Who Killed Danny Pearl? Or, on the Existence of Evil
Note: The Following is a lightly edited version of an essay I first published in 2003 in the now-defunct journal Zeek. It was prompted by a reading of Bernard-Henry Lévy’s Qui a tué Daniel Pearl, and watching the video of Danny Pearl’s execution. All this came flooding back to me while watching videos from October 7. I believe the essay has regained its pertinence. I see no distinction between then men who beheaded Danny Pearl and captured it on film and the Hamas militants who on October 7 engaged in an orgy of hatred and captured it all on smart phone and GoPro video. At the bottom you will find an Epilogue addressing current events.
In a letter to Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt wrote that she had backed down from an earlier assertion about "radical evil" and now held a different view, one which has in the fifty years since the letter was written become rather famous. "It is indeed my opinion now," Arendt wrote, "that evil is never 'radical,' that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension." She continued:
It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is "thought-defying," as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality." Only the good has depth and can be radical.
Arendt was trying to put her finger on something she saw in Nazism and Soviet Communism, something so awful that it left her profoundly bewildered and frightened. Like other intellectuals, she was perplexed by evil. What was it? What did it mean? She had hoped to understand evil by attending Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem, where it would presumably be on clear display. But she was disappointed. Like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, there was no 'there' there. Eichmann was banal, the system was banal - there was no heart of darkness. And, concurrently, there was no capacity on the part of the legal and philosophical defenses of the Western liberal order to define and adequately respond to it. Neither the Nuremberg Trial, the pre- and post-war international treaties on human rights, nor the Jerusalem trial successfully got to the bottom of what so threatened us. In Arendt's opinion, they dodged.
Today when we say the crimes "defied comprehension," many people mean that they are so awful, hideous, etc., that they cannot be grasped. But this is not what Arendt meant. In fact, she meant the exact opposite. Eichmann himself personified the conundrum, for everything about him and his crimes defied classification and comprehension. Eichmann was no monster; one of the Israeli psychologists who interviewed him in prison declared that Eichmann was more 'normal' than he was, particularly after the meeting. Eichmann's crimes, moreover, were not exactly crimes in the technical sense, for there was nothing on the books that quite matched what he did. There was little legal precedent that might have prescribed what to do with him and how to try him, nor was it evident who should try him and according to which law. He gave the impression of having been a bureaucratic functionary. It was as if his crimes were so great that they were no longer crimes.
At the same time, Arendt had no patience for those who would spare Eichmann's life (Martin Buber among them). She regarded many contemporaries who clung to liberal Enlightenment humanism as fools. Yet, because Arendt was not about to abandon liberalism herself, she sought to defend it from the threat that Eichmann and Stalin represented, which in turn meant recognizing that there was indeed such a thing as evil. The task proved too much for her. Arendt, one of the century's most rigorous intellectuals, was reduced to saying she knew evil when she saw it, and pointed her finger at Eichmann.
Today, the discourse of evil is in even worse shape. First, the term itself was co-opted by George W. Bush and thus emptied of all useful meaning: "evildoers" are our enemies, nothing more. Second, whereas Nazi evil was remarkable in its non-utility, the evil we face today at least has the trappings of meaning. It arguably has causes, reasons, or at least excuses. And finally, our intellectual discourse often seems trapped in a false dilemma between moralism on the one hand (evil is evil, and that's it) and oversimplified, exculpatory causality on the other (evil results from certain factors, and therefore isn't really evil).
Can we reclaim the term "evildoer" from W. and his religious friends? Evil does exist. Just look for the "Daniel Pearl video" on the internet. (Here’s one version.) What you'll see is beyond criminal, beyond comprehension, and utterly terrifying: a forced confession by Pearl of the sin of being Jewish, and then Pearl's beheading. The medium (digital video) may be new, as are the references (Palestine, Guantanamo, September 11), but there is nothing new or modern about the hatred and nihilism on display.
Hannah Arendt is not around to explore the meaning of Pearl's murder. Instead, we have Bernard-Henri Lévy's recent Qui a tué Daniel Pearl? (Who killed Daniel Pearl?), which is an Eichmann in Jerusalem for our times. Lévy, often referred to as BHL, is arguably the most pretentious man in France today, which is really saying something, and his book suffers from the astonishing narcissism that has marked his entire career. However, BHL can be credited with rising above the clichés and posturing of France's intellectual classes and boldly going out on a succession of limbs, each one more contrary to French consensus than the last. He was a major advocate for military intervention in Yugoslavia, for example, and he maintained his position even after the United States intervened.
BHL's book was the fruit of a yearlong investigation that he conducted in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, England, and the United States immediately after hearing of Pearl's death. His mission was to understand, to find out who killed Pearl, and why, and to figure out what it all meant in the context of September 11 and the slow-cooking "Clash of Civilizations" that, as a committed liberal and a humanist, BHL wishes very badly to avert. What he learned, however, was not encouraging, and rather than get to the bottom of his murder, he fell into a bottomless pit of evil where, just as one has achieved some understanding, "a trap opens up beneath one's feet," and the descent begins again.
