SOUL FOOD:Read ‘Heart’ before you watch

What happened to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was cruel enough. That it happened on the last day of his assignment in Pakistan made it all the more cruel.

It’s the sort of timing that makes me want to stomp my feet, as though I might, with a good enough tantrum, persuade time to turn back the clock just long enough to reenact one fateful moment. But time has neither ears nor heart. It presses on, regardless of what has been snatched from us — however much too early. We are left to deal with our losses. Our only choice is how.

The film “A Mighty Heart,” and the book of the same name on which it is based, is testimony to that. Both tell the story of the kidnapping and killing of Daniel Pearl.

Both tell the story of Pearl’s thenpregnant wife Mariane living through them. Her 234-page memoir, subtitled “The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl,” provided the fabric for John Orloff’s 1-hour-and-48-minute screenplay.

Daniel Pearl was in Karachi, Pakistan, trying to follow the money that sponsored the actions of shoe-bomber Richard Reid and others involved in militant Muslim networks like Al Qaeda. Daniel never returned home after he set out for one final interview.

He was American and Jewish by birth. A video made by his killers documented “I Am Jewish” as among his last words.

That Daniel thought of himself as a secular Jew did not matter to those who took him hostage. Or, if it did, it “merely compounded [his] transgressions” in their eyes, as Leon Weiseltier wrote in an article titled “The Death of Daniel Pearl” the month after Daniel was killed.

In the view of his killers, secular is a dirty word because, as Weiseltier pointed out, they believe religion — one religion, their religion — ought to rule the world. Of various origins, they are self-described Muslims and jihadists with ties to an assortment of militant groups.

Mariane Pearl, who was raised in Paris, is a Buddhist of Afro-Cuban and Dutch descent. Before her husband disappeared, she and Daniel were living in the rented home of journalist Asra Q. Nomani, a Muslim born in India and raised in West Virginia.

The five-week hunt for Daniel brought together an ad hoc team of detectives, intelligence agents, journalists and friends from diverse cultures, politics and faiths. So on the eve of the film’s release, another ad hoc group of folks saw an opportunity.

Paramount Studios hosted a preview in its Sherry Lansing Theater followed by an interfaith panel discussion co-sponsored by the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Los Angeles-based Progressive Christians Uniting.

The panel’s members were Hussam Ayloush, executive director of CAIR; the Rev. Peter Laarman, executive director of Progressive Christian Uniting; and Rabbi Haim Dov Beliak, co-founder of a 1st Amendment website, JewsOnFirst.org.As though Mariane Pearl’s memoir didn’t raise enough social issues, the film introduces others, including the apparent condoning of torture.

It also suggests Daniel Pearl may have been kidnapped and killed not because he was a Jew, an American, or a journalist identified in the Pakistani press as a CIA agent and Mossad operative connected to India’s intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing, but as retribution for the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Along the way it largely loses the focus of Mariane’s story, which is Danny, as she and his family and his friends call him.

In the pages of “A Mighty Heart,” Daniel is richly rendered as a suitor, a husband, a son, a brother, a friend, a journalist and a father-to-be with intelligence, humor, foibles and grace — a man, as Mariane wrote, “with a mighty heart.”

By contrast, in the film he seems little more than a ghost. In an essay that appeared in The Washington Post on the day of the movie’s release, Nomani lamented this to the point of regretting her involvement in the film.

In a more recent article published by The New Republic, Judea Pearl spoke out against the “moral relativism” he believes the movie portrays. While he hopes viewers will leave theaters inspired by the film’s glimpse of his son, he notes its visual comparison of Daniel’s abduction to the internment of detainees at Guantanamo (the film opens with photos from the prison) and its expressed “comparison of Al Qaeda militants with CIA agents.”

He writes, “I am concerned that aspects of [the] movie will play into the hands of professional obscurers of moral clarity.”

He refers to a remark made by Ayloush after the screening at Paramount: “We need to end the culture of bombs, torture, occupation and violence. This is the message to take from the film.”

That message conveys, Judea Pearl says, that “all forms of violence are equally evil.” And he is adamant this is not true.

In his mind, that kind of moral relativism died with his son on Jan. 31, 2002.

“There can be no comparison between those who take pride in the killing of an unarmed journalist and those who vow to end such acts — no ifs, ands or buts,” he concludes.

At Paramount, where I first saw “A Mighty Heart,” Ayloush also said, “These people [who killed Daniel Pearl] were not Muslim. They were not Pakistani. They were criminal.” But that only begs the question of how to prevent acts such as theirs.

It’s something dialogue, as much as Judea Pearl and Hussam Ayloush are both for that, is not likely to do.

As Mariane Pearl told Andrew Anthony during an interview for Britain’s Daily Telegraph, “I don’t think those guys [militant Muslims] have much interest in dialogue.”

Until the trial of Omar Sheikh, the man convicted of masterminding Daniel’s abduction, Mariane did not believe in the death penalty. But after the trial, about men such as Omar Sheikh and Osama bin Laden, she told Anthony, “I think they should die.”

See “A Mighty Heart” if you will; it will tug at your heartstrings and may keep you on the edge your seat. But first, read the far more measured and eloquent book.