Klarinet Archive - Posting 000241.txt from 2006/03

From: "dnleeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Remarks on Tom Fox from The AmericanThinker
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 10:08:54 -0500

I received this copy of an article which appeared in The
AmericanThinker, and originally published on Saturday, March 11,
2006. I am not familiar with this journal and think that it is,
perhaps, a blog.

The article gives a different view of peace activist Tom Fox who
was a clarinetist with the U.S. Marine Band. What the article
suggests is that Tom was a decent person but morally confused,
politically naive, and that his terrible death came about because
of this naiveté.

Dan Leeson
dnleeson@-----.net

======================================================

The Death of Tom Fox: Terror Meets Delusion

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 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.

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 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. 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.

Thomas William Fox (1951-2006) R.I.P.

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