Foley in Aleppo, Syria in 2012. Photo by Nicole Tung.
The life of photojournalist James Wright Foley, who was beheaded by the Islamic State militant group, “stands in stark contrast to his killers,” President Barack Obama said today.
“Jim was taken from us in an act of violence that shocks the conscience of the entire world,” Obama said at a press conference. “He was 40-years-old — one of five siblings, the son of a mom and dad who worked tirelessly for his release.”
Foley was abducted in Syria in November 2012 while working for GlobalPost. His family began the Find James Foley campaign to raise awareness about his capture. A video posted and quickly taken down from YouTube yesterday showed Foley being murdered by a “London-accented extremist” over recent U.S. airstrikes in Iraq against a group formerly known as ISIS. It was later authenticated by the intelligence community.
“ISIL speaks for no religion,” Obama said today. “Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision, and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.
“And people like this ultimately fail. They fail, because the future is won by those who build and not destroy and the world is shaped by people like Jim Foley, and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him.”
During a 2011 event at the Medill School of Journalism, two weeks after he was released from captivity in Libya, Foley acknowledged the inherent danger in his work. “It’s part of the problem with these conflicts,” he said. “We’re not close enough to it. And if reporters, if we don’t try to get really close to what these guys—men, women, American [soldiers], now, with this Arab revolution, young Arab men, young Egyptians and Libyans—are experiencing, we don’t understand the world.”
“We have never been prouder of our son Jim. He gave his life trying to expose the world to the suffering of the Syrian people,” his mother Diane Foley said in a statement. “We implore the kidnappers to spare the lives of the remaining hostages. Like Jim, they are innocents. They have no control over American government policy in Iraq, Syria or anywhere in the world.”
