The Lessons of Tom Fox
Posted by B. Preston
JunkYardBlog
American peace activist Tom Fox was taken hostage in Iraq a few months ago, and this week he was murdered by his captors. He seems to have been shot execution-style, a single shot to the head, with his hands tied behind him.
He was also tortured, and not the faux Abu Ghraib kind, but real, sadistic torture with no purpose other than to inflict pain. After his killing, his captors left his body in a garbage dump. His life was worth as much to those captors as used toilet paper.
And he was on the terrorists’ side in the war. Not that it mattered:
<<< Fox, who had been in Iraq to campaign against the U.S. occupation and to work for the release of Iraqis held by U.S. forces, was taken hostage with three colleagues in November by a group calling itself the “Swords of Truth.” >>>
From this, it would be good for the Amnesty Internationals of the world to learn a couple of lessons. First, being a peace activist does not now and never will exempt you from the violence inherent in the West’s conflict with Islamism, caliphascism and their assorted offshoots. If you happen to run across the likes of those who captured, tortured and murdered Mr. Fox, your lifetime of peace activism will not mean a thing. They will still kill you. But if they have time, they will torture you first. And they will torture and kill you whether you know anything of interest to them or not.
The second lesson the Amnestys would do well to learn is the difference between enhanced interrogation and true torture. Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah was captured in Afghanistan in early 2002 and shipped to Gitmo. Once there, he underwent enhanced interrogation—waterboarding, most likely—and gave up several al Qaeda plans that were in the works. One of those plans involved US citizen Jose Padilla, who was arrested at Chicago O’Hare Airport in May 2002. Padilla, according to Zubaydah, was returning to the US from training in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere to carry out a series of terrorist attacks in the Chicago and to scout the feasibility of carrying out a “dirty bomb” attack. The ehanced interrogation of Zubaydah saved American lives, by tipping authorities to the travel plans and mission of Jose Padilla.
The terrorists who captured, tortured and murdered Tom Fox had no such goal in mind. They aren’t interested in saving lives. They captured him because he is a kaffr, a non-Muslim and therefore subhuman to them. They tortured him because they could. They killed him because they are savages who believe in human sacrifice.
If the Amnesty International left could learn these two lessons—that their status as peace activists won’t protect them, and that the terrorists engage in pointless torture while the US government acts to save lives—perhaps the West could finally unite to defend itself and crush this minor Islamist insurgency before it flares into a global firestorm.
We’re not far from that flash point now, but there is still time to avoid it.
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