The discovery of peace activist Tom Fox's body in Iraq Thursday was, sadly, not unexpected. But the murder of Fox, 54, a Virginia resident with Guilford College ties, still was shocking in its senselessness and brutality.
Fox, one of four members of a grass-roots peacekeeping team kidnapped Nov. 26 in Baghdad, may have been tortured before he was shot and killed, Iraqi police said. The Swords of Righteousness Brigade, a previously unknown group, claimed responsibility for the abductions and said the Christian Peacemaker Teams members would be executed if Iraqi prisoners were not released from U.S. and Iraqi prisons. Footage of the other three hostages, two Canadians and one Briton, was aired last week on al-Jazeera television via a video dated Feb. 28.
The grim news of Fox's murder hardly could have come during a more perilous time in Iraq, a period of heightened tension and turmoil that began with the bombing of a Shiite mosque last month and retaliatory attacks that killed hundreds. The spike in violent incidents has continued, most recently on Sunday, with an attack killing more than 50 civilians in a Shiite market in Baghdad; and Monday, when four men suspected of terrorist attacks were executed in response.
As the violence mounts and Iraq appears to move closer to a civil war, Fox's ideals -- shared by his fellow CPT members whose fates are yet unknown -- may seem hopelessly out of reach and completely out of touch with the realities of war.
Certainly some would find fault with the political philosophies of Fox and other activists, who have sought to document abuses of detainees held by U.S. and coalition forces, and pointed to the military as responsible for the killings and increased violence in Iraq.
It may be difficult to see anything other than the killers' depravity in how Fox died, to feel anything other than anger that an innocent man was murdered for acting on what he believed was a mission from God. But to best honor his memory, we should deeply consider his own words, from a reflection he wrote for electronicIraq.net the day before he was abducted: "As I survey the landscape here in Iraq, dehumanization seems to be the operative means of relating to each other. ... 'Why are we here?' We are here to root out all aspects of dehumanization that exists within us. ...We are here to stop people, including ourselves, from dehumanizing any of God's children, no matter how much they dehumanize their own souls."
