The Journalist and the Jihadi: The Murder of Journalist Daniel Pearl - A Documentary Film

The official title of this documentary is The Journalist and the Jihadi. This documentary exhibits the patchy, chopped effect of hurried editing and production but it is a fascinating document nonetheless and well worth seeing.

The journalist Daniel Pearl was a worldly and sophisticated reporter assigned to various overseas bureaus for the Wall Street Journal, lately to India and finally to Pakistan where he met a gruesome death under the knife of militant Islamic terrorists. The film footage of Daniel Pearl's beheading was used as a Muslim propaganda tool to foment anti-Jewish hatred and garner recruits to an increasingly desperate fanaticism.

The barbaric blood-drenched spectacle of Daniel Pearl's beheading was widely circulated on the internet, but the grisly film clip does not appear in this film. Instead, we have interposed shots of the ill-fated journalist squatting upon his haunches, a semi-automatic pistol to his head.

The portrait that emerges of Daniel Pearl is that of a sensitive and vastly creative personality, the type of person who overflows the objectives of any mere job or assignment. Daniel was an accomplished musician, trained in the classical forms, but he was just at home in Cabaret and among many people of diverse background. The journalist in Daniel Pearl saw himself as a bridge of communication between turbulent cultures, according to the narration.

Daniel Pearl's background made him a target for terror. Daniel was Jewish, upper middle-class, and intellectual. In this documentary, we are not spared of hearing Daniel Pearl's tortured voice admitting to the Islamic crime of being Jewish, of having Jewish forebears, of having visiting Israel, of being guilty for all the crimes of the West, both imagined and real.