The issue, according to the article, seems to be that the Pearl video doesn’t violate the 1996 federal obscenity law which apparently deals only with sexual issues.
Now the question, should the video be legal?
I believe the freedom of speach but I am wondering about these types of situations.
Also, I watched the video. I didn’t really want too but I thought that I couldn’t make a judgement unless I saw it. For those who do not want to watch it I will describe it. If you don’t want to hear about it skip the rest of this post.
The video starts with Pearl reciting his Jewish history. He then starts reading anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda. During his speach there are little montages on the side showing hurt children and wounded people. The video was obviously highly edited. The speach goes on for a little over 2 minutes. The next shots show Pearls death. They are, considering that this is the death of a real person, nowhere as bad as I expected. They show a guy with a knife at Pearls neck and some blood for a couple of frames. It appears that they edited the actual death down to a few stil frames that go by pretty quickly. The next shot, and the most disturbing to me, was of someone holding Pearls head by the hair. They then fade out to some scrolling text basically stating their anti-US and anti-Isreali stance.
To be honest, and I do not mean to belittle Pearls death in any way, I see way more graphic scenes on TV daily. The only reason this video disturbed me was because I knew that it actually happened.
After watching the video I think it should be available. I think it should be available for two reasons. #1 It shows that the kidnappers are not religous in anyway, just cold blooded killers and #2 I feel that it made me understand that Daniel Pearl was more than a news story. Somehow hearing the story on the news or reading it from the paper doesn’t have the impact the video had on me.
One line of reasoning that I heard the FBI & other groups are using to try to get the video banned is that it is pornographic.
HUH?!?!
As far as I know, “pornography” refers to depictions of sexual acts and/or naked human bodies in various positions of exposure.
There wasn’t any of that in the video that I saw. So, despite what some bozos are screeching, there are no 1st amendment grounds for banning the video.
As far as showing Pearl’s death, I’m not so sure about that. I would think that he would have struggled mightily no matter how well he was tied up and in the video the intital shot of t=him & the guy with the knife, Pearl is motionless, elading me to believe that he was laread dead at that point. It was pretty grusome watching the guy saw away with the knife and realizing how deep into Pearls throat the knife was.
As for holding Pealr’s head up, I have to say that they did a really good job of cutting away his neck and throat.
I find it funny that The Wall Street Journal and other conservative outlets are calling for the banning of the video. You would think they of all people would want it out there, better to inflame pro-US-pro-war sentiment.
His killers WERE religeous. That is the problem: Fundemental Islam is at odds with pretty much every value we hold dear.
If it takes watching some poor innocent guy getting his head cut off to get a tregedy accross, then may I recommend laying off the violence for a while? You seem a bit desensitized.
No flaming intended, I just take issue with some of your conclusions.
You may have misunderstood my point about the killers and religion. The point that I was trying to make was the killers claimed to do what they did in the name of God but if you see what they did it seems to me that their argument falls to dust. There are believers in Islam who hate violence as much as any Christian. If you didn’t know, the KKK claims to believe in Christ yet they preach hate. When someone ‘preaches death or killing’ in the name of a religion that does not make all those who believe in a certain religion evil.
About your second point. Fuck off. I felt very bad when I read the story and heard that he was killed. All I said is that the video had a bigger impact. I never met the man, I didn’t know him. Seeing him speak and hearing his voice was more powerful than reading a newspaper account of his death. If you don’t understand this then you are just a fool.
As an immigrant Catholic, I am no fan of the KKK. But the differences between the KKK and Al Queda are legion. We (America) took care of the klan. America, by and large, rejects them and their view. Not so with muslim terrorists, who recieve funding and popular support from every muslim nation in the world, barring Turkey. A seperate topic, perhaps.
2)Consider me as having dutifully fucked off. Like I said, no offense intended. I am curious about the morbid fascination some people have (again, NO OFFENSE INTENDED), with this sort of stuff. Slowing down to see a car accident, etc.
I have no doubt that there is no legal reason to ‘ban’ this video. But perhaps there is a moral reason. Just because we can view the tape does not really mean that we should; If the masses weren’t bright enough to figure out that we need to fight terrorism before this tape, I doubt they will be after. I
Just looks like someone in the FBI’s Newark office, presumably out to make a name for themselves within the Bureau, not having a clue about the relevant law. Waste of everyone’s time. Bad career move. Period.
sleestak, in this forum we do not tell fellow posters to “fuck off” or call each other names. If you absolutely must, you can do it in the BBQ Pit…but not here. Understood?
Radical Islamist thought gets far more support in the Muslim world than I would like, though it is hardly a majority viewpoint and according to at least a few experts, for example Gilles Kepel, it is an ideology on the decline ). But to say terrorists get funding and popular support from every Muslim country ( by that I assume you mean every country with a Muslim majority, of which there are 60-odd I believe ) is a inflammatory exagerration. Just how much funding did Mali give to terrorist organizations last year?
This report list seven state sponsors of terrorism ( and several more implicated, i.e. Pakistan ) in 1999:
Would the FBI try to ban a video of a non-American getting the same treatment? How about the “Faces of Death” videos? (And yes I know a lot of those are faked, but the Bud Dwyer stuff is real, for example)
It’s terrible what happened to Mr. Pearl and his family, but I think they are overreacting here.
I apologize for the FO statement. I took Otttos second point personally and I shouldn’t have reacted as I did. At the same time I took what Ottto said as an insult. It still reads that way to me. Otttos statement seemed to label me as a heartless bastard who didn’t care when people die. But he did qualify that with “No flaming intended”. So I guess his insult was not really an insult.
Second,
In the OP I stated that I did not want to watch this video but felt that in order to make a value judgement I had to watch it. Sometimes you have to watch, hear or read things that you would rather skip to get a clue as to what is going on in the world. If you do not know what people are trying to ban then you cannot have a reasonable arguement one way or the other.
That can’t possibly be the case. Pornography is legal, provided you don’t show it to minors or broadcast it over a medium that isn’t considered Protected Speech (e.g. radio or television).
Perhaps what you heard was that the FBI was trying to get the video banned on the grounds that it constituted obscenity. There’s a sharp legal distinction between pornography, which is protected speech, and obscenity, which is not.
Many countries not listed in the above link make payments to families of Palestinian “martyrs”, including Saudi Arabia. While those countries go to great lengths to claim that this is different from supporting terrorism, to me it seems to be a distinction without a difference.
shelbo: A good point. Indeed the al-Quds Fund, was established, not just by Saudi Arabia, but by the Arab League as a whole in their 2000 summit with a capital outlay of ~ $200 million, to “support the family of intifida martyrs, finance the education of their sons, and heal the wounded.” However I’ll note that this one is debatable and equivocal, because “martyr” does not necessarily equate with suicide bomber, but rather any who had died during the intifida. But certainly some of that money is making it to suicide bombers, which is deplorable.
Still, even if we accept the al-Quds Fund as being terrorist funding ( and like I said, I think it is mixed issue ), the Arab League states do not come anywhere close, even in toto, to being a majority of the Muslim world. At best Arab-speakers make up about 20% of Muslim population worldwide. And it still begs the question of whether those suicide tactics are popularly supported even in the Arab world, let alone the Muslim world as Ottto contended.