Christians characteristically take incredible risks for what they believe and do so with love for those who, in so many historical instances, have wound up killing them. This is difficult for non-Christians to understand (it took me a long time to grok it), so it is no surprise that the sacrifice of Tom Fox is both bewildering and threatening to the right.
I've been blogging this all day, here an elsewhere. It seems I can't think of anything else.
This is the man the right is calling "delusional."
[Tom Fox] 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.
Note the loaded language and guilt-by-association tactics. Tom Fox was not a member of the International Solidarity Movement. Like Rachel Corrie, however, Fox is ultimately the enemy because he was among the enemy of this author (and not for the purposes of murdering them; I'm sure Christ would demand an explanation of Mr. Fox). Tom must be made a sub-human as well as an example. There is no evidence that Tom Fox thought that the US "got its comeuppance" on 9/11, it is merely useful for the slanderer to say so.
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 essentially 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 in blood and misery, terror-mongers like those who murdered him.
Here, the author has fabricated a black and white opposition and then put words in Fox's mouth. Dead, Fox is the brownshirt's meat-puppet, made to say anything that might justify hate, which in turn neutralizes the significance of Fox's death. That Fox died doing what he did is terrifying to the right because it undercuts their childish rhetoric of fear and hate, the very reason why Christ and his followers were such a challenge to authority. Fox must therefore be made into the Divine Fool at best, a secret traitor at worst.
Everything I've read about Mr. Fox indicates that, though misguided in his worldview, he was in many ways 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.
Fox's actual life is confined like a prisoner to these few lines. When you challenge the author over this hateful smear, he will hide behind these lines and feign incomprehension in front of his sadistic audience.
Then it gets just plain weird:
But Fox also harbored hatred for his culture and an overall disdain for America, as indicated by statements he made on his blog. He also suffered from a terrible naiveté:
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, ignoring, among other things, the fact that people fear America so much, that they flock to its shores in droves, seeking freedom and peace and economic opportunity.
Here, the author ignores plain fact. Fox is right about perceptions of America, but mentioning the facts supposedly means he hated his culture and disdained America. This is the tiny world of the brownshirt: most facts are off-limits and if you cite them we will put words in your mouth and accuse you of hating America. Finally, the author takes the continuing influx of the poor into America in search of work, often the exploited labor of illegal immigrants, as a counter-point to Fox's citation of simple fact. Perhaps to someone as benighted and ignorant as a rightwinger, this is a counterpoint but people who think for a living will recognize that one has nothing to do with the other.
The missed meaning of a dead man's life is a humor as black as this author's heart.
After reading most of his blog entries, it seems to me that 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.
No examples. More insinuated belief. This author is a one-trick pony. Perhaps he can attend some rightwing hate seminar and learn new ways to tear good people down? As it is, Fox is living proof that some men are more evil than others: consider the author in comparison to his subject.
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 essentially described the liberation of Fallujah as a senseless act, he failed to mention 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.
"Moral," here, is used in its traditional rightwing sense. It means "I am excused from making rational arguments, since I can't." "Morally," Fox was focused enough to face his death. These are the "mores" of his faith. But the author wouldn't know anything about that. The juxtaposition of the horrors of Fallujah requires tremendous ignorance in the reader: the liberation of Fallujah was itself a slaughter, led by forces that maintained their own torture chambers. The author requires you to conclude that US = less evil than Them, despite the sad facts. You must join him in his frantic denial, help him deny the sickening reality because
he can't handle it. That's why the author works so hard to fling such filth and hate, since finding good guys and bad guys in reality is a lost cause.
A Christian would understand that.
Ultimately, Tom Fox saw that face up close and personal. It is the face of 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.
I do, which is why I can't bring myself to vote Republican.
The Utopian fanatics who killed Tom Fox could 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 have cared less if he had a family or 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.
The author is apparently on very good terms with the men who held and killed Tom Fox. He knows what they've been thinking. He knows if they're awake. He knows that they are bad, we're good, so obey for Murka's sake.
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 useful, 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.
Here the author is describing the way the Iraqis appear to him. To a Christian, however, the author is describing how he sees himself. As an agnostic I can say that the two are not mutually exclusive. This is why this man heaps hate on the world and relishes in death, mutilation, and suffering. Like most of this war's supporters there will never be enough of other people's blood, shed by other people's sweat and tears, to satisfy his revulsion for himself. The world must suffer so that he can blot himself out for a while. There is no goal, no victory is conceivable; war without end, amen.
If 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.
Strangely enough, it is the right that has committed suicide in Iraq, slaughtered and sacrificed sons and daughters and infants on a blood-stained Mesopotamian altar.
This was their clash of civilizations. It has shown that the right does not know civilization, any more than this author knows Christ. They are merely the frightened and feral followers, consumers and vicarious revelers in other people's suffering. The right is the least of us, the worst of us. They can be made to endorse anything so long as someone else is screaming on the slab. If it is one of Them, they celebrate. If it is one of us, they celebrate like this author has, above. Anything can be made to justify the suffering of everyone. It is not important that the war be won, it is important that the war be eternal.
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