Counter Strike Global Offensive By DJ Scoki CPY
Vilma Steiert
Thank you so much, Judea. It's really my honor. I want to thank Judea and Ruth, and Tamara and Michelle and any other members of the Pearl family that are out there. I don't know if Marianne or Adam are watching. I want to thank officials with the Pearl Foundation, students and alumni and faculty of UCLA, and any other guests who have joined us today. It is such an honor to deliver the 2021 Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture, a deep and profound honor, especially significant as Judea just noted, given that this event comes as the Pakistan Supreme Court has ruled that Omar Sheikh and other terrorists involved in the heinous crimes against Daniel should go free. Regretfully, just earlier today, the Supreme Court ordered that Omar Sheikh should be taken off death row and moved to a government statehouse. The Biden White House has called all of this an affront to terrorism victims everywhere. Secretary of State Blinken last week called his Pakistani counterpart to express outrage and ensure accountability. And we'll see what happens; we're gonna stay on top of it, stay on top of this this outrage. I had Chris Christie on my show before this came to court, the Pakistani Supreme Court. He of course was the US attorney at the time of Danny's murder. And he recently told me that if Omar Sheikh and the others are freed from prison, the US should demand that they be extradited, that the New Jersey US Attorney's Office is ready to act to ensure justice. And as much as as journalists such as myself stay on top of this, I hope that with people like Secretary Blinken and former Governor Christie, justice will be done. But it's all a reminder that when it comes to the fight for justice and the fight against extremism and hate, vigilance must be eternal. We're never going to arrive at a place where we can just relax and not worry about it. And that vigilance can come through any number of places (vigilance for justice I'm talking about now), whether you're active in politics or you want to go into the legal system, whether you're a community activist, whether you want to be a journalist, you just want to be a well-informed citizen... that vigilance is the responsibility of all of us. I believe in a balanced and independent and nonpartisan news media, but that's not the same thing as a valueless news media. Journalists can stand up for justice, we can stand up for democracy, we can stand up for decency. I believe that it's our role. It's an essential part of the watchdog role for journalists. And I know that being a watchdog and telling stories is what Danny Pearl dedicated his life to. I would remember him when he was alive, I remember his work (I'd never had the honor to know him but I remember his work) and I know that this is an early calling for him, whether reporting for Stanford's KZSU, or co founding The Stanford Commentator, which was a student newspaper at the time that invited writing on all sides of contentious issues so people could hash things out and do so in a respectful way based on an evidence and facts and well thought out opinions. Whether he was dedicating his time to writing under deadline, a perfect 14 inch story about a six car pile up in Lanesborough, Massachusetts for the Berkshire Eagle, or tracking down terrorists in Karachi for the Wall Street Journal to find out more about why they were doing what they were doing. And that was Danny's legacy: facts and truth brought with clear eyes and context. His former editor at the Eagle, Louis Kyler, would later recount how Danny would have to tell him to stop making phone calls to make deadline. "I had to tell him 'Dammit, Danny, write, no more calls.' He always wanted to make more calls because there were so many dimensions of the story he was curious about curious about," the editor said. A former mayor in western Massachusetts recalled threatening Danny, he was going to cut off Danny's access to City Hall if Danny reported on a building development before the powers that be wanted it devolved to the public. And Danny said, "No, you won't." And he reported it to the public and he was right. So many journalistic values exemplified in just a few anecdotes about Danny and Danny's life: a curiosity about the world; a recognition that more information, more facts, more viewpoints would enhance all of our understanding of the world; and diligence and perseverance and a strong work ethic, and the courage to stand up to people in power whether a local mayor or something more nefarious. Those of us who work at CNN and on my shows The Lead during the week and on State of the Union on Sunday we aspire to live up to the these values that guided Danny, to be watchdogs to be storytellers, to inform, to come at issues not with an allegiance to any partisan view to come at it with no allegiance to a party, but an allegiance to our viewers and our readers, to bring them the facts and the truth and bring them an analysis and a context that that helps them understand what was going on. Because what was Danny doing in Karachi? He was trying to understand. He was trying to explain. He wanted to foment understanding. And that was difficult, what he did, and he ultimately gave his life to it. Every era of course has its challenges and then in this era where facts and truth are so willingly being disregarded, were bigotry and indecency and conspiracy theories are being mainstreamed. It is our belief on my shows that journalists need to stand something as lighthouses in a fog, hoping and helping the world to steer around rocky, treacherous shoals. And right now, in the world of politics, those rocks are lies and bigotry and indecency. Some of the lies about the election, ones that have been adjudicated in courtrooms and before election boards, and have almost entirely to be found without merit. And we need to be precise. We need to be clear-eyed with the public. If we have any hope that the facts we share, that the truth that we aspire to protect has any hope of surviving the assault by lies that we are now witnessing, we in journalism need to be extra diligent, even more so than before. The big lie of, course, right now is