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Pearl. Dr. Pearl is a man of extraordinary strength in the face of extraordinary pain, and I felt somehow that to watch his son being slaughtered would be a kind of personal betrayal. But I won’t say that’s the only reason. The philosopher Berel Lang argues in his book
Holocaust Representation
that there are some aspects of the death camp process that, by an almost universal human consensus, should just not be represented. Or, if they are, not watched. But I’ll admit my reluctance is not entirely philosophical; it’s part of my “private balancing act.”
    You’ll recall that in the classical myth, those who gazed on the Medusa’s head turned to stone. In some respects I think of the savagely severed head of Daniel Pearl as something like the Medusa’s head of contemporary anti-Semitism.
    So, I understand the reluctance of some to gaze too deeply into such acts of darkness. I’ve felt it. I just don’t think it should become a principle, a general rule.
    Looking and looking away. How much does one want— need—to know? I had a curious experience, one I’ve come to think of as inadvertently emblematic of this dichotomy, in compiling this anthology.
    One of the most important and influential, if dispiriting, examples of reporting I read in the months after September 11 was Jeffrey Goldberg’s “Behind Mubarak” in
The New Yorker
. It was a courageous piece of reporting in which Goldberg, who did not disguise his Jewishness, walked into mosques, madrasas, and media centers in Cairo and asked mullahs and newspaper columnists to talk about 9/11, America, and the Jews. It was about this time that an influential mullah in Cairo (who was also head of the Islamic Cultural Center in New York City) advanced the claim that the World Trade Center attack was the work of Jews and added, “If it became known to the American people, they would have done to the Jews what Hitler did.” He did not make this sound like an unattractive prospect to him.
    It was the first instance I’d come across of what began to blossom into a kind of subgenre of radical Islamist rhetorical appeals and encomiums to Hitler. These began to surface in English through the important efforts of the Middle East Media Research Institute. It was an organization founded to promote understanding by translating Arabic media into English. But one of the less savory themes MEMRI 6 brought to light was a disturbing tendency one could find in Islamist rhetoric: the apostrophe to Hitler.
    Goldberg cites one example, a tribute to Hitler written by a columnist in a self-described “very moderate publication” in Cairo: “Thanks to Hitler, of blessed memory, who on behalf of the Palestinians took revenge in advance, against the most vile criminals on the face of the Earth. . . .”
    â€œRevenge in advance”: retrospectively “justified” genocide. But he doesn’t stop there. He feels Hitler did not do enough: “[W]e do have a complaint against him [Hitler], for his revenge was not enough. . . .” In other words, he failed to kill every single Jew. This, again, in a “moderate” Egyptian newspaper.
    This was exceeded in vile ingenuity by another quote from the Egyptian media, courtesy of MEMRI’s translation. Another kind of complaint against Hitler: “French studies have proven that [the Holocaust] is no more than a fabrication. . . . But I . . . complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart: ‘if only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened . . . so the world could sigh in relief.’ ”
    â€œSigh in relief,” knowing all the Jews were dead. A unique and groundbreaking fusion of Holocaust denial and Holocaust craving. Even “mainstream” Holocaust deniers at least publicly imply that the mass murder of Jews would have been a bad thing (otherwise why bother to defend Hitler from the