Even as he looks into the camera and utters the statements that his captors demand that he utter--a confession of his Jewishness, followed by a confession of the sins of America--there is a good, genial look in his eyes, and a complete lack of despair in his voice; and then suddenly he is on the floor and a knife is passed along his throat and his severed head is raised by a hand in a white sleeve, and your heart breaks for this obviously lovely life destroyed in some low, godless corner of a deranged world.
These are the images that a website called prohosters.com decided to keep online despite FBI demands that they remove them and that The Boston Phoenix controversially chose to link to. The images are, to put it mildly, tasteless; but surely there are times when truth is more important than taste.
Why should Americans not see the actual savagery of some of our actual adversaries? The squeamishness of some critics of the video's distribution is certainly not owed to any mixed feelings about what it depicts, or about American policy in Muslim lands. No, it appears to be a more generalized squeamishness about the reality of the universe that the video shows: about the facticity of evil. This fear must be fiercely resisted, if we are to have clarity about the struggle in which we now find ourselves. For this reason, a viewing of this hideous video is as instructive an experience as it is a shattering one.
But then there is the other shocking thing about this little snuff movie: It is a commercial. Pearl's doomed talking head is isolated within the blackened frame and surrounded by bubble-like images of the intifada. Moments before the tape's grisly climax there appears a photograph of Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush at the White House. There is a primitive soundtrack of thumps, sounding alternatively like drums or bombs. The anonymous executioner lifts his victim's head again and again, in a kind of triumphal refrain, and there appears an announcement that this has been brought to you by the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistan Sovereignty. That obscure anti-American and anti-Semitic groupuscule then lists its demands, which include the release of the F-16s the United States has not yet delivered to Pakistan. The F-16s!
So the images may be raw, but the footage is not raw: This is a political advertisement, pure and simple. It was produced and edited and titled the way advertisements are produced and edited and titled. Like all advertisements, it was designed to appeal to a particular audience. The assumption of the makers of this advertisement was that it will not inspire only horror, but also admiration.
Once the genre of what you have seen begins to sink in, so does a sickening feeling of just how twisted is the environment in which these enemies of ours prosper. And what remains in the mind once the "credits" have rolled is not merely disgust, but also the conviction that the only right and proper response to this variety of anti-Americanism is American power.
Wake up America!
These people will not be rehabilitated, they must be destroyed, completely and utterly destroyed before their poison spreads throughout the world.