the one that Donald Trump actually won in a landslide victory. But because of fraud and malleable software, the election was stolen. And we all know that that's not true. What is shocking and dispiriting is to have seen so many other people beyond Donald Trump give this lie credibility. For months, this lie was repeated over and over on Fox and by Trump and by Pence and Rudy Giuliani and others. And then, lied to for months, millions of Americans got angry, got angry because they had been misinformed. And enraged and incited, thousands of them came to Washington D.C. Far right groups,, radicalized Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. Five were killed that day. Three died by suicide subsequently. And yet the lie continues. And like any virus, the lie mutates. It has variants. The Oregon Republican Party is now pushing a lie that the Capitol insurrection was actually a "false flag operation designed to discredit President Trump and conservative Republicans." The letter even compared the attack to the 1933 Reichstag fire. Some of the believers of the big lie also believe in the deranged QAnon conspiracy theory, that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles secretly rules the government and Hollywood, and Trump is a messiah0like figure who is going to bring about an end to it. The Hawaii Republican Part, in expressing support for QAnon believers, amplified the voice of a fringe conspiracy theorist who also denies that the Holocaust happened. And then, of course, is the big lies poster child Georgia Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a bigot and a QAnon adherent, who over the weekend tweeted that she had received a supportive phone call from former President Trump. She tweeted attacks such as "Yes, there is an enemy within and that enemy is a poisonous rot of socialist policies and America-last sellouts who are pompous hypocrites that believe they are untouchable elites," which is certainly interesting language. In 2018, then-citizen Marjorie Taylor Greene wrote on Facebook that the "Vice Chairman of Rothschild Inc," international investment banking firm may have used "space solar generators" beaming the sun's energy back to Earth to fire a "laser beam or light beam coming down to Earth" to cause the 2018 Camp Fire in California in order to manipulate the stock market. And who would this benefit? Whose pockets would it line? Rothschild, Inc. and Senator Dianne Feinstein's husband Richard Blum. Greene has also expressed support on social media for an account that tweets conspiracy theories about the Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, suggesting that Israel killed John F. Kennedy. Now, needless to say, none of this is true. And needless to say, it is blatantly anti-Semitic. Blatantly. And yet it is a debate right now, a debate, a discussion about whether or not Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greeneshould be sanctioned at all. And sadly, we are in a period where deranged lies, whether they're anti-Semitic or not, deranged lies continue to be mainstreamed instead of isolated and condemned. And the question then becomes what is the role of a nonpartisan journalist at a time like this? I don't believe that it's our role to sugarcoat any of it. And we all need to know that those who push the lies will continue to attack us as well. And they will try to attempt to rewrite history. They will try to tell Americans that up is down and the moon is the ocean. Douglass Mackey is an anti-Semitic far right social media influencer, a troll, a very successful one in 2016. He was arrested the other day by the Justice Department on charges of conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 presidential election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote. He was sending out false information telling people that they could vote via text, Democrats, that they could vote via text. Mackey was known in 2016, he would tweet under the name Ricky Vaughn. And if you followed his account that year, you can find anti-Semitic canards as blatant as an octopus with the Star of David controlling the world. I guess this is for people who thought Marjorie Taylor Greene was too subtle. Mackey a few days ago was a cause célèbre on Fox ,he was described as a mere "conservative journalist who upset Democrats by mocking them." That's of course not a factual representation of the man or the crime. We need to be honest about what's going on. We are now all watching as there is a struggle in the Republican Party, among Republican officials, and it would be much easier for journalists who do not like to take sides who do not like to say one side is right and one side is wrong, it'd be much easier if I could come to you and say this a similar struggle to the similar extent is going on on the side of the Democratic Party. But it's not. There are Democrats who say offensive things and yes, anti-Semitic things. And they will continue to be called out by me and others. But this is something different because this has taken root in the mainstream of the Republican Party. What's going on right now in this struggle is that the party is trying to figure out how much it wants to embrace conspiracy theories and falsehoods and lies. 126 House Republicans, including the House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and the House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, signed on to a lawsuit to go to the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the election, to strip away the electoral votes from four states that voted for Biden, a lawsuit so mendacious, so unfactual and disreputable rven just describing it factually might make it seem as though I'm engaging in hyperbole, but I'm not. The suit claims that the probability of Biden winning the popular vote in in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin independently, given that Trump was leading in those states as of 3:03am, November 4, that Biden would then take the lead in those states.... According to this lawsuit, the odds the probability is less than one in one quadrillion. Anybody who was paying attention to the election knows that that's not true. We all knew when we all had been reporting