American hostage Tom Fox killed in Iraq

Michelle Malkin notes the murder of American hostage and Christian peace activist Tom Fox in Iraq, probably by members of Michael Moore's Minutemen Al Qaeda.  Judging from the condition of his body, it is likely that he was tortured before he was killed.

Michelle also notes Rocco DiPippo's excellent American Thinker article about Fox, which rather exactly sums up my thoughts about Fox's death:

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.

... Everything I've read about Mr. Fox indicates that, though misguided in his worldview, he was basically 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.

... 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 essentially 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.

As I blogged earlier regarding Fox and the three other Christian Peacemaker Teams members taken hostage:

Even though it is fair to say that the political motives of these four men may have blinded them to the danger posed by the real terrorists in Iraq, we should keep them and all other hostages held by Islamist terrorists in our prayers.  Pray for the safe delivery of all hostages back into Coalition hands.

Keep praying.
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More from The Autonomist and All Things Beautiful about the mixed-up worldview of Christian Peacemaker Teams.