daniel pearl

On Sunday, Samantha Powers, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., gave the annual Daniel Pearl Lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles, where Pearl’s father, Judea, is a professor of computer science.

(Why she was asked to speak is anyone’s guess. A committed Leftist, she has been a vocal critic of Israel, frequently engaging in moral equivalence between “Palestinian” terrorists and Israeli citizens trying to protect themselves from annihilation.)

Via The Daily Caller: UN Ambassador Samantha Power’s bizarre tweet on the Islamist beheading of Daniel Pearl

….Pearl is the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted in Pakistan four months after Sept. 11, 2001. Al-Qaida leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed slit Pearl’s throat and sawed his head off on camera, after forcing the reporter to read that “My name is Daniel Pearl. I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California, U.S.A. … My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.”

Pearl was 38.

“We give u 1 more day if America will not meet our demands we will kill Daniel,” read the first message from the militants who kidnapped Mr. Pearl. “Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.”

After the lecture, Powers tweeted the following:

And a Twitter-firestorm ensued:

Powers then tweeted a “correction” that clarified nothing.

But maybe we should not expect logic from someone married to Cass Sunstein, another committed Leftist, who called for animals to have the right to sue their owners.

Related:

Arnold Ahlert: FrontPage Mag — An Israel-Hater Heads to the U.N.

examiner.com: Cass Sunstein animal rights views: Should activists stop him from joining Obama administration?

Judea Pearl: Wall Street Journal — Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil

This section is for comments from tammybruce.com's community of registered readers. Please don't assume that Tammy agrees with or endorses any particular comment just because she lets it stand.
13 Comments | Leave a comment
  1. midget says:

    I dont think Powers & her like would get it even as their heads were being hacked off. Mr. Pearl & his family deserved better than her asinine comments.

  2. Kitten says:

    These people are wretched and heartless. Who is going to hold HER accountable?

  3. strider says:

    “Cycles of Violence” must have been her theme paper.

  4. Maynard says:

    The phrase “cycle of violence” is used to evade judgement or attribution of responsibility. A “cycle” is a force of nature, like seasons. It just happens. So Daniel Pearl’s death was just one those things. But what of right and wrong, good and evil? On this Powers is silent.

    By the way, this is the same Samantha Powers that rambled on in some weird hypothetical circumstances under which America might invade Israel to protect Palestinians from genocide. See YouTube clip.

    Obama’s people are precocious children living in ivory towers, rationalizing their emotions and ignorant of their ignorance.

    FWIW, a transcript of that interview.

    INTERVIEWER: “Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine — Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?”

    POWER: “What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing — or investing, I think, more than sacrificing — billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.

    Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Freidman has called “Sharafat.” I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention.”

    So she mouths a lot of gobbledegook, concluding that Sharon and Arafat are morally equivalent, and therefore America must “intervene”.

  5. makeshifty says:

    I feel like I’m “spreading the gospel” a bit, but I’ve found Evan Sayet’s analysis on “the modern liberal” very helpful in understanding how they think. I’ve found it to be complementary, and in some ways differing, from Tammy’s book “The Death of Right And Wrong.” He separates liberals into two categories, the elite, and those who vote for them. The latter just mouth what they think the elite want them to say. Here’s some of what he said. You can watch the full speech at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDb3sTwD_vA

    How do they think they’re creating a better world? What I’ve discovered is the modern liberal looks back on 50,000 years, a 100,000 years of human civilization, and knows only one thing for sure: That none of the ideas that mankind has come up with; none of the religions, the philosophies, none of the ideologies, none of the forms of government; none have succeeded in creating a world devoid of poverty, crime, and injustice. So they’re convinced that since all of these ideas of man have proved to be wrong, the real cause of war, poverty, crime, and injustice must be found–can only be found–in the attempt to be right [my emphasis]. See, if nobody thought they were right, what would we disagree about? If we didn’t disagree, surely we wouldn’t fight. If we didn’t fight, of course we wouldn’t go to war. Without war there would be no poverty. Without poverty there would be no crime. With no crime there would be no injustice. It’s a utopian vision. All that’s required to usher in this utopia is the rejection of all fact, reason, evidence, logic, truth, morality, and decency; all the tools that you and I use in our attempts to be better people, to make the world more right, by trying to *be* right, by siding with right, by recognizing what is right, and moving towards it.

