voice of the day
"If nothing else, prayer was the glue that enabled my freedom, an inner freedom first and later the miracle of being released during a war in which the regime had no real incentive to free us. It didn’t make sense, but faith did."
- James Foley, journalist who was executed by Islamic State jihadists this week, on his captivity in Libya in 2011, as written in Marquette Magazine
THE beheading of James Foley is a heinous crime that proves isis is run by apostates, not Muslims, and the God they claim to believe in and His Prophet do not advocate or condone such actions against an individual or whole cultures. Those drawn to isis are also apostates, they are sick, perverse, twisted people, a disgrace to all humanity. I know God will deal with these people in His way if they continue murdering, persecuting, and abusing innocents. My prayers are for the Foley family, that God gives them