Remembering Daniel Pearl
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Apr 1 2002
Daniel Pearl will be remembered for many things, but above all, he was a writer.
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“Not long after Danny Pearl disappeared in January, I received a message from one of his many friends around the world. 'A lovely guy,' wrote a former colleague of mine, who knew Danny well. 'What can I do to help?'
As it turned out, nothing that anyone did could save Danny’s life. A videocassette has confirmed the terrible news of his brutal death. And every foreign correspondent and foreign editor is examining anew the risks inherent in reporting from dangerous assignments.
Such risk assessments are not new, but the focus this time is changing. Other wars have prompted editors to issue flak jackets and send their correspondents through hostile environment training. But what protection is there in this new war on terrorism, for those who might be targeted by terrorists far from the battlefield?
That must become more than just a rhetorical question. It needs to be posed and discussed, and answers need to implemented, in order to protect every journalist who, like Danny Pearl, is trying to help us all understand this sprawling conflict.
— by Ann Cooper.
Ann Cooper is the executive director for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She has worked for National Public Radio covering South Africa, the United Nations, Moscow and Lithuania.
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These Songs Bring Tears to your Eyes, Or Something Worse
In Persian Gulf, Some Say Vocalists May Be Blinded By Pearl-Diving Spirituals
May 14, 1996 -by Daniel Pearl
DOHA, Qatar — American blues can make you sad. Russian work songs can make you suffer. The fervent belief of many in the Persian Gulf is that pearl-diving songs can make you go blind.
The songs are undergoing a revival, a half-century after crowded pearl boats plied the shallow Gulf waters for the last time. As a new generation in the Gulf rediscovers the wailing old spirituals, they are also rediscovering the special pain of singing them.
“Sometimes I feel like my head is going to explode,” 37-year-old soloist Omar Busaqar says after recently singing a few pearling songs with the Qatar National Folkloric Troupe in Doha.
“I get migraines,” says another soloist, Monssour Al-Mahannadi, 24. After singing for six years, he concedes, he has gone a bit farsighted and wears glasses. “Ah, you’re going to go blind,” Mr. Busaqar taunts.
He wouldn’t be the first. Soloists, or nahams, were notorious for going blind in decades past, according to Aldulrahman Al-Mannai, a Qatari folklorist.
… The emotion involved in singing these songs makes nahams go blind, contends Khalif Bin Salah Al Mannai, a septuagenarian Qatari naham who learned to sing as a pearl diver in the 1940s and whose eyesight is now starting to fade. “If you really get involved, you get deeply sad, deeply hurt,” he says, but if you stop singing the songs you feel even worse.
Behind the Music
Rock Rolls Once More In Iran as Hard-Liners Back a Pop Revival
New Genre Speaks of Love In Veiled Terms, but You Still Can’t Dance to It
Mr. Assar’s Mystical Persona
June 2, 2000 -by Daniel Pearl
TEHRAN, Iran — In a basement studio here, Iranian pop singer Alireza Assar and his crew are mixing their latest rock ballad. Mr. Assar’s strong solo voice rings out in Farsi, singing, “We should find love in the rain.” As the music swells, an electric guitar begins to wail, and women’s voices take up the song.
If Iran’s political hard-liners ever heard this, there’d be hell to pay, right?
Wrong. In fact, the conservatives sponsor Mr. Assar. They own this digital recording studio, they promote his $5-a-ticket concerts, and they approve each of his songs before its release.
… Iran’s Islamic government doesn’t condone dancing or dating, however. So, led by the conservatives, it came up with a plan to co-opt the forbidden pop. It put Tehran pop on the airwaves, with singers who could match the voices and melodies of the popular L.A. acts, but with slower rhythms and ambiguous lyrics. One example: “I wish it were possible, for the spring of my dreams, with you, to come true.”
Is this poem about God or a girl? It’s hard to tell, and that’s why it lends itself so well to the new Iranian pop scene.
… On a recent day, Farid Salmanian of the ministry’s Music Council sits in his office and listens to a demo tape, with a clipboard that holds marked-up lyrics of a soft-rock song about traveling. The ministry’s Lyrics Council has changed the words: “It’s the start of the hard road of the hot weather of the West” becomes “It’s the demands of the long road.” Mr. Salmanian says the tape will be rejected anyway because the singer is out of tune….
Looming Large: This Persian Rug Should Set a Record
Less Certain Is Who Will Buy A Carpet That is So Big It Needs A Soccer Stadium
June 30, 1997 -by Daniel Pearl
BEN, Iran — This is a small town in search of a really big floor.
It should be a bare floor, big enough to accommodate about 6,000 people, with no columns breaking up the space. And it should be crying out for the subtle decorative touch of the world’s largest hand-woven carpet, with a third of an acre of beige, brown and blue swirls and flowers.
Working in two shifts in a converted fire station at the top of a hill, 84 women have spent two years on the carpet so far, and it is only half finished. The asking price, yet to be arrived at, could be as high as $1 million. There is nary a buyer in sight.
