Who Killed Daniel Pearl by Bernard-Henri Lévy Read Free Book Online Page B

Light that hurts your eyes. A small house by the side of the road, with a garage, potted flowers hanging from balconies, a profusion of small cacti. Cautiously, discreetly, with all possible tact, I am in the process of sharing my preliminary conclusions with Daniel Pearl’s parents, including my version of their son’s death.
    â€œNo, no, that’s not it,” interrupts the father, Judea, who looks to me like the genial French humorist Francis Blanche, with kind intelligent eyes that occasionally flash with infinite sadness. “It’s true there was a video tape. But it was in two parts. I’m sure it was taped at two different times of the day. You can’t go ahead as if the two parts say the same thing, or as if they’re said in the same tone.”
    What are these two parts? And what does that change?
    â€œEverything,” he replies. “It changes everything. You have the part when he talks about the United States, the prisoners in Guantanamo. There he actually talks like a robot. The words are obviously dictated. Maybe he’s even being shown cue cards, off camera. He trips over certain words. He puts in these long ‘uhhhs’ between words. He deliberately mispronounces things. He says ‘Amrica,’ for instance, which is what they must have written on the card. What I mean is that he’s doing everything to let us know, we who are going to get the message, that he doesn’t believe a word of what he’s saying. And then you have the second part, where he says, ‘My name is Daniel Pearl . . . I am a Jewish-American . . . I live in Encino, California . . . On my father’s side I come from a family of Zionists . . . My father is Jewish . . . My mother is Jewish . . . I am Jewish.”
    Judea knows these words by heart. I sense that he could recite them to the end, like a poem. At certain points he takes on intonations and a voice that are not entirely his but Danny’s, his son’s . . . As for the other part of the message, which concerns Guantanamo and American policy, I find it strange that he seems so certain that it was dictated and that Danny is reciting it against his will. I would have thought otherwise. I had thought and written otherwise, but I let him speak.
    â€œJust listen to this second part. Listen . . . ”
    His face has brightened. He’s smiling. He’s looking at his wife who is smiling too. She’s fragile, heartrending, a sharp pretty face half hidden by a fringe of jet-black hair and a pair of glasses, a tiny figure who floats in her shift, halfway between the living and the dead. He takes her hand, strokes it imperceptibly. They have the same look that they have in the magnificent photo in the staircase to the office, dating from the time, forty-three years ago, when they arrived from Israel. The house is full of photos of Danny, of course. But there are also photos of his sisters, Michele and Tamara. Of Mariane, his wife, and little Adam. And there are two magnificent, glorious, resplendent portraits of them—the little Iraqi Jewish girl and the little Polish Jewish boy landing in America like the Ellis Island immigrants, because they know that this is the land of liberty. And suddenly that’s what they look like.
    â€œThat part about being Jewish, he said that. Those are his words. Those are his sentences. Nobody is forcing him to do anything at that point. There are no cue cards. How many times do I have to tell you that two plus two makes four, that I’m a Jew, that I’m proud of it—that’s what he’s telling them. I imagine at that point he still trusts them. He doesn’t know what’s going to happen. So he’s talking to them, telling them where he comes from, his background. We all have roots, don’t we? And these are mine. You’re Moslems. I’m a Jew. But ultimately we’re human before anything else.”
    Another glance towards his wife, who has