Love your enemies

Peace activist Tom Fox has lived in Baghdad by the words of Jesus. Now he faces murder by terrorists. Was his mission in vain?

By Michelle Goldberg

Dec 7, 2005 | Living in Iraq, Tom Fox wrote of his struggles to transcend rage and fear, to forgive his enemies even as they threatened his life and murdered people around him. Now his faith is being put to the ultimate test. On Nov. 26 in Baghdad, the 54-year-old musician from Virginia and three other volunteers with the pacifist group Christian Peacemaker Teams were kidnapped by a previously unknown band of insurgents calling themselves the Swords of Truth Brigade. This weekend, their captors released a video threatening to execute the four men unless all the prisoners in Iraqi and coalition custody are released by Thursday, Dec. 8.

The grotesque irony is that few have worked as assiduously on behalf of Iraqi detainees as Christian Peacemaker Teams, the last Western human rights organization to operate in Iraq outside the Green Zone. CPT volunteers were among the first to document reports of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Despite the growing danger, they've remained in Iraq to help ordinary Iraqis track down relatives who've been seized by coalition soldiers. Muslim groups throughout Iraq and the Middle East -- including the Iraqi Islamic Party, the country's largest Sunni party, and the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group of prominent Sunni clerics said to have ties to the insurgency -- have called for the Christian Peacemakers' release. But right now, CPT members says none of their contacts know who the Swords of Truth are, or how to reach them.

Ever since he first arrived in Iraq in 2004, Fox has tried to prepare himself for this situation. In October that year, he and 24-year-old Matt Chandler, a recent college graduate from Oregon, were the only two Christian Peacemakers in Baghdad, and they felt the danger of kidnapping increasing. That September, the Italian aid workers Simona Torretta and Simona Pari were abducted and held for three weeks before being released. A few weeks later Margaret Hassan, CARE International's head of operations in Iraq, would be taken, held for a month, and murdered.

Wanting to prepare for the worst, Fox and Chandler drafted a statement outlining their position on their own potential abductions -- a position that begins with empathy for their captors, and a demand that no violence be used to rescue them. Each sent a copy to the members of the five-person support team that all CPT volunteers assemble at home before entering war zones.

Should a volunteer be taken hostage, the statement said, "CPT will attempt to communicate with the hostage takers or their sponsors, and work against journalists' inclinations to vilify and demonize the offenders. We will try to understand the motives for these actions and to articulate them while maintaining a firm stance that such actions are wrong ... We reject the use of violent force to save our lives, should we be kidnapped, held hostage, or caught in the middle of a violent conflict situation. We also reject violence to punish anyone who harms us ... We forgive those who consider us their enemies, therefore any penalty should be in the spirit of restorative justice rather than violent retribution."

There is no reason to believe the insurgents who captured the Christian Peacemakers will be moved by their forgiveness or their frequently stated refusal to dehumanize anyone, even those who would dehumanize them. Margaret Hassan spent 30 years living in Iraq and devoted her life to the welfare of the Iraqi people, but that didn't stop her killers. Innocents and humanitarian workers have been shown no special mercy by terrorists who often appear to have no goal other than spreading chaos and committing mass slaughter.

Fox and his colleagues must have known this -- in their dispatches from the field, a fervent, otherworldly idealism mixes with a sober appraisal of growing danger. But Fox and the other hostages -- James Loney, a 41-year-old from Toronto who serves as program coordinator for CPT Canada; Harmeet Singh Sooden, a 32-year-old electrical engineer from Montreal; and Norman Kember, a 74-year-old retired professor of medical physics from London -- decided to stay in Iraq, anyway. Their choice can seem reckless and crazy, maybe vainglorious, but the fact remains that in a region being flayed by religious and nationalistic hatreds, the members of CPT chose to risk their lives on behalf of human solidarity.

To some, including Fox's daughter, who didn't want him to go to Iraq, the risk wasn't worth it. The Christian Peacemakers' deaths won't change anything in a country coming hideously undone. But in a world torn between competing religious chauvinisms, they are a welcome reminder that deep faith can make people generous rather than punitive, humble instead of jingoistic.

Next Page: The kidnapping pleases Rush Limbaugh: "I like any time a bunch of leftist feel-good hand-wringers are shown reality"

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