Yesterday, peace activist Tom Fox was found murdered in Iraq.
Fox, along with fellow activists Harmeet Singh Sooden, Norman Kember, and James Loney were kidnapped in Baghdad on November 26, 2005.
All belonged to the leftwing Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT), which provided "human shields" in Iraq at the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, works side by side with the anti-Israel, quasi-terrorist International Solidarity Movement and takes the standard leftwing position that America, as the world's biggest terrorist, got its comeuppance on 9/11/2001. CPT's official motto is "Getting in the Way," and it ran a program called "Adopt a Detainee," which was sympathetic to suspected terrorists being detained by U.S. and Iraqi forces in Iraq.
So, the late Mr. Fox, belonged to a group that essentially saw the "good guys" as being equal to, if not worse than, the bad guys. He believed he was doing a righteous thing by joining a group throwing stones in the path of the U.S., Iraqi and Coalition soldiers, the same men and women who are trying to round up the Islamist terror-mongers washing the streets of Baghdad with blood and misery, terror mongers like those who murdered him.
Everything I've read about Mr. Fox indicates that, though misguided in his worldview, he was a decent man. Fox played in the United States Marine Band for twenty years. A Quaker, he served as a youth leader at Langley Hill Friends Meeting. His daughter, Katherine, says that while he was in the military, he refused military discounts on principle.
But Fox also harbored hatred for his culture and an overall disdain for America, as indicated by statements on his blog. He also suffered from a terrible naivete: "I think it would be fair to say that a survey of opinion taken from news sources in various parts of the world would find people using the words 'fear and hatred' much more often than they would use the words 'respect and love' when it comes to describing the United States. Not only in the Middle East but in Europe and in much of Asia and other areas as well. We are seen more as an empire rather than a beacon of hope to the oppressed and downtrodden. We are seen more as a militaristic superpower, bent on imposing our will on others, rather than the keeper of the flame of the hope and promise of democracy," said Thomas William Fox, missing the fact that people fear America so much, that they flock to its shores in droves, seeking freedom and peace and economic opportunity.
After reading most of his blog entries, it seems to me that Tom Fox's tragic flaw, the one that ultimately got him killed, was that he did not really believe that some men are more evil than others.
Crippled by this moral confusion, Fox habitually ignored the greater of two evils. His blog entry on Fallujah hints at as much. Though in his writings he described the liberation of Fallujah as a senseless act, he failed mentioning that after U.S. forces chased out and killed the Islamists who had held the town hostage, they made the gruesome discovery of nearly two dozen torture chambers, awash in blood, some with bloated bodies and hacked off body parts dumped near them. Lt. Col. Gareth Brandl, a Marine said, "The face of Satan was here in Fallujah, and I'm absolutely convinced that that was true."
Ultimately, Tom Fox saw that face up close and personal. It is the one worn by those who commit shocking evil while promising Heaven on Earth. I wonder if, in the end, he finally recognized it for what it was--and is.
The Utopian fanatics who killed Tom Fox could not have cared less whether or not he was sympathetic towards them, or if he hated them or whether he believed in God, or not. They could not have cared less if he had a family and friends who loved him. They did not care for his compassion. They did not care that, on some levels, he even empathized with them; they who held him captive. They did not care that, in his way, he was trying to help alleviate the suffering of their brothers and sisters.
All Tom Fox was to his captors and murderers was filth-- a piece of garbage; a weak, vile, subhuman infidel of the Western variety; a creature to be spit on and reviled and, when no longer of use, slaughtered like an animal and then discarded. They treated Mr. Fox like they would treat us all, as stones to be kicked aside while building the road to Paradise. They treated Mr. Fox, and if given the chance they'd treat us all, like the Nazis treated the Jews.
If there there are lessons to be learned from the murder of Tom Fox, they are primarily for the Left: Like a person, it is never too late for it to abandon its suicidal march until the moment the executioner strikes.
