Naive Westerners and the Daniel Pearl Story

With the release of the new movie A Might Heart, Mark Steyn shares some of his earlier commentary on the Daniel Pearl saga:

…. Fisk settles on a “shameful, unethical headline” over an “article by Mark Steyn” in Pearl’s own Wall Street Journal. It was about Fisk’s bloody beating by an Afghan mob in Pakistan last December, after which he said that, in their shoes, “I would have done just the same to Robert Fisk. Or any other Westerner I could find.” It’s not their fault, he insisted, their “brutality is entirely the product of others”. As Fisk sees it, the mob who attacked him were “truly innocent of any crime except being the victim of the world”. In The Wall Street Journal, I called this “Fiskal responsibility – it’s always the Great Satan’s fault.”

Insofar as there’s any connection between the mugging of this vain buffoon and the murder of Daniel Pearl, it’s this: History repeats itself, but, in this instance, the usual order – tragedy’s recapitulation as farce – has been reversed. Is it too much to hope that militant Islam’s apologists might finally put an end to their own “misconceptions”? Islam is not “the victim of the world”, but the victim of itself. Omar Sheikh is a British public schoolboy, a graduate of the London School of Economics, and, like Osama and Mohammed Atta, a monument to the peculiar burdens of a non-deprived childhood in the Muslim world. Give ’em an e-mail address and they use it for kidnap notes. Give ’em a camcorder and they make a snuff video.

Let’s assume that all the chips fell the jihadis’ way, that they recruited enough volunteers to be able to kidnap and decapitate every single Jew in Palestine. Then what? Muslims would still be, as Pakistan’s General Musharraf told a conference the other day, “the poorest, the most illiterate, the most backward, the most unhealthy, the most unenlightened, the most deprived, and the weakest of all the human race.” Who would “the victim of the world” blame next? The evidence of the Sudan, Nigeria, and other parts of Africa suggests that, when there are no Jews to hand, the Islamofascists happily make do with killing Christians. In Kashmir, it’s the Hindus’ fault. There’s always someone.