Like Lot's wife, you have to look.
It is every bit as dreadful as you fear. The approximately three-minute video of the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl was posted recently on the Web site of a popular and respected newspaper, vastly expanding access to the horrific images.
While the video had appeared earlier on an obscure site, the decision by Stephen M. Mindich, publisher of the Boston Phoenix, to post a link on his paper's home page was a watershed moment, raising profound moral questions about the balance between privacy and freedom of information, between voyeurism and the desire to understand the depth of hatred in the world.
"I've been fighting the impulse to click on it," said Rich Gordon, chair of the New Media program at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. "It's human nature to think about it."
The inevitable availability of the video of Pearl's murder instantly renders certain debates moot. CBS News was criticized for airing a heavily edited, non-graphic portion of it May 14, but who cares about that now?
Images, no matter how gruesome, belong to everybody now. For good or ill, anything digital is endlessly up for grabs.
While that has been true for some time, perhaps only a controversial and almost mythologized piece of footage - the video made by Pearl's executioners - could have brought that abstract concept so suddenly down to earth, forcing us to confront its grim implications.
"It's past the point of saying we're entering a new communications world," Gordon said. "We're in it. On some level, that scares me. But on another level, I don't know what the alternative is. We have, for the first time in history, an open publishing medium - one where anybody can, at relatively low cost and with relatively low complexity, make their thoughts and information available to anyone anywhere in the world. That's incredibly exciting.
"But as with many exciting things related to technology, there's a dark side as well."
The dark side of the Pearl video is easy to imagine - but not easy to watch. A crude piece of anti-American and anti-Semitic political propaganda, it juxtaposes pictures of alleged violence against Muslims with shots of Pearl talking, during which The Wall Street Journal reporter repudiates American foreign policy. "My father is Jewish. My mother is Jewish. I am Jewish," Pearl states.
And then comes what seems to be Pearl's decapitation. The qualification is necessary because there is no way to independently verify the video. The executioner, who is not seen, then brandishes the severed head for several seconds.
Given the video's grotesque content, why would the Phoenix, for which Pearl once worked, post a link to it? The Phoenix, after all, is a responsible news organization, an alternative weekly that was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.
In a note to readers on the Phoenix's site, Mindich calls the video "the single most gruesome, horrible, despicable and horrifying thing I've ever seen." He adds, "The outrage I feel as an American and a Jew is almost indescribable. If there is anything that should galvanize every non-Jew hater in the world - of whatever faith, or not faith - against the perpetrators and supporters of those who committed this unspeakable murder, it should be viewing this video."
In the last few days, the Phoenix site has had such heavy traffic that it has installed an auxiliary home page.
In an interview, Mindich expressed dismay that the U.S. government had apparently taken pains to suppress the video. In fact, he added, the government should have aided widespread dissemination of the video, so that Americans could fully comprehend the murderous virulence of the anti-Semitism among Islamic extremists.
Had they been able to see the full video, he believes, Americans would have been devastated - and enlightened.
"When you get to the end of the video and the scroll on the screen says, 'If you don't get out of Muslim land, this scene will be repeated over and over again' - frankly, America needs to understand this," he said. "If Daniel Pearl had his choice, he'd want it seen."
Others disagree. Michael Schudson, a journalism professor at the University of California at San Diego who said he doesn't intend to see the video, is disturbed by the Phoenix's link. "Whether this serves the cause of freedom or terrorism more, I have no idea. Journalists restrict the release of information sometimes for good reason - say, withholding the name of victims of rape or minors accused of crime. I don't think we've reached a point where a conscientious journalist has only one choice - publish everything you have, regardless."
Mindich said he decided to post the video after hearing that a Virginia-based company called ProHosters, which develops and maintains commercial Web sites, said it had been pressured by the FBI to remove the video from one of its clients' sites.
FBI officials, who said in published reports that they sought to squelch the video out of respect for Pearl's family, have not contacted the Phoenix about removing the link, Mindich said. It will remain indefinitely on the Phoenix site, he added. "I don't see any reason to take it down."
Julia Keller writes for the Chicago Tribune.