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.
It may be. There have been circumstances where this was the only right and proper response. Such a response became history on the beaches of Normandy (not a response to anti-Americanism, BTW).
Just this morning I happened to finish reading a chapter from a book entitled "Political Power and the Forces of Darkness." (a lovely Father's Day morning, with sunshine and kids drawing chalk on the sidewalk). The author, Frederick Wilhelmsen, writes about political prudence which grounds its action not on the principle of success or survival (mindful that all the best virtue, as often as it is successful, is time and again found empty-handed, stolen of hopes by the most absurd events and found flagging under external defeat) but truth.
This principle must be understood with all the delicacy involved in political speculation and action. The principle does not urge us to abandon astuteness when we treat the enemies of civilization, be they the Turks before Vienna in the sixteenth century or the Russions in Berlin and Angola and Cuba in the twentieth. The principle does not insist that we hurl all our troops and all our resources into the breach in a desperate cavalry charge against barbarism, although the principle does not discount this possibility. The principle does not goad us into a politics of international suicide. The principle does not countermand and negate the subtlety and even the deviousnes demanded in the actual practice of the arts of diplocmacy. It rather commends all of these things and presses them upon us in the name of political prudence. But the principle does insist that these arts be seen for what they are, techniques in the service of something deeper than themselves: the preservation and the enhancement of civilization and therefore the ultimate destruction of civilization's enemies. Should the arts of diplomacy convert themselves into a general foreign policy whose very end is the preservation and perpetuation of political evil, then politics would have renounced its own poper finality, a common good shared.The more important point of the posted essay is the recognition that politics must respond to these events and only has a few options at hand. The options are limited by the very definition of what constitutes evil.