Lévy constructed his book around the strange dyad of Daniel Pearl and his assassin, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, whom he usually refers to simply as Omar. On one side, Pearl represented all that Lévy usually celebrates: he was a progressive, non-observant, and intermarried Jew, one who was nonetheless immensely proud of his heritage and would never hesitate to identify himself as a Jew no matter where he found himself. He was, moreover, a proud American who loved his country while remaining critical of it and its actions. He was similarly enamored with Israel, from which his family had immigrated, though he was no Likudnik. Above all, he was a cosmopolitan humanist, a progressive liberal who was open to the world, optimistic about human nature, and convinced of his ability to make friends with the entire planet. The Byronesque BHL, a highly assimilated though proud Jew who had been born in Algeria but was now a globe-trotting Frenchman (married to a French movie star) identified with Pearl and expressed a warm, posthumous love for the man.
On the other side is Omar, who, from a certain point of view should have turned out a lot like Daniel. Indeed, whereas the enigma of Eichmann was his extraordinary normality, Omar's mystery lies in the paradoxes of his personality: he is not at all the uneducated fundamentalist one might expect. Born in London to a family of Pakistani immigrants, he is a British citizen raised and educated in England. Like Daniel, he is by all accounts highly intelligent and charming. Like Daniel, who had studied at Stanford, Omar received one of the finest educations his Western, liberal country offered (at London School of Economics). His family, like Pearl's, was an example of the success that immigrants could now achieve in Britain. Yet whereas Daniel left Stanford to become a star reporter and worldly humanist, Omar ended up cutting off Daniel's head. Lévy was desperate to understand why.
Lévy made a series of ominous discoveries. The first set of discoveries is essentially political. Omar, although ostensibly dedicated to the cause of "occupied" Kashmir, was also linked to Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. He was also closely connected to Pakistan's notorious intelligence service, the ISI. Lévy is convinced that Omar was an ISI agent, and he determined that for all intents and purposes the ISI, the Taliban, Al Qaida, and Kashmiri terrorist groups are close collaborators, making both the Pakistani state and Islamicist terrorists responsible for killing Daniel Pearl.
But the second set of discoveries regarded the depth of hatred current in Pakistan today: hatred against foreigners, hatred against Westerners, hatred against Americans, and hatred against Jews. This last element Lévy found particularly shocking. At nearly every turn he ran into an intense and grotesque antisemitism that is all the more bizarre when one considers how little contact Pakistanis have had with Jews or with European anti-Semitism. Lévy, who is normally very open about his own religious background, was terrified that he might be found out, and he was profoundly grateful that no one he met knew enough for his name to give him away.
But why exactly did Omar and those connected to him, from the ISI to Al Qaeda, want Daniel Pearl dead? Lévy concluded that they murdered him because of a combination of reasons. First, because he was a journalist. Lévy had found that official Pakistanis and radical Pakistanis alike could not grasp the idea of an independent journalist, and thus found the American-Jewish journalist intrinsically threatening; they could not believe that he could be anything other than an agent of the Mossad and the CIA. Second, because he was an American. Lévy had learned from his conversations in that part of the world that hatred of America was such that one could not admit to the possibility that all Americans were not all alike. They were all evil, they were all guilty, they were all open targets. In such an environment, no one cared what Daniel Pearl thought, said, or wrote about America and the world. He was guilty by birth. Lévy comments:
Pearl died for being an American in a country where to be an American is a sin that is not unlike, in the rhetoric that stigmatizes him, the sin of being Jewish. Pearl was the victim of that other vile stupidity called anti-Americanism that makes one, in the eyes of these neo-fascists that are the Islamicists, a reject, a sub-human to eliminate. American, thus bad. America, or Evil. The old Western anti-Americanism crossed with that of these fanatics of God. The rancid hatred of our Pétainists, restyled for the Third World and the wretched of the Earth. I finished this book at a very precise moment. I had in my ear, in that instant, the planetary clamor that made of America a region not of the world but of the spirit, and the darkest. It is better to live as a serf under Saddam than to be free thanks to Bush, claimed the planetary mob. One can, like me, refuse the war wanted by Bush and find this clamor nonetheless abject. Daniel Pearl died because of it.
