Xavier’s Reviews > I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl > Status Update

these youngsters semiclones of Danny—talented, curi-ous, principled, and friendly—and I tell myself: Look at the kind of hatred they will be facing when they grow up. They deserve encour-agement. They deserve to be told, “You are OK. You are not the bloodthirsty baby-killing money-hungry imperialists that Danny’s killers and their intellectual sympathizers on college campuses try to portray you as. No. You are Daniel

“Here we come from Pakistan, a country where, to many peo-ple, the word ‘Jewish’ implies contempt (if not a license to kill), and here we are celebrating the life of a Jewish boy from Los Angeles, California, a descendant of a Hasidic Jew from Bnei Brak, Israel. Ask yourself why we do that! We do it because Daniel Pearl is a symbol of the new alignment, the ‘Coalition of the Decent,’ to which we belong and toward whi

October 10, 2002, we celebrated Danny’s thirty-ninth birthday in the form of a global concert called Daniel Pearl Music Day. Thousands of musicians in over one hundred concerts and eighteen countries around the world played for world harmony and took a stand for tolerance and humanity. This was a modest but significant beginning.
Among the many participants was Pakistan’s number-one rock group, Junoon, who dedicated

By building respect for diverse cultures and values, this “Coalition of the Decent” will strengthen its ranks and will stand up to rising cultures of hate, accusation, and deceit.

It is a unique opportunity because there are not many such legacies around. In other words, there aren’t many faces which both a Muslim and a Westerner can point to and agree: “Here is a man of peace, an emissary of goodwill.”

This is our vision of revenge: fighting the hatred that took Danny’s life.

If you are a decent person anywhere, it was your decency that was betrayed on February 21, 2002.

If you are an American, or a citizen of any democracy, it was your values and your freedoms that were targeted and abducted on that fateful night of January 23, 2002.
If you are a journalist, it was your hands that were chained in Karachi on that terrible night.
If you are a Muslim who struggles to lift his countrymen to new opportunities, it was your head that came under the gun in Karachi in January 2002.

When Danny said “I am Jewish,” I wrote, what he meant in fact was: “I respect Islam precisely because I am Jewish, and I expect you to respect me and my faith precisely because you are, or claim to be, good Muslims.” In other words, “I come from a place where one’s heritage is the source of one’s strength, and strength is measured by one’s capacity to accommodate diversity. Because it is only through diversity that w

inherited no other mental tranquilizer except that chronic urge to question and to understand. “I understand suffering, because the suffering of my ancestors is etched on my consciousness. “I understand justice, because I was distilled by injustice. “I understand Muslims’ suffering as well, for I have seen your people in Kosovo, I have worked with your carpet weavers in Iran, and I have sung with your pearl divers