Widow of the War On Terror

Monday, Feb 25th: Mariane Pearl, the wife of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed by Al Qaida in Pakistan in 2002, spoke before a packed audience at the Buell theatre in Denver as part of the Unique Lives lecture series. A French freelance journalist, Mariane is also a reporter and columnist for Glamour magazine. On Sept 12th, 2001, the Pearls traveled to Pakistan to cover the war on terror, where her husband was kidnapped and beheaded by Al Qaida, and specifically by men surrounding Omar Sheikh. She was six months pregnant at the time. She wrote a memoir about this terrible event, A Mighty Heart, which eventually became a movie starring Angelina Jolie and produced by Brad Pitt.


In a story on The Forgiveness Project, a charity organization which uses forgiveness and conflict resolution to open up dialogue and promote understanding, Mariane spoke about Omar Sheikh, revenge, and effectively fighting terrorism. At the time of his trial, she wrote to President Musharraf of Pakistan to ask that Omar Sheikh, the man behind the killing of her husband, get the death penalty: “Personally I could easily kill Omar Sheikh, but I prefer to leave it up to Pakistan’s justice system. There is a huge difference between taking revenge into your own hands and leaving it up to the law.”

She defended seeking the death penalty against Omar by making a distinction between ‘revenge’ and ‘justice’. His death at the hands of the state would be justice, in her opinion, for the killing of her husband. She is forcefully against revenge in the form of the Iraq war (that the Iraq war was about revenge was puzzling to this humble scribe, as I thought that it was about alleged weapons of mass destruction, dominating the Middle East and the flow of hydrocarbons, or “because he tried to kill my Daddy”. That it was related to 9/11 is a mystery to me.) or suicide bombings. For her, forgiveness is too lame, you have to win a victory over the terrorists and that is by keeping on valuing on life, and demonstrating the strength they think they have taken from you.

As a practicing Nichiren Buddhist, Mariane’s ideas on killing and being able to “easily kill Omar Sheikh” herself are not in accord with strict Buddhist precepts on not harming any living being. On the other hand, one understands her urge and supports her restraint against vigilante-type revenge.

Nichiren Buddhists believe that all people have a Buddha nature and that enlightenment can be attained in this lifetime and they primarily focus on chanting as the vehicle to attain it. The Lotus Sutra is particularly important to this sect. They have also been noted for having an evangelical streak, attempting to refute the beliefs of other faiths and proving the validity of Nichiren’s teachings.

According to a June 2007 article in Time magazine, she asked for compensation from the 9/11 fund for Daniel Pearl, after realizing that his killers were linked into Al Qaida. Claiming that she did that “for her son”, this struck some observers as odd, given that the fund was set up to give money to the direct victims of 9/11 in New York City.

In July 2007, she also launched a lawsuit in New York against Al Qaida, several well-known terrorists, and the Habib Bank, a bank alleged to have been involved in financing terrorist activities. The lawsuit was dropped in October 2007 for “personal reasons”.

According to the New York Post, there is little love lost between Mariane and the Wall Street Journal, her husband’s former employer. According to an anonymous source at the Journal, she demanded too much money from the newspaper for charity events honoring the memory of Daniel Pearl. Also, there are tensions between Mariane and her in-laws, Daniel’s family, over the making of the movie, A Mighty Heart.

In Her Own Words:

“About four years ago, a young lady from Colorado sent me a letter and it was just a one page letter and there was only one question. And she said to me, ‘How do you attempt to fight terrorists?’—that was it. ‘Best Regards, Danielle’ I sat down and I thought about—obviously I had been thinking about that, but—I thought, you know, terrorism uses fear. How do you fight terrorists? You can only fight terrorists with what terrorism seeks to take away from you. And the one thing that terrorists don’t have is hope…I want to share with you those few lines that I wrote to her. I said, ‘They want to destroy hope, therefore I shall preserve it by any possible means. They want to kill trust, thus I will reach out to others, Africans, Asians, Arabs, Americans, and Jews alike. They want to imprison people in labels and stereotypes. I will strive to maintain the dialogue. They want to silence me, therefore I will speak out. They want to kill joy, thus I will laugh again.’ Basically my life has been that. I have lived by those words ever since.”


“When I said I travel the world, I’m not kidding. In the last four years, I’ve been around the world four times. In the last year and a half, I’ve been in 20 different countries. I keep traveling even after what happened to me. I keep encouraging people to do the same. My relationship with the world as One started very early, I was kind of born with it. My father is Dutch, from Amsterdam, my mother’s Cuban, and I was born in France. My Dad’s family was basically white and rich and my Mom’s family was poor and black. I thought when I was little that everyone had a poor black family and a white rich family. I thought that was the way the world was.”

“Of course, then I met poor white people and that was a lot to take. Forget about the black rich people. This is too confusing. Let me go and find out what is going on.” [laughter]

“My father was a very idealistic person. His ideas had to do with politics. He was attracted to revolutions, so when I was little, we basically went to different countries following revolutions. It sounds weird, I know. This is what we did, we went to Africa, we went to Portugal in ‘74, when they had their revolution, my father obviously went to Cuba, that’s where he met my Mom, we demonstrated, we went to all these things, and so I looked at my father and his politics, and all the discussions that were going on, but I saw that my father was sad. All the countries that we were living in after the revolution or change, in the end, nothing really changed. The heart of people will not change. People were not working on themselves, they were working on some kind of setting of society, or a new leader, or a new something. But it was never a change that started within themselves. That was true for my father as well, I think that he was looking for something, maybe a meaning in his life, but he would not look for it within himself, he would look for it in ideals. After, when I was nine, and my father was getting in worse and worse shape, and then there were no more revolutions to go to, basically. So we went back to France and my father got increasingly sick until the day he actually took his own life. Before that happened, he called me next to what was going to be his deathbed, and he said to me the one thing that later on saved my life, ‘Learn to fear cynicism.’ That was his conclusion. ‘Cynicism is the weapon of the weak.’”

“I met my husband Danny in Paris. I met him at a party. And he was not alone at the time. He was dating a girl that was my opposite: very tall, blond, blue-eyed, lingerie designer. [laughter] It was terrible because I was at this party and I saw Danny and he was so cute. And there was this girl next to him. We had a very polite, professional conversation. We started talking, and he was like, ‘I work for the Wall Street Journal. I’m just coming back from Saudi Arabia and I’m going to Iran tomorrow.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m going to Havana.’ And he’s like, ‘Oh, a communist dictatorship, that’s good.’ I created something. And I’m looking at the lingerie designer, ‘I’m sure you can’t say that’. You score your points, you do what you can.” [laughter]