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| James Foley - from www.sedgemore.com |
An
article written by journalist James Foley for the magazine of his alma mater,
Marquette University, brings some measure of comfort as we consider his
horrific demise: he was a man of prayer. After being freed from his first
kidnapping in Libya in 2011, he described how he tried to connect with his
family through prayer: “I began to pray the rosary. It was
what my mother and grandmother would have prayed. I said 10 Hail Marys between
each Our Father. It took a long time, almost an hour to count 100 Hail Marys
off on my knuckles. And it helped to keep my mind focused.”
The final sentence in the ‘Hail
Mary’ is: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour
of our death. Amen.”
Despite that first kidnapping, Foley
decided he had to return to the Middle-East to report on the suffering of the
Syrian people. It was there, in 2012, that he was captured by IS. His cellmate,
a French journalist Nicolas Henin said in a BBC interview that although one
develops survival instincts in prison where you grab at everything, “James was
the opposite – he would share everything. If you were cold, he would share his
blanket, if you were hungry, he would share his ration.”
James Foley lived the life of a true
Christian and died a martyr for the truth.
Serious journalists know that their career is more than a profession –
it is a vocation. Here in Jamaica, our journalists have faced some terrifying
moments (yours truly included), but we soldier on in the name of truth.
Foley’s death has revealed to the
world the depth of evil that is IS – now the international community must act
not only to avenge his sad loss, but also to bring justice to the good people
of the region who have been living under a reign of terror.
Dr Martin Luther King Jr said,
“Undeserved suffering is redemptive.” The only way we can try to understand how
such a good person could have had such an unspeakable death, is to consider him
a holocaust – a sacrifice for some greater good.
'Because sentence against an evil deed is not executed speedily, the heart of the sons of men are fully set in them to do evil."
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