Investigating Danny Pearl’s murder, Lévy says he had to die for what he discovered, the shape of the next terrorist attack from the jihadist alliance that killed him, which will “make 9/11 look prehistoric.” The opening paragraphs of Ron Rosenbaum’s New York Observer review of Lévy’s book are surprisingly, incongruously flip (perhaps Rosenbaum is imbued with Bushite anti-French fever?). Despite saying the two books don’t compete, he is far more enamored of the forthcoming memoir by Pearl’s widow Mariane, A Mighty Heart, which he says, perhaps abit boastfully, that he has read in galleys. The comments are gratuitous and tangential to the chilling details he describes in the rest of the article.
With the recent focus on Iraq, we have lost sight of the very real need for concern about the unholy, hypocritical, dangerous alliances the Bush cabal has forged with nations like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, both the provinces of sophisticated, angry and well-endowed radical Islamists with fragile vulnerable governments only tentatively willing to or capable of containing them, not to mention that they receive support from official elements such as Pakistani intelligence. Lévy’s book, and Rosenbaum’s précis, are a horrific reminder of what seeds of our own destruction we may have sown.
The narrative hinges on the moment after Pearl’s kidnapping when his abductors drop their ransom demands and change tack, deciding to kill Pearl. Rosenbaum notes that Lévy’s narrative from here on is speculative, although ackonwledging that it is the speculation of a daring reporter with seasoned instincts.
…Mr. Lévy seeks to convince us that Pearl was on the trail of the nexus that he, Lévy, discovered in his investigation of the crime: the nexus between Pakistani intelligence, Al Qaeda, Pakistani nuclear scientists and rogue states such as North Korea that portends the sum of all fears: a handover of the Islamic bomb—or, at the very least, lethal nuclear materials—to Al Qaeda terrorists. The genesis of the next 9/11. Mr. Lévy not only believes this was the subject of Pearl’s investigation, the reason he sought the ill-fated interview with Sheikh Gilani that led to his kidnapping, but that in the course of his captivity he learned even more from his captors, learned too much to be allowed to live.
Rosenbaum demurs, “All of Mr. Lévy’s speculations may be true, but that doesn’t mean they were Danny Pearl’s.” But why use the vehicle of an exploration of Pearl’s death if one has the scoop of the century to claim as the fruits of one’s own investigations? And why would Lévy’s attribution of this discovery to Pearl prompt such vehement disavowals from his employer (“Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, said the newspaper had no evidence that Mr. Pearl was investigating any such conspiracy” — NY Times), and his family, which favors the more prosaic theory, essentially that Pearl was killed because his kidnappers had an opportunity to produce a snuff video of a Jewish American?
Rosenbaum speculates that Lévy is “using the notoriety of the Pearl death, using his own fame and his own investigation, as an opportunity to issue a heartfelt warning to the West of the apocalyptic developments brewing in Pakistan…”, but comes to favor instead the possibility that Lévy lovingly identified so thoroughly with Pearl that he was moved to give him a posthumous gift of attributing his own insights to the younger man.
Related? Special Report: Saudis consider the bomb. Guardian.UK
