From The Wall Street Journal: “Daniel Pearl, RIP: American journalists, like America itself, will not be intimidated.”

Danny’s death is a terrible reminder, like so many others since last September 11, that evil still stalks this world. Danny was no soldier or spy, as his killers claimed in their e-mails. He was a noncombatant, an American journalist trying to understand and explain the Islamic world to his readers. His death is an act of barbarism for its own evil sake.

Oh, how the cosmopolitan chic must hate this kind of language. “‘Evil stalks this world?'” they sniff. “How cartoonish! “‘Barbarism for its own evil sake’? How trivial!”

But you know what? There’s nothing to the motives behind Daniel Pearl’s cold-blooded killing that need “problematizing” — academese for “complicating the perfectly obvious”; the issues that spurred on Pearl’s murderers not only aren’t “complex,” but they’re entirely irrelevant by way of “explication”; and the collective gut reaction many of us had to the stark barbarity of Pearl’s slaughter — to recognize it for what it is and to give it the name of “evil” — is not at all “simplistic,” no matter how hard some affected French clown in a tailored linen suit strains to make it seem so. Can’t stomach the word “evil,” Hubert? Then retire to your drawing room, I say, and ponder the “root causes” of what to the rest of us is a perfectly obvious bloodlust and hatred. Perhaps in a few years you’ll emerge the wiser, your insights captured in a finely nuanced sonnet, your artist’s soul weary but sated. Who knows, maybe somebody’ll even read the wretched thing (how I hope it’s Tim Blair…!)

Me, I don’t need to be an egg to recognize a chicken’s ass, and I don’t need to stick my head inside to convince myself that it stinks in there.

More — from Michael Ledeen, writing in The National Review, and LGF’s Charles Johnson:

It