Judea Pearl: A Clash of Two Birthdays

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http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/a_clash_of_two_birthdays_20080917/

Last month, in my column titled “Al Jazeera and the Glorification of Barbarity” (August 21) http://www.jewishjournal.com/judea_pearl/ I described al Jazeera’s royal celebration of the birthday of Samir Kuntar, the unrepentant child-killer psychopath, and called on the network to “publically apologize to its viewers in the Arab world for attempting to turn their children into the likes of Kuntar; to the journalism community, for robbing the profession of its nobleness; and, most urgently, to us, citizens of this planet, for re-legitimizing barbarity in the public square.”

Those who expected Al Jazeera to apologize should recall that apology in Al-Jazeera’s worldview is tantamount to a humiliating surrender. Surprisingly, a letter signed by Al-Jazeera’s general director, Khanfar Wadah, was received by the newspaper Ha’aretz, a copy of which I have obtained, saying: “elements of the programme violated Al-Jazeera’s Code of Ethics” (Ha’aretz, Aug. 6), This letter prompted Ha’aretz editors to issue a cheerful headline: “Al-Jazeera apologizes for ‘unethical’ coverage of Kuntar release.” Two days after the letter was sent, however, Ahmad Jaballah, the station’s deputy editor-in-chief, denied that the channel had ever apologized, or sent any letter to Israel. On Aug. 8, in an interview with the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar, Jaballah called the report on the letter “utter nonsense and totally groundless” (MEMRI translation.) It is, indeed, utterly impossible for Al Jazeera to apologize for echoing its viewers’ deepest passions.

The most frequent question I received from readers of my column was: “Did you get any response from Arab or Western readers?” I will summarize these responses below, together with responses to another, totally different birthday commemoration, one that contrasts the surrealism of Kuntar’s carnival with the spirit of our local community and illuminates what many characterize as a “clash of civilizations.”

The responses to my August column fell into four major categories, as encapsulated in the following quotes:

  1. “They apologized, didn’t they? So, why rub it in?”
  2. I am ashamed of being an Arab, Al Jazeera does not speak for me.”
  3. “What do you expect of those Arabs, they are fed this hatred with their mother’s milk.”
  4. “What about the millions of Iraqi children killed by Americans and the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians?”

I expected these four types of responses, but what struck me as odd was that the fourth group came not only from anti-American fanatics and Jihadi websites, but also from well meaning American intellectuals, among them respected journalists and political analysts. It seems that two very simple ideas, so obvious to ordinary folks, have not been able to penetrate the skulls of some of our intellectuals.

The first is that, irrespective of body-counts and political agenda, those who take pride in targeting the innocent or who aim at maximizing civilian casualties are not on the same side of heaven as those who struggle to prevent such acts and minimize civilian casualties. Most people are under the impression that United Nations diplomats, coerced by a certain block of terror-sympathetic countries, are the only thinking humanoids who are incapable of formulating a commonsensical definition of the evil of terror. This is no longer true; evidently, the body-count argument now blinds the best of us.

The second idea concerns the fundamental distinction between individual behavior and societal norms. When an American or Israeli soldier targets civilians, he/she is court-martialed, not glorified as a hero for youngsters to emulate. Al Jazeera’s celebration of Kuntar’s birthday party was unmistakably designed and choreographed to position child-killer Kuntar as a role model for Arab society, and it undoubtedly succeeded, given the admiration that Kuntar commands these days in the Middle East, including his recent meeting with Mahmoud Abbas. Some Western intellectuals are not willing to sit down and calculate the number of years it would take for human civilization to clean up the moral warpage that Al Jazeera is spouting in the young minds of its 50 million viewers. In sharp contrast to the birthday of Samir Kuntar, next month will witness another birthday celebration, closer to my heart: the birthday of our late son, Daniel Pearl, who would have turned 45 on October 10. Unlike the former, this birthday will not be celebrated on satellite TV with butcher knives, Hezbollah fatigues and “Heil Hitler” salutes. Instead, it will be celebrated by grass root communities, including Danny’s musician friends, to commemorate and perpetuate his passionate use of music to connect people of diverse background.

Danny’s birthday represents the soul of a different society, one whose role models are truth-seeking journalists and bridge-building musicians, not child killers; a society that celebrates life, not death, one that commemorates birthdays with music and interfaith gatherings, not butcher knives, assassination threats and vows to “meet the enemy very soon.”

As some readers probably know, every year since 2002, the Daniel Pearl World Music Days has taken place worldwide during the month of October. Music Days involve hundreds of musical happenings that include dedications to the ideals for which Danny stood as well as declarations against the culture of terror and hate that took his life. In 2007, more than 500 concerts were dedicated in 42 countries, uniting and empowering many thousands of people in a stand for a more humane world.

Here in Los Angeles, this year’s World Music Days will prelude in Royce Hall on Sept. 21 with the American Youth Symphony dedication of Beethoven 9th symphony, joining the Angeles Chorale with “Alle Menschen werden Brüder (All men will be brothers.)” This will be followed by Yuval Ron Ensemble on Sept. 25, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra on Oct. 4-5, the Los Angeles Master Chorale on Oct. 12, Kadima String Quartet on Oct. 22, the Victory Orchestra on Oct. 26, and many more concerts, festivals and performances (see www.danielpearlmusicdays.org/events.php, for a full and growing list,) dedicated to the ideal of a hate-free world.