(p. 460)
And then there is the third reason why Pearl died: because he was a Jew. He was a Jew in a country where Judaism is not a religion or even an identity but a crime and a sin. Lévy argues that Pearl was a victim of "modern antisemitism," that, "without renouncing any of the old clichés . . . reintegrates them in a system where the very name of Israel has become synonymous with all the worst in this world." This new antisemitism, Lévy writes:
makes of the real Jew the face of crime (the IDF), of genocide (the theme, popular since Durban and even before, of the massacre of Palestinians), of the desire to falsify (the Holocaust as a lie intended to mask the realty of Jewish power). From Durban to Bnei Brak, the new clothing of hatred. From "one Jew one bullet," called out by certain NGO representatives at Durban, to the Yemenite knife that operated the real murder of Daniel Pearl, a logical consequence. Daniel Pearl is dead, victim of a neo-anti-Judaism that is emerging before our eyes. . . One hears less and less that Jews are detestable in the name of Christ, the anti-Christ, or the purity of blood, this is what I believe. We are in the process of seeing a new formulation, a new way of justifying the worst that, a little like in the time of our own Dreyfus Affair, but now at a global scale, associates the hatred of Jews with the defense of the oppressed. . . (p. 462)
Finally, there is a fourth reason, which complicates everything, and of which Lévy is less admittedly less certain. Lévy speculates that Daniel Pearl died because he knew too much; specifically, he had uncovered certain secrets that none of the parties involved in his murder, specifically the ISI and Al Qaeda, could afford to let Pearl publicize. After carefully retracing Daniel Pearl's last steps, Lévy hypothesizes that he had uncovered hard evidence that Pakistan had assisted Bin Laden with his attempts to acquire the technology to make nuclear weapons. The evidence he presents, though far from conclusive, certainly gives one pause for thought.
Lévy is convinced that what he encountered in Pakistan was nothing less than evil, a word he does not shy away from. Unlike so many European intellectuals, moreover, he does not scoff at Bush's rhetoric of "rogue states" and an "axis of evil." "I affirm," he declares near the end of his book, "that Pakistan is the most roguish of the rogue states today." "I affirm," he continues,
there what is forming there between Islamabad and Karachi is a veritable black hole in comparison to which the Baghdad of Saddam Hussein was a depot of worn-out weapons…There is floating around, in these cities, the odor of apocalypse; and it is, I am convinced, what Danny had smelled.
(p. 525)
BHL characterizes the evil he encountered in Pakistan in language similar to that of Arendt, while sharing her reticence to define what evil is in itself. There are clear similarities: both Nazis and jihadists were interested in going beyond law in the name of some transcendent truth. They also did not want to share the earth with certain types of people, whole categories defined more often than not by birth rather than actions or beliefs. And they wanted to kill Jews.
While both Nazi and Islamicist evil may be explained, it cannot be justified - something that many of those who have sat in 'solidarity' with Hamas or Saddam Hussein seem to miss. Those who expect to find "real" evil with a heart of darkness and a sinister laugh, and those who, when they don't find them, assume that they are not confronting evil - these two groups fail to understand that evil does not run deep, and that it may be practiced by people with plenty of explanations and people who love their mothers. Evil is as evil does, and evildoers are human.
The question that troubled Lévy - and should trouble us - is the same one that motivated Arendt:: what can we, humanists and liberals, salvage? Are we compelled to regard a "Clash of Civilizations" as pre-determined? Is there a middle ground between the reckless foolishness of those who refuse to recognize evil there where it is most evident and Bush-style reductionism, intolerance and warfare?
In the last pages of Lévy's book, when he recounts the last moments of his final trip to Pakistan, he recalls all the positive experiences he has had with Muslims and the positive feelings he has had for Islam. "There is that other face of Islam," he writes, "that gentleness of Islam in which…against everything, to the last minute, Daniel Pearl wanted to believe, and in which I believe also." (p. 535) But which face will win? Will it be the "inheritors of that ancient exchange of men and cultures that goes from Avicenna to Mahfouz, by way of these sages of Cordoba-or the furious men of the camps in Peshawar who call for jihad and, chest ringed with explosives, aspire to die as martyrs?" And is there any role that we in the West can play?
Lévy can only conclude his book by praising Pearl for going up against "all the doctrinaires of a war of civilizations that can only promise the worst." He honors his "posthumous friend." and "calls for the spread of Enlightenment." Beyond that BHL is silent. He has no answers.
Epilogue
Now, writing in 2023, two months after the horrors of October 7, I am struck by the conflict I wrote above between the moralistic view that evil is evil, and the tendency shared by many to grasp onto an exculpatory causality, i.e. evil results from certain factors, and therefore isn't really evil. I find myself swinging to the moralist side. There is evil. Hamas is evil. And I have lost patience with exculpatory causality. Liberals, I believe, are deeply uncomfortable with this idea. We overlook deep-seated hatred and instances of evil. This perhaps is the reason why the raw antisemitism at the core of Al Qa’ida’s ideology is so really mentioned. No one talks about how Al Qa’ida chose the World Trade Center in the hopes of killing as many Jews as possible, not to mention the fact that they saw Jewish power behind all that they thought was evil about America. There is an atavistic hatred at work here, and a willingness to commit the worst atrocities to advance their vision. “Palestine” or “Guantanamo” are merely excuses.
By the way, a Pakistani court acquitted Omar in 2021. He is, as far as I know, free.