Last week, India announced that its recent airstrikes on Pakistan had killed Abdul Rauf Azhar, one of the terrorists involved in the murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. Ben Cohen looks back on Pearl’s death, arguing that it marks a turning-point in the history of modern anti-Semitism.

Daniel Pearl, an American Jew, was abducted from a hotel in Karachi by Islamist terrorists. A few days later, video surfaced online (at that time, the technology was still novel) of Pearl’s savage execution. After uttering his final words—“My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish”—Pearl was beheaded on camera by his captors.

To my mind, his sickening fate signaled the beginning of the revived trend that Jews are still confronting. I say that because this wasn’t a case of ugly rhetoric or graffiti, a smashed window. or even an unsuspecting Jewish passerby getting punched in the face. This was a cold-blooded, ideologically driven murder that exposed the lethal violence that lurks inside every committed Jew-hater.

The significance of Azhar’s elimination now, when anti-Semitism is raging with far greater intensity than at the time of Pearl’s killing, should not be lost on anyone. During the 23 years that separate the deaths of Pearl and Azhar, Jews have endured insults and vandalism, assault, and even murder. Much of this has tracked the troughs and peaks of conflict in the Middle East, especially the Second Lebanon War in 2006, and earlier wars in Gaza in 2008–9, 2014, and 2021.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.