U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power has touched off a firestorm of controversy with a tweet about Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, beheaded by al-Qaida in Pakistan 12 years ago.

In her tweet (which came a few hours after she delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at UCLA), Power referred to Pearl’s story as a “reminder that individual accountability & reconciliation are required to break the cycle of violence.”

The Daily Caller Reported that in their first message after kidnapping Pearl, the terrorists threatened to kill him if their demands were not met, declaring that: “Then, this cycle will continue and no American journalist could enter Pakistan.”   

Pearl, 38, was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan in January 2002 and murdered weeks later by al-Qaida terror mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was filmed slitting his throat and sawing his head off.

Pearl’s killers forced him to read a statement that said in part: “I’m a Jewish American from Encino, California, U.S.A. … My father’s Jewish, my mother’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We’ve made numerous family visits to Israel.”

Power’s tweet about Pearl drew fire almost immediately.  

“To what ‘cycle of violence’ are you referring? The man had his throat cut for being a Jew,” one respondent tweeted back.

“Can you elaborate? What should Pearl have been accountable for? Should he have reconciled with Al Qaeda?”, read another.

“Reconciliation? With people who cut his head off because he’s Jewish and American?”,  another tweeter demanded to know.

About nine hours after the original tweet, Power tweeted a “correction” in which she implied that when speaking about Pearl’s story, she was referring to other people’s actions after his murder.

Power’s tweets drew fire from conservative talk-show host Mark Levin, who said she should resign but would not be forced to do so because “she’s a mouthpiece for Barack Obama.”

Another host, Laura Ingraham, called the tweet “an outrage,” adding that “her comments going back decades were worse.”

One of Power’s most controversial comments came in April 2002, when Israel had gone to war to bring a halt to suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks launched from the West Bank by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah and Hamas. She argued that a Western or American force should be sent to the region to protect Palestinians from Israel.

Power’s latest tweets came shortly after she delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture Sunday night at UCLA, where the slain journalist’s father Judea is a computer science professor.

In her remarks, Power defended Secretary of State John Kerry’s controversial efforts to push for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement while criticizing efforts to boycott and delegitimize Israel.

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