30 Facts About Daniel Pearl

Daniel Pearl was an American journalist who worked for The Wall Street Journal.

Daniel Pearl was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1963, to Judea and Ruth Daniel Pearl.

Daniel Pearl's father is an Israeli-American of Polish Jewish descent, and his mother was an Iraqi Jew whose family was saved from the Farhud by Muslim neighbors.

Daniel Pearl's family moved to Encino, a neighborhood of Los Angeles, when his father took a position with the University of California, Los Angeles as professor of computer science and statistics and later director of the Cognitive Systems Laboratory.

In 2011, Judea Daniel Pearl received the Turing Award, the 'Nobel Prize for Computer Science'.

Daniel Pearl attended Portola Junior High School and Birmingham High School.

Daniel Pearl then attended Stanford University from 1981 to 1985, where he was a Communication major with Phi Beta Kappa honors, a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, a co-founder of a student newspaper called the Stanford Commentator, as well as a reporter for the campus radio station KZSU.

In 1990, Daniel Pearl moved to the Atlanta bureau of The Wall Street Journal and moved again in 1993 to its Washington, DC, bureau to cover telecommunications.

Daniel Pearl's articles covered a range of topics, 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.

Daniel Pearl became more involved in international affairs: his most notable investigations covered the ethnic wars in the Balkans, where he discovered that charges of an alleged genocide committed in Kosovo were unsubstantiated.

Daniel Pearl explored the American missile attack on a supposed military facility in Khartoum, which he proved to have been a pharmaceutical factory.

In 1999 in Paris, Daniel Pearl met and married French journalist Mariane van Neyenhoff, a former reporter and columnist for Glamour.

The Pearls settled in Mumbai, India, after Daniel Pearl was made Southeast Asia bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal.

The beheading video of Daniel Pearl was released by Jaish-e-Mohammed, under the pseudonym of "National Movement for the Restoration of Pakistani Sovereignty" and Jaish member Amjad Farooqi was reportedly involved in the kidnapping and murder.

Daniel Pearl was detained and later killed at an Al-Qaeda safe house in Karachi owned by Pakistani businessman Saud Memon.

Daniel Pearl helped ensure that Pearl's remains were returned to the United States, where he was later interred in the Mount Sinai Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles.

The video shows Daniel Pearl's mutilated body, and lasts 3 minutes and 36 seconds.

Daniel Pearl's family stated that he did so under duress, describing him as "a proud American, and he abhorred extremist ideologies".

Daniel Pearl is an alleged Al Qaeda operative reported to be third in command under Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 2001 attacks.

On May 2,2020, the parents of Daniel Pearl filed an appeal to the Pakistani Supreme Court to reverse the April 2 decision of the Sindh High Court which had overturned the convictions of the four men in Pearl's case.

On September 28,2020, Pakistan's Supreme Court accepted the appeal by the family of Daniel Pearl seeking to keep Omar Said Sheikh on death row as punishment for beheading their son, and to uphold the life sentences of the three co-conspirators.

The court ordered that the three Pakistanis co-conspirators, who were sentenced to life in prison for their part in Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder by beheading, should be freed.

Daniel Pearl is expected to remain there while the rest of the appeal process plays out in the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

The Daniel Pearl Foundation was formed by Pearl's parents Ruth and Judea Pearl; other family and friends have joined to continue Pearl's mission.

At one point in the video, Daniel Pearl said: "My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish", after which Pearl added a seemingly obscure detail, that a street in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak is named after his great-grandfather, who was one of the founders of the town.

Judea Daniel Pearl has written that at first this statement surprised him, but he later understood it to be a reference to the town-building tradition of his family, in contrast with the destructive aims of his captors.

Judea Daniel Pearl then enlarged upon the idea by inviting responses from artists, government leaders, authors, journalists, scientists, scholars, rabbis, and others.

In western Massachusetts, where Daniel Pearl had been a young journalist, his friend and former bandmate, Todd Mack, established a new nonprofit organization called Fodfest, to continue Daniel Pearl's legacy of "bridge building", Mack said.

In 2002, Daniel Pearl posthumously received the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award from Colby College and in 2007, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Moral Courage Award from the Houston Holocaust Museum.

The honorary board of the Daniel Pearl Foundation includes Christiane Amanpour, former US President Bill Clinton, Abdul Sattar Edhi, John L Hennessy, Ted Koppel, Queen Noor of Jordan, Sari Nusseibeh, Mariane Pearl, Itzhak Perlman, and Elie Wiesel.