Murdered reporter Pearl added to Holocaust memorial

A US journalist who was abducted and killed in Pakistan had his name added to a Holocaust memorial in Florida.

Daniel Pearl became the first person to be added to the 30,000 names on Miami Beach memorial who was not killed in the 20th century genocide.

Pearl died for the same reasons that six million Jews were killed, his father Judea Pearl said.

“The forces of barbarity and evil are still active in our world. The Holocaust didn’t finish in 1945,” Judea Pearl told a crowd of hundreds as his son’s name was unveiled.

During the ceremony, he asked one of his son’s heroes, famed violinist Ida Haendel, to play a song as he lit a candle in Daniel Pearl’s memory.

Judea Pearl said he will always remember his son, a classically trained violinist, as “the journalist who is roaming the roads with a fiddle and a laptop spreading friendship and good will into the human faces behind the news”.

Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal’s South Asia bureau chief, was abducted on January 23, 2002, while working on a story about Islamic militants in Karachi, Pakistan.

Four days later, the Journal and other media outlets received pictures of Pearl with a pistol to his head. A group calling itself the National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty claimed responsibility for the kidnapping and demanded that suspected Taliban and al-Qaida fighters be released from US custody.

The journalist’s body was found months later in a shallow ditch in a compound on the outskirts of Karachi. His throat had been slit.

American authorities investigating the murder now believe the journalist’s throat was slit by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

Daniel Pearl’s last words “I am Jewish”, are the title of a book his parents wrote in 2004. A movie starring Angelina Jolie based on the memoirs of Pearl’s widow, Mariane, is scheduled to be released this year.

Although his son’s death and the Holocaust were many years apart and “executed by people of different faith, different language and different agendas” they share a common thread of hatred, Judea Pearl said.

“Daniel Pearl died for the crime of being Jewish, which is the same reason the 30,000 other names on the wall also died and the six million who died in the Holocaust,” said Norman Braman, chair of the Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial Committee.