Tom Fox: "Too many are willing to die for war and too few are willing to die for peace"

They found Tom Fox's body last week. Tortured, then killed--the new Iraqi way. (They're quick studies. And we're great teachers.) Here's something the Christian peacemaker wrote the day before he was abducted:

I have read that the word in the Greek Bible that is translated as "love" is the word "agape." Again, I have read that this word is best expressed as a profound respect for all human beings simply for the fact that they are all God's children. I would state that idea in a somewhat different way, as "never thinking or doing anything that would dehumanize one of my fellow
human beings."

As I survey the landscape here in Iraq, dehumanization seems to be the operative means of relating to each other. U.S. forces in their quest to hunt down and kill "terrorists" are, as a result of this dehumanizing word, not only killing "terrorists," but also killing innocent Iraqis: men, women and children in the various towns and villages.

It seems as if the first step down the road to violence is taken when I dehumanize a person. That violence might stay within my thoughts or find its way into the outer world and become expressed verbally, psychologically, structurally or physically. As soon as I rob a fellow human being of his or her humanity by sticking a dehumanizing label on them, I begin the process that can have, as an end result, torture, injury and death.

Tom Fox understood the chain of causation so thoroughly he had to put his life where his heart was. That was a missionary. That was a man. Gone to Jesus as this criminal enterprise now enters its third year....