    So what you have is people who think that the best way to eliminate rational thought, the best way to eliminate the attempt to be right, is to work always to prove that right *isn’t* right, and to prove that wrong *isn’t* wrong, to bring about a philosophy–and you see this in John Lennon’s song, “Imagine.” “Imagine there’s no countries,” not, “Imagine great countries.” Not, “Imagine defeat the Nazis.” “Imagine no religions”–and a key line is, imagine a time when anything and everything that mankind values is devalued to the point where there’s “nothing left to kill or die for.” See, obviously this is not going to happen overnight. There’s still going to be religions, but they’re going to do their best to denigrate them. There are still going to be countries, but they’ll do the best they can to get us to cede our national sovereignty to one-world bodies. But in the meantime, everything that they believe is designed–everything they teach in our schools, everything they make into movies, the messages of the movies, the TV shows, the newspaper stories that they pick, and how they spin them, have but one criteria for truth, beauty, honesty, etc., etc., and that’s does it tear down what is good, and elevate what is evil? Does it tear down what is right, and elevate what is wrong? Does it tear down the behaviors that lead to success, and elevate the ones that lead to failure, until there’s nothing left to believe in.

    It’s not that they’re not aware of all the things that we’re aware of. It’s that they *need* to reject them in order to remain in this 5-year-old [he’s talking about the mind of a child] Utopia that they’ve been told is the only hope for mankind; a mindless indiscriminateness.

    But here’s a key: Indiscriminateness of thought does not lead to indiscriminateness of policy [my emphasis]. Indiscriminateness of thought *invariably* leads the modern liberal–inevitably leads them–to side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success. Why? Because in a world where you are indiscriminate, where no behavior is to be deemed better or worse than any other, then your expectation is that all behaviors should lead to equally good outcomes. When in the real world different behaviors lead to different outcomes. You and I know why, because we think! … To the modern liberal, who cannot make that judgment, *must* not make that judgment, that would be discriminating [my emphasis].

    His thesis is that the ultimate sin to a modern liberal is to engage in *any* form of discrimination, even ones that we would consider smart to engage in, such as choosing between right and wrong, constructive or destructive, and good over evil. Their ultimate utopian objective is to end conflict by eliminating *any* distinctions which would cause people to see a need for it. In their view, until that objective is achieved there will of course be conflict, but they will make sure to try to make the protagonist the antagonist, and the antagonist the protagonist, muddying the waters in the hope that people will just give up trying to tell them apart, so that they will come to Hillary Clinton’s famous conclusion, “What difference does it make?”

    • Isaac T says:

      If you want to travel further down the rabbit hole opened up by Mr. Sayet’s book, I recommend “The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics: How Liberalism and Conservatism Evolved Within Humans” written under the pseudonym Anonymous Conservative. Where Sayet does very well in describing phenomena, Anonymous Conservative actually *explains* it at a much deeper level.

  6. Vintageport says:

    So we are to understand that there is a moral equivalency between beheading and what exactly?

  7. LucyLadley says:

    This story makes my blood boil!!!!! What a nasty despicable cold-hearted person Samantha Powers must be.

  8. Alain41 says:

    Can’t say that the following is leftist incoherence, leftist insanity okay, but not incoherence.

    Recently leftists have been preaching against Libertarians. A Harvard Law professor several years ago pointed out 2 examples of libertarianism gone wild: “…(1) the American Revolution; and (2) political resistance to the PATRIOT Act during the mid-2000s….”

    http://washingtonexaminer.com/libertarian-paranoia-is-the-newest-fad-in-politics/article/2544542

  9. Dave says:

    Unacceptable, on any level.
    The Daniel Pearl murder was so disturbing to me,
    I almost got physically sick thinking about how that poor soul died and the horror that he experienced.
    It still HAUNTS me.
    These Libs obviously don’t know where to stop.
    2014, we should show them where they stop.

You must be logged in to post a comment.