that Trump had been discouraging his voters from vote by mail and Democrats had been encouraging their voters to vote by mail. Obviously, there was much more vote by mail than before because of the pandemic. So we'd all been reporting that that we're going to be states like Ohio and Texas, where the vote by mail was counted early in those states, which suggests early on a Biden lead, that Trump would almost certainly overtake, and that the reverse would take place in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin... er, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, it was very close as to what was gonna happen in Georgia. But that's just one liein this and, fed these lines, months later a crowd of angry Americans stormed the Capitol. And the question is, how far is the distance between the big lie about the election, that McCarthy and Steve Scalise and Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley gave support to, how far is the distance between that lie and QAnon? How far is the distance between QAnon, and the lie that the Parkland and Sandy Hook shootings were false flags? And how far is the distance between any of those lies and the desire to blame the evils of the world on a minority group, whether Mexicans or Muslims or Jews, or any group? How far is it, what is the distance once you start lying willfully, eagerly? How far is it from the big lie about the election to saying that the Rothschilds are firing space lasers to make money? And how can any one of us sit back and let it happen? Because we're all seeing what happens when you let these things become mainstreamed. I know a lot of you see it on college campuses today, except perhaps the accusations aren't really coming from the political right but maybe from the left. Attacks on students or faculty members because of their faith or ethnicity, their religion, the kind of discrimination that assumes that because of your religion, you support all sorts of policies carried out by others who share your religion, or you support all sorts of policies carried out by a foreign government. Lies told in the name of justice. It's not acceptable, whether it's done by the left to the right. It's not acceptable, whether it's done by a student leader or a member of Congress. But obviously, right now, the bigger threat I see is the lies that are incubating inside the leadership of the Republican Party. Because we saw those lies turned into violence on January 6 2021. And to be honest, we saw it before then, too. We saw it on October 27 2018 in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, 11 killed six wounded. What else was going on in October 2018? It was the midterm elections. Donald Trump and his supporters were saying over and over that a caravan of Honduran migrants were coming to the US. They would help destroy the country. Many of the President's supporters blamed George Soros, a Jewish billionaire. They blamed leftist groups. And the gunman that walked into the Tree of Life synagogue, he took them at their word. As Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic magazine, "the apparent sparked for the worst anti-Semitic massacre in American history was a racist hoax inflamed by a US president seeking to help his party win a midterm election. The shooter might have found a different reason to act on a different day, but he chose to act on Saturday. And he apparently chose to act in response to a political fiction that the President himself chose to spread and that his followers chose to amplify." And then came August 3, 2019 in El Paso, when another white supremacist, poisoned by the same lie, killed 23 people and injured 23 others at the Walmart in Texas. The big lie about the caravan is similar to the big lie about the election. The President and his supporters, such as congressman Matt Gaetz, spread it on channels where it was open and welcome, like Fox. It wasn't true. It was entirely in the service of maintaining power. Supporters took it seriously. Many were incited to violence. And now there are dead people because of a lie. I do not believe that journalists do anyone any favors by covering this kind of story with kid gloves. And I include myself in who I'm criticizing because I look back at how I covered Trump (and I do think I covered him fairly aggressively early on), but I look back and I am disappointed in myself in that I allowed him to move on from his racist comments about Mexicans that he made on his announcement day or his anti-Islamic bigotry that he made when he called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States in December 2015. Yes, I provided critical coverage. Yes, I called him out on his lies. But maybe I didn't fixate on those lies because I allowed him to move on and change the subject. I'm still grappling in many ways with what I could have done differently, what I should have done differently. But I'm confident it's something. Demonizing our fellow human beings, whether Latinos or Jews, or Mike Pence, or members of Congress... urging action against them, even vaguely urging action against them that could be seen as encouraging violence, whether it's stochastic terror, vaguely suggesting violence, or directly ("trial by combat", as Rudy Giuliani said, on January 6), underneath all of it is the corruption of facts and the destruction of truth. So my friends, in honor of Danny Pearl, whom I will admire for the rest of my life, in his memory, and in honor of his loving parents and sisters, his widow and his son, and in honor of Danny Pearl's search for truth and decency, defined in his all too brief life, let us all of us commit to standing up for these values, even in the face of their assault by some and callous indifference by others. Let us learn a lesson from this era by not just moving on from lies and bigotry, but by recognizing that toxins in our body politic need to be called out and they need to be expunged. It's not easy to do this. And it won't be easy for all of us to get through this era. And we will never succeed completely and utterly and totally, but in Danny's name, let us pledge to each other that we will try. Thank you so very much for this honor. I now look forward to our conversation.