A Mighty Heart - The Brave Life And Death Of My Husband, Danny Pearl by Mariane Pearl Audio Book CD Brand New Abridged (5 CDs 6 Hours):
In A Mighty Heart, an astonishingly courageous woman tells the terrifying and unforgettable story of her husband's life and death. For five weeks the world watched and worried about Danny Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan. And then came the news of his shocking and brutal murder. Danny's reasons for being in Karachi, the complete story of his abduction, and the intense effort to find him are told here for the first time.
Mariane and Danny Pearl were working in South Asia, as they had been elsewhere in the world, because they believed that good reporting is essential to our understanding of ethnic and religious conflict around the globe. They knew the risks inherent in the life they chose and took conscientious precautions.
The courage of Danny and Mariane is extraordinary, yet we are dependent on brave journalists everywhere to produce news coverage that educates us. There are many mighty hearts in the Pearl story, many brave people who helped Mariane in her search for her abducted husband. This account is riveting, illuminating, and heartbreaking. We learn, through the urgent tracing of Danny's last movements, about the terrorists' methods, ideologies, and ruthless violence. As soon as Pearl was discovered missing, a global effort began to locate him and identify his captors -- a race against the clock that spanned the dangerous fissures of culture and politics and language that separate Islamic terrorists and America.
Only one person can tell this story: Danny Pearl's wife, Mariane, for it was she who initiated and helped direct the urgent search for her husband and she who can paint a moving portrait of a marriagebuilt on the ideals of truth, justice, and love. Intensely suspenseful despite the known outcome, uplifting at the last, A Mighty Heart is essential reading for our time.
 About Danny Pearl :
Daniel Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and grew up in Encino in Los Angeles, California, where he attended Portola Middle School and Birmingham High School. His father, Judea Pearl, is a professor at UCLA. His mother, of Iraqi Jewish descent, is named Ruth. The history of the family and its connections to Israel are described by Judea Pearl in a book by Alan Dershowitz, What Israel means to me. Danny, as he was known throughout his life, attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, where he stood out as a communications major with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a member of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity, and co-founded a student newspaper called the Stanford Commentator. Pearl graduated Stanford with a B.A. in Communications, after which he spent a summer as a Pulliam Fellow intern at the Indianapolis Star and a winter bussing tables as a ski bum in Idaho. Following a trip to the then-Soviet Union, China, and Europe, he joined the North Adams Transcript and the Berkshire Eagle in western Massachusetts, then moved on to the San Francisco Business Times.
In 1990, Pearl started in the The Wall Street Journal's Atlanta bureau and moved to the Washington, D.C. bureau in 1993 to cover telecommunications. He jumped to the Journal's London bureau in 1996, penning articles such as the October 1994 story of a Stradivarius violin allegedly found on a highway on-ramp, and a June 2000 story about Iranian pop music. His most notable investigations covered the ethnic wars in the Balkan where he discovered that charges of a genocide committed in Kosovo were unsubstantiated, and the American missile attack on military facility in Khartum, which he proved to be a pharmaceutical factory.
Later, he met and married his wife Mariane. Their son, Adam Daniel Pearl was born in Paris on May 28, 2002, three months after Daniel's death.
In 2002, Pearl received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College (Awarded Posthumously): and, in 2007, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Moral Courage Award from the Houston Holocaust Museum.
Death
On January 23, 2002, on his way to what he thought was an interview with Sheikh Mubarak Ali Gilani at the Village restaurant in Karachi, Pearl was kidnapped by a militant group calling itself The National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty. This group claimed Pearl was a CIA agent and — using the e-mail address kidnapperguy@hotmail.com — sent the United States a range of demands, including the freeing of all Pakistani terror detainees, and the release of a halted U.S. shipment of F-16 fighter jets to the Pakistani government.
The message read:
We give you one more day if America will not meet our demands we will kill Daniel. Then this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.
Photos of Pearl handcuffed with a gun at his head and holding up a newspaper were attached. There was no response to pleas from Pearl's editor, and from his wife Mariane.
Nine days later, Pearl was murdered and beheaded. Pearl's body was found cut into ten pieces and buried in a shallow grave in the outskirts of Karachi on May 16. When the police found his remains, Abdul Sattar Edhi arrived promptly on the scene, personally collected all ten body parts, and took them to the morgue; then his body was returned to the United States and he was interred in the Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
(Although foul play was obvious, no autopsy was needed or performed. The subsequent video (see next section) made the sequence of events clear. Years later, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed confessed to cutting off Pearl's head, but didn't state whether he had cut his throat: it is likely that one person did both.)
The Daniel Pearl video
On February 21, 2002, a videotape titled "The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl" was released. The video shows Pearl's mutilated body and lasts three minutes and thirty-six seconds.
On the image to the right, the text in Arabic reads: My name is (Daniel Pearl), I am a Jewish-American... The English transcript of the text reads :
* "My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California USA.
* I come from, uh, on my father's side the family is Zionist."
* "My father's Jewish, my mother's Jewish, I'm Jewish!"
* "My family follows Judaism. We've made numerous family visits to Israel.
* Back in the town of B'nai Braq there is a street named after my great grandfather Chayim Pearl who is one of the founders of the town."
According to Daniel's father, the fact revealed in the last sentence was not known outside the immediate family and, therefore, could not have been extracted from him by force. Pearl's father believes that his son chose to reveal it as a coded message to his family, that he was doing well and speaking freely in his own words.[6]
The second part of the video shows Pearl stating his captors' demands. A caption in Arabic is shown along the way. Pictures of dead Muslims and similar scenes are superimposed around the image of Pearl. Other images shown are those of United States President George W. Bush shaking hands with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and those of Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura, allegedly killed by Israeli bullets which, according to latest claims, were staged by France 2 TV to malign Israel
Published reports say that a technical error prevents the first slashing of Pearl's throat from being captured on film. In the video, Pearl's body is shown naked from the waist up with his throat slit at about 1 minute and 55 seconds into the video, by which time he would have bled to death. A man then cuts his head off. A few more images, such as captives held at Guantanamo Bay detention camp, are shown near the image of Pearl's head. The last 90 seconds of the video show the list of demands scrolling, superimposed on an image of Pearl's severed head being held by the hair.
The English transcript of the text reads :
NATIONAL MOVEMENT FOR THE RESTORATION OF PAKISTAN SOVEREIGNTY (NMRPS)
We still demand the following:
- The immediate release of U.S. held prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
- The return of Pakistani prisoners to Pakistan.
- The immediate end of U.S. presence in Pakistan.
- The delivery of F-16 planes that Pakistan had paid for and never received.
We assure Americans that they shall never be safe on the Muslim Land of Pakistan.
And if our demands are not met this scene shall be repeated again and again...
The video made its way to the Pakistani and United States governments. A jihadist site leaked the video onto the Internet. In April 2002, Dan Rather reported on CBS TV that the video was used extensively as a recruiting tool by jihadis in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
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