The announcement that the Pakistani president, General Musharraf, will address an American Jewish audience next month is a dramatic development at a time of war between American and Islamic extremists. The meeting, which will take place in New York, comes fewer than four years since the kidnapping and murder by Muslim fanatics in Pakistan of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who died proclaiming that he was a Jew and that his father and mother were Jews. So the decision by the Pakistani leader to meet with the leadership of the organized Jewish community can be seen as, among other things, a rebuke to those radical Islamists and their terrorist allies – provided that he follows up his words in New York with reforms at home.

Since September 11, 2001, General Musharraf has steered Pakistan on a generally pro-American path, angering critics at home with Islamist sympathies. He has dampened the conflict with India over Kashmir. Pakistan is under military rule, though some elements of democracy operate. Too many children study in madrassas financed by Wahhabi sources in Saudi Arabia, which maintains close ties to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The problem, however, isn’t only the madrassas – it’s the public schools system, controlled by General Musharraf, as well. Los Angeles Times reported last week that textbooks in Pakistan’s public schools carry “disparaging references to Christians, Jews and Hindus,” and that “One textbook tells kids they should be willing to die as martyrs for Islam.”

Pakistan’s many flaws throw General Musharrraf’s demarche into sharper relieve. When he meets with the Jewish leadership, General Musharraf will undoubtedly embellish his doctrine of “Enlightened Moderation,” first delivered as a speech two years ago at the annual conference of the Organization of Islamic Countries, where he encouraged his co-religionists to embrace rather than confront modernity and its values of pluralism, openness, and tolerance. In May 2003, the president-general publicly raised the question of establishing normal relations with Israel, although Pakistan’s official position on ties with the Jewish state is that they must follow, not precede, a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

In the case of the meeting in New York, the medium will be the message. The meeting will take place on a platform provided by the American Jewish Congress-Council for World Jewry. It was a mission to Islamabad last May undertaken by leaders of the Council – Jack Rosen, Phil Baum, and David Twersky, who is a contributing editor of The New York Sun – that produced the meeting. No doubt it will turn heads and cause some gnashing of teeth, especially in the Muslim world, nowhere more than among those murderous extremists who cut Daniel Pearl’s throat. But that, in and of itself, will be scant progress. The thing to watch will be what Pakistan does when the general returns to Islamabad.