas, it isn’t simply trying to justify an atrocity. It expresses an ideological opposition to the notion of reporting.
Those reporting on the brutality, those who expose and witness the facts and bring them to the attention of a wider audience, are working against the interests of the Zionist project and thus are equal to its enemies, including Hamas.
Israel has become accustomed to portraying itself as an island of democracy, an enlightened society amid a sea of backwardness, a PR campaign that only intensified in the West during the War on Terror.
Alas, both Israel’s secular and religious rightward shift has made it more like its neighbours than its liberal defenders acknowledge.
The bloated journalistic death toll at the hands of Israel since the autumn of 2023 is still a drop in the bucket considering the vast loss of life in Gaza, as well as its physical destruction and ecocide.
Yet, it is still important because it marks the end of the pantomime of Western imperialism in the early 2000s, which somehow acted as a defender of open discourse in the face of Al-Qaeda’s savagery.
This danger is meant to grow beyond the Gaza War.
For Benjamin Netanyahu’s allies, like the United States under Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the core message is that journalism is hostile to the national project and aligned with every perceived enemy.
The liberal mythology of the War on Terror was always a thin one. Since October 7th, it has crumbled completely.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
