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A journalist explains why its horrific images should be treated as news.
True martyrs-unlike the twisted souls who fly jets into buildings or blow themselves up at pizze-- rias-are inevitably reluctant. Whether it's Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr., Jesus or Gandhi, the anonymous Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe or the anonymous Muslims of Kosovo and Bosnia, people want to live their lives, not become symbols.
So I have little doubt what Daniel Pearl would have thought of the Boston Phoenix's decision to provide a link on its Web site to the propaganda video of his execution and to publish a photo of his severed head being held aloft. He would have been horrified that his last, terrible moments were made so public.
As his father, Judea Pearl, recounted in an eloquent op-ed piece for The New York Times, his son had sent him an e-mail from Pakistan two months before his abduction saying, "It looks pretty dicey from here-at least your papers don't run front-page photos of the corpses of journalists." Judea Pearl then wrote: "To preserve the dignity of our champions, we should remove all terrorist-produced murder scenes from our Web sites and agree to suppress such scenes in the future."
I respectfully disagree. Daniel Pearl didn't seek martyrdom, but martyrdom found him. The three-and-a-half-- minute video shows us the true face of evil, an evil that manifested itself unambiguously last September 11.
Over and over, Pearl is forced to talk about his Jewish heritage while the screen is splashed with scenes of Palestinian suffering. He also talks about the alleged sins of the United States...