“If Jesus and Gandhi are right, then I am asked to risk my life, and if I lose it to be as forgiving as they were when murdered by the forces of Satan.”
Of course, Mohammed was neither Jesus nor Ghandi, but a man who led dozens of raids, sieges and attacks on other Arabs and Jews, and countenanced execution and assassination, even of surrendered prisoners, as a matter of course. Occasionally he and fellow Muslims took the wives of men killed captives as their own.
Who says so? Islamophobes? Christian right –wingers? Well, no. All this is taken from the most sacred Islamic Hadiths and the Koran itself. Any resemblance between Ghandi, Jesus and Mohammed is purely co-incidental.
Not wishing to disparage the memory of Tom Fox, are his ilk “peace activists” at all? Or could they more likely be called “war dupes”? Fox’s CPT group is exceptionally anti-American, anti-Israeli and pro-Muslim. They denounced the Coalition in Iraq, blamed all the violence on Bush and Blair and previously joined Palestinians in other anti-Israeli “peace activist” tours of the Middle East.
When newspapers published the Mohammed cartoons, even in captivity Fox and his fellow CPT members issued statements denouncing the abuse of their “gracious Muslim brothers”, as they stood over him with AK-47’s and throat-knives. The "apologies" were not, in this case, coerced but rather volontary.
Fox reminds one of fellow U.S. “peace activist” Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer. Rachel’s “peace” was relentless verbal, intellectual and propaganda assault by her group on one sides only – the Jews. After her death, radical Palestinian elements readily admitted they used people like Corrie as part of their “war activism”. So much for Ms. Corrie’s deluded pacifism.
From his quote about Jesus and Ghandi, Fox obviously had something of the traditional Christian martyr about him. Sadly, the Swords of Righteousness group who took him captive had the Islamic “shahid” concept of martyrdom, which is not the same. Christian martyrs have always been non-violent, as was Christ himself. Their suffering was persuasive in shaming the Romans and other persecutors into conversion. The Islamic “shahid” is just as likely to be violent, as was Muhammad. He can, after recent fatwa, even be a suicide bomber or homicide pilot. His violence is likely to be persuasive in intimidating others to convert to Islam.
The murder of Fox by Islamists was no doubt proceeded by all the “letter of the law” Koranic injunctions. As Fox was a person of the “kitab” ( Bible) they were not allowed to kill him right away. They had to offer him a chance to pay “jizya” (a tax on Christians and Jews) and “feel himself subdued” (Koran). If that failed, they had to offer him the chance of conversion to Islam,or death (Koran,Hadiths). Maybe Fox chose death – the actions of a brave, principled and sadly misguided man.
Martyrdom is meant to move us morally, as a spectacle, a narrative and a religious act. As Martin Roth points out, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, prayed for those who killed him, as Christ did for his killers when he was on the cross. Anyone who can't tell the difference between these theologies and those of jihad shahids is a theological imbecile....or a secularist. If it comes to choosing between Tom Fox and a shahid, I think we know which way most of the world wishes to go.
1 comment:
Loving your enemies doesn't get you off the hook for hating your friends.
But in fact, Fox didn't "love his enemies"; he loved the mass-murdering psychopaths who he was honored to consider his friends.
He considered the rest of us his enemies, and he hated us.
So it seems to me that he was just another hypocrite.
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