http://www.americanfreepress.net/03_03_02/Murdered_American_Journalist/murdered_american_journalist.html
Media Suppressed Facts About Murdered American Journalist
The tragic killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl highlights the impropriety of placing dual nationals in regions of the world where it could put them in mortal danger.
Exclusive to American Free Press
By Christopher Bollyn
Although the killing of Daniel Pearl was a tragedy for his family and loved ones, the American media has once again misreported the facts. Contrary to the claim that Pearl was an American, at best he was half American because he was also a citizen of Israel.
What is fact is that Pearl’s killers claimed that he was Mossad and executed him as an Israeli spy.
One week after Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped in Pakistan on Jan. 23, his captors claimed he was working with Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, and that, if their demands were not met, he would be killed. The American mass media cooperated to conceal Pearl’s Israeli origin and citizenship while he was held, ostensibly to protect his life and, unlike the Israeli press, continued to do so even after his death.
During the month following Pearl’s kidnapping, there was great concern that publication of his family’s Israeli roots would further endanger his life. In Israel, as soon as news of Pearl’s death was disclosed, newspapers rushed to report his Israeli origins.
ACCUSED OF SPYING
An unsigned email purportedly sent by the kidnappers on Jan. 30 showed Pearl with a gun to his head and threatened to kill him within 24 hours. The message claimed that Pearl, the paper’s South Asian bureau chief, was a Mossad agent.
“We talked to Daniel Pearl and we learned that he is not a CIA officer but is an agent of Mossad,” the statement said.
The previously unknown group, the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty, demanded the release of Pakistani prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in exchange for Pearl. Their messages denounced the detention of Pakistanis in the United States and Cuba on terrorism-related charges without benefit of lawyers or trials.
The kidnappers accused U.S. reporters of working for intelligence agencies and warned “all American journalists” in Pakistan to leave the country within three days. “Anyone remaining after that will be targeted,” it said. Fahad Naseem, one of three men accused of involvement in the kidnapping, said Pearl was abducted be cause he was a Jew working against Islam.
Efforts to rescue Pearl were in vain and four weeks after he was kidnapped his death was confirmed in a videotape. The State Department said the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan received evidence on Feb. 21 that Pearl was dead.
The Journal denied that Pearl was a spy while representatives of Dow Jones, its parent company, reportedly worked intensively behind the scenes to alert news organizations to the danger in publishing the names of Pearl’s parents or the family’s Israeli background.
PEARL’S ISRAELI ROOTS
Although a Dow Jones spokesman, Gary Foster, said Daniel Pearl was “very proud of his heritage” the company organized a concerted effort to keep the details of Pearl’s Israeli heritage out of the news.
“We were particularly anxious that networks reaching large international audiences, such as CNN and BBC, would not break the news,” Foster said. Since his death announcement, some newspapers have reported, briefly, that the Pearl parents have “remained Israeli citizens.”
Pearl’s father, Yehuda Pearl, was born in Tel Aviv in 1936 to parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. He served in the Israeli army and studied electronics at the Technion, the Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa, where he met his future wife, Ruth. They came to the United States in the late 1950s, where they had three children, Daniel, Tamara, 41, and Michelle, 32.
Yehuda and Ruth came to Princeton, N.J., for graduate studies and he subsequently worked at the RCI research center near Princeton, where Daniel was born in 1963. The family moved to Los Angeles in 1969, after Yehuda was offered a position at UCLA. They eventually became American citizens but retained their Israeli citizenship and close links with Israel.
Tova Pearl, Daniel’s grandmother, lives in north Tel Aviv. “His parents were Israeli but he was not Israeli. He came to Israel a few times to be with his grandmother and take part in celebrations,” she told Ma'ariv newspaper, adding, “And even if he had been an Israeli, it’s also not a crime for which he needed to die.”
Although the Israeli interior ministry considered Daniel Pearl a citizen, he reportedly did not use an Israeli passport, and according to his father saw himself as an American.
Yehuda Pearl expressed anger over the revelation by the Israeli media of his family’s “Israeli connection” and Daniel’s Israeli citizenship. Los Angeles is home to some 150,000 Israelis, many of them U.S.-Israel dual citizens like the Pearls. The American media continued to comply with this request even after confirmation that the 38-year-old reporter was dead.
The WSJ denied that Pearl was a spy for Israel or the U.S. government and even that he was an Israeli citizen.
When AFP asked Steven Goldstein of Dow Jones about Pearl’s ties to Israel, Goldstein claimed to have no understanding of U.S.-Israel dual nationality, saying, Israeli law “has no bearing or significance” because Pearl “was an American.”
Both Goldstein and Aaron Bedy, a spokesman for the Journal, denied that Pearl was an Israeli citizen. “He is an American,” Bedy told AFP. “The Israelis can say whatever. He is not an Israeli.”
“Danny Pearl was an American citizen. He was born an American and, sadly, died an American. He only traveled on an American passport,” Goldstein told AFP. Questions about Pearl’s ties to Israel “are moot as he was not a citizen of any other country,” Goldstein said.
Pearl was an Israeli by virtue of the fact that his parents were both Israelis when he was born in Princeton, N.J. Children born in the United States to Israeli parents, like the Pearls, usually acquire both U.S. and Israeli nationality at birth. Israeli nationality is given to any person whose father or mother was an Israeli national at the time of his birth, regardless of where the person is born.
Daniel had frequently visited his relatives in Israel and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In 1976, as a 13-year-old, he “registered himself” as a citizen with the Israeli government, according to The New York Post.
U.S.-Israeli dual citizens are required to serve in the Israeli armed forces and need an exemption or deferment from Israeli military service before going to Israel. Without this document, they may not be able to leave Israel without completing military service or may be subject to criminal penalties. AFP was unable to confirm whether Pearl had served in the Israeli army.
==^================================================================
This email was sent to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?bUrCn8.bUNmfU
Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail!
http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register
==^================================================================
|