“I would like to see it in a great exhibition hall — a big room, where anyone who walked in would say, ‘Vuy!’ (‘Wow!’)” says 21-year-old Mehrandokht Aghaie, sitting on a 100-foot-long bench at a huge loom, tying knots with woolen yarn around hanging silk threads and then swiping the excess with a razor blade.
… Iranians can’t stop making carpets. By some estimates, the industry occupies one of every seven Iranians. “People in the villages don’t have anything better to do,” says Nasrollah Arvarian, 31, a weaver in the village of Sefid-Dasht, down the road from Ben (population 8,000). He has invested his life savings (about $21,000) in two living-room-size rugs that he and his family are weaving at home. His wife, Nargess, who sometimes works through the night, is bug-eyed from staring at tiny knots. “The doctors say I have to stop, but this is my job,” she says.
… Big rugs do have a history in Iran. In the 1950s, the shah ordered a series of approximately 1,550-square-foot rugs for his palaces. One of them is still on display, under eight dining-room tables in the north Tehran palace, now a museum. “It’s the biggest carpet one could ever make,” says one of the security guards, who tended the palace before the revolution, too. “I’d bet my eyes on it.”
Bad idea. The Guinness Book of Records lists a 54,000-square-foot carpet made with gold-enriched silk in eighth-century Baghdad as the biggest, though it no longer exists….
Costly Talk
Why Pay-Phone Calls Can Get So Expensive, and Spark Complaints
Some Long-Distance Carriers Reward Shops to Sign Up And Then Soak Callers
Has Competition Gone Awry?
May 30, 1995 -by Daniel Pearl
DALLAS — When you are selling some of the country’s most expensive telephone service, it helps if customers don’t care what you charge.
Cynthia Whiting, a marketer for Oncor Communications Inc., is pursuing a Cleveland Laundromat owner named Nick. If he will choose Oncor as the long-distance carrier for the Laundromat’s pay phone, she promises him $50 up front plus monthly commission checks. Oncor also will pay the local phone company’s switching charge and give him 20 minutes of free long-distance calls.
In the strange world of pay phones, Nick is the customer, and the person doing the dialing is merely an “end user.” Like most of Ms. Whiting’s customers, Nick says yes without asking how much the end user will pay.
… “It’s just so expensive,” a shocked caller tells Dwight Harris, who gazes at a computer-screen summary of his $27 bill. Mr. Harris, in a weary monotone, offers each disgruntled caller some free long-distance minutes as calculated by his computer. If the caller persists, Mr. Harris offers to reduce the bill.
… “This stuff makes me furious,” says Kathleen Wallman, the FCC’s top telephone regulator. “There are companies operating out there as traps for the unwary. People deal with them by mistake, not by choice.”
… Oncor is fighting rate caps, too, with leaflets, petitions and personal lobbying. Its officials say they are victims of high costs, counterattacks by AT&T and vicious competition for customers. They say AT&T would have little pay-phone competition if it weren’t for companies such as Oncor, which charge more for the same reasons that mom-and-pop stores charge more for bread.
… To stay ahead, Oncor uses a platoon of distributors, outside sales companies. Its favorite is Western Group Communications Inc., of Dallas, whose star salesman is Marvin Brock, an energetic 35-year-old minister with two Bibles in the trunk of his car. He insists on saying “upgrade” instead of “switch” when he strides into bodegas or nightclubs to urge owners to sign up with Oncor. If they do, Mr. Brock collects a fee as long as the phone stays with Oncor. A good phone can bring him more than $20 a month; he especially likes those used by Mexican immigrants to call their relatives collect….
Missing Violin’s Case: The Finder Fiddles While Losers Sue
‘Alcantara’ Stradivarius, Lost 27 Years Ago, Resurfaces — But New Owner Plays Coy
Oct. 17, 1994-by Daniel Pearl
LOS ANGELES — David Margetts still doesn’t know if he left the borrowed Stradivarius on the roof of his car and drove off, or if it was stolen from the unlocked vehicle while he bought groceries.
That was in August 1967. Mr. Margetts, then a second violinist with a string quartet at the University of California at Los Angeles, sent notices to pawn shops and violin stores and took out classified ads. He spent the next 27 years worrying that the “Duke of Alcantara” Stradivarius, made in 1732, was gone forever.
It wasn’t. Officials of UCLA, to which the instrument had been donated, say the same violin reappeared this January. But the tale doesn’t end there. University officials have discovered that once somebody is smitten with the love of a Stradivarius, taking it away is like wresting a baby from its mother’s arms.
… Violinists can have sticky fingers with such instruments. One New York violinist waited until he was on his deathbed in 1985 to reveal that the instrument he played for years was a Stradivarius stolen from Carnegie Hall nearly a half-century earlier.
… Alexander Treger, concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, ... already plays an orchestra-owned 1711 Stradivarius. On tour, Mr. Treger says, “I don’t leave the violin even if I have to go to the bathroom.”