The Los Angeles Jewish community has played a special role in World Music Days in the past seven years. Synagogues, Jewish Schools and community centers have turned their October gatherings into a powerful opportunity to inspire members with unity and purpose as well as reach out to neighboring, non-Jewish communities and catalyze lasting alliances through the shared values that World Music Days symbolize. The Weizmann Day School in Pasadena, for example, has invited, for the past seven years, the children of both a Muslim school and an Episcopalian school to come to their campus and sing songs of peace in tribute to Daniel’s memory. These concerts have developed into lasting relationships and joint programming throughout the year.

Major synagogues such as Valley Beth Shalom, Sinai Temple, Temple Israel of Hollywood, and University Synagogue in Irvine have dedicated musical portions of the High Holidays or Kabalat Shabbat services to Daniel’s last words, “I am Jewish,” and thus transformed routine liturgical texts into a powerful poetry of pride and resilience, cogently relevant to our troubled century.

Two clashing birthdays, two cultures, and two outlooks for the 21st century.

Our rabbis, cantors, school principals and community leaders understand that a birthday celebration is a profound statement of identity, not a propaganda gimmick; it is a mirror of society, its principles, norms and aspirations, not an impulsive vent of one’s hatred. They understand that those who celebrate Kuntar’s birthday with butcher knives and Hezbollah’s fatigues are committing their children to another century of helplessness, while those who celebrate the birthday of a friendship-building journalist-musician-humanist elevate their children to a balcony of hope.

The former are nourishing a generation of Samir Kuntars, the latter rear a generation that reveres life and can look itself in the mirror without shame.


Judea Pearl is a professor at UCLA and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation www.danielpearl.org, named after his son. With his wife, Ruth, he co-edited the anthology “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl (Jewish Light, 2004).

==================supplement for 2008 Music Days——-==============

Shooting Stars
(To Daniel Pearl )
——————————
It seems unfair, a waste,
To journey like a shooting star,
One thousand cosmic years through space.
To smile one time, just once,
Emit your brightest ever light and swing
In daring curvature to nowhere,
Like that actor on the stage
Who ends the play to no applause,
And bows to empty seats, yet glows.

Unfair! a waste!

But a child may chance to stare
And see that daring curvature, remember?
Which may bewitch this child to motion,
Remind him of those cosmic years, of freedom,
Jolt his mind to point up north
Yond the curtain of prediction,
Dare to shed the bonds of earth
And bend the course of expectation.

Unfair? A waste?

My eyes to shooting stars, to motion.
My heart to one that just passed by,
Softly traveled, bright, secured,
Like a wandering minstrel,
In the distant land of broken mandolins,
Measuring the path of your world, oh God,
With kisses.

Judea Pearl: A Clash of Two Birthdays

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AUTHOR

Judea Pearl

Judea Pearl was born in Tel Aviv and is a graduate of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. He came to the United States for postgraduate work in 1960, and the following year he received a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering, now New Jersey Institute of Technology. In 1965, he simultaneously received a master’s degree in physics from Rutgers University and a PhD from the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, now Polytechnic Institute of New York University. Until 1969, he held research positions at RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey and Electronic Memories, Inc. Hawthorne, California.

Pearl joined the faculty of UCLA in 1969, where he is currently a professor of computer science and statistics and director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory. He is known internationally for his contributions to artificial intelligence, human reasoning, and philosophy of science. He is the author of more than 350 scientific papers and three landmark books in his fields of interest: Heuristics (1984), Probabilistic Reasoning (1988), and Causality (2000; 2009).

A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, Pearl is the recipient of numerous scientific prizes, including three awarded in 2011: the Association for Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award for his fundamental contributions to artificial intelligence through the development of a calculus for probabilistic and causal reasoning; the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition, and the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Other honors include the 2001 London School of Economics Lakatos Award in Philosophy of Science for the best book in the philosophy of science, the 2003 ACM Allen Newell Award for “seminal contributions that extend to philosophy, psychology, medicine, statistics, econometrics, epidemiology and social science”, and the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute.

Pearl is the father of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, which he co-founded with his family in February 2002 “to continue Daniel’s life-work of dialogue and understanding and to address the root causes of his tragedy.” The Daniel Pearl Foundation sponsors journalism fellowships aimed at promoting honest reporting and East-West understanding, organizes worldwide concerts that promote inter-cultural respect, and sponsors public dialogues between Jews and Muslims to explore common ground and air grievances. The Foundation received Search for Common Ground’s Award For Promoting Cross-Cultural Understanding in 2002 and the 2003 Roger E. Joseph Prize for its “distinctive contribution to humanity.”

Judea Pearl and his wife Ruth Pearl are co-editors of the book “I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl,” winner of the 2004 National Jewish Book Award for Anthologies, which provides a panoramic view of how Jews define themselves in the post 9/11 era.

Professors Pearl and Akbar Ahmed (American University), the founders of the Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding, were co-winners in 2006 of the Civic Ventures’ inaugural Purpose Prize, which honors individuals 60 or older who have demonstrated uncommon vision in addressing community and national problems.

Pearl lectures throughout the United States on topics including:

1. I am Jewish: Personal Reflections Inspired by the Last Words of Daniel Pearl

2. Being Western, American and Jewish in the Post 9/11 Era

3. Creating Dialogue between Muslims and Jews

4. The Ideological War on Terror

5. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict: The Case for Co-Existence

He has written commentaries about these topics for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, The Daily Star (Beirut), The Saudi Gazette (Jeddah), and the Jerusalem Post. He writes a monthly column for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles and is frequently interviewed on major TV and radio stations.


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