MONDAY, JUNE 3, 2002 — The haunting thing about the video of Daniel Pearl’s execution is the doomed man’s voice. He speaks in a lively and upbeat tone. He sounds confident — as if his captors told him he would go free as long as he mouthed their hateful words. It’s the kind of voice you’d expect to hear at a newspaper writers’ meeting (early in his career, Pearl did a stint at the Phoenix).

Never, it seems, did Pearl expect that the Islamic terrorists would execute him because he was a Jew and an American. With that voice, Pearl intoned the words they forced him to say: "I’m a Jewish American. I come from on my father’s side a family of Zionists." Then, they killed and beheaded him.

If someone had told me six or seven years ago — at the height of the Oslo peace process — that a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a secular American Jew like me, would be killed in such a horrifying fashion, I would have dismissed that person as paranoid and insane. Weren’t Jews in America at a pinnacle of safety and prosperity as high as at any time in the long, sad history of the world’s Jews? Didn’t Oslo, after all, usher in a new era of acceptance for Jews the world over — including within the Arab world? Never in my darkest imaginings could my mind conjure up the unthinkable images in the Daniel Pearl video — let alone the September 11 terrorist attacks.

As a boy, I’d have long conversations with my grandfather, a South Boston–born Jew who left his medical practice to serve in World War II. He saw action in North Africa and Italy and witnessed the birth of the state of Israel, which he steadfastly supported. He hammered into my head the threat both Jews and America had faced during World War II, and how, as far as he and Israel were concerned, things hadn’t gotten much better, a view that I saw then as hopelessly outdated. He never lived to see Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin shake hands on the White House lawn — an event that prompted me to think that my grandfather’s era had finally ended. I even wrote a news story predicting that a group called Americans for Peace Now would have trouble staying in existence because everybody in Israel favored the peace process.

That was before I began to report on burgeoning terrorism emanating from Arafat’s Palestinian Authority and Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. The terrorists were preaching the old Hitlerite canards that had moved my grandfather to action. The ancient hatreds were back. And so America fell victim to the September 11 attacks. And so a terrorist thug slew my landlord, pilot John Ogonowski, one of the first victims of that horrible day. And so Israeli Jews were slain celebrating a Passover seder. And so Daniel Pearl was executed.

We live in a terrible world, reminiscent of the one my grandfather inhabited. I thought of that when I visited his grave in Sharon on Memorial Day. An American flag marked the spot. The battle for freedom against hatred rages once again. The September 11 victims, Ogonowski, and Pearl did not die in vain: another generation now rises to fight the battles of the past.