Bunker Hill Community College

BHCC in the News

2008-02-21 - International Journalist Mariane Pearl Addresses Crowd at BHCC

Boston, February 21, 2008 – International journalist and author Mariane Pearl spoke to a standing room only crowd today as more than 400 turned out at Bunker Hill Community College to hear her speak about her husband, his death and his legacy. Mariane Pearl was five months pregnant when her husband, The Wall Street Journal’s South Asia Bureau Chief—Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a militant fundamentalist group in Pakistan in 2002. Their son was born in Paris four months later.

Determined not to be broken, Mariane wrote A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband Daniel Pearl. The book was later made into a feature film starring Angelina Jolie. In November 2007, Pearl published a second book, In Search of Hope: The Global Diaries of Mariane Pearl. Her resolve was evident as she spoke to the BHCC community about her experience; Pearl said that “you try to use what they (terrorists) are trying to destroy.” She went on sharing her philosophy, “They want to destroy hope. I will preserve it. They want to silence me. I will speak out. They want to paralyze me. I will take action.”

Pearl said that she would not be broken by what had occurred.  “I knew we were beyond the physical threat and this was a threat to the spirit,” she said. After hearing of her husband’s death, Pearl told the audience that she grabbed a gun and ran out of her house, “It is not hard to kill someone who has hurt you so much,” she said. Then in thinking about it, “I realized that the only thing I could do was to have courage, and the only courageous thing to do was to put that gun down.” 

Sharing her story has been a way to keep Daniel Pearl’s legacy alive. Pearl says it is also a way to keep the terrorists from silencing him. She says she hopes that by sharing his story, Daniel can serve as a role model to young people—especially their son Adam for whom she wrote her first book which has since been translated into 18 languages. Pearl spends her time now traveling the world reporting on “women who stories of personal triumph represent human resilience.”

Bunker Hill Community College is the largest community college in Massachusetts, enrolling more than 8,800 students on two campuses and at five satellite locations each semester. BHCC is one of the most diverse institutions of higher education in the Commonwealth. Six in ten students are people of color and more than half of BHCC’s students are women. The College also enrolls more than 600 international students who come from more than 95 countries and speak 75 different languages.

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