I was listening to Fresh Air last night and they had an interesting piece on humorist Jon Runson’s experience in tracking down and writing about the various extremists in the world in his new book Them: Adventures with Extremists which you can hear here.

Terry Gross repeatedly asked the Jewish journalist Runson if he was ever worried about whether or not Omar Bakri Mohammed would have him killed as he spent almost a year with the Muslim extremist. Runson said that he felt as though the two were almost friends and that they still kept in close contact by phone. Apparently, in the book, Runson portrays Bakri as a bit of a buffoon and someone who perhaps was more of a glory hound than a real extremist threat to the sovereignty of Britain.

As my title states, Runson’s experiences make the death of Daniel Pearl seem strange. They were both Jewish and both confronting extremists known to hate Jewish people. Why then were their fates so different?

It is the absurdity and inscrutability of our life on this planet. Both men were putting themselves in danger. One didn’t make it and the other lives to make money off his book. We never know how our day will end when we wake in the morning. We can try to be safer than Pearl and Runson in who we deal with and how we deal with them, but the crazed lunatic with a gun is always around the corner of time. We simply do our best at all times and enjoy the fruits of that labor.

That’s what Daniel Pearl was doing: his best. At least, what he thought was the best thing to do, even though it was insanely dangerous. He simply ended up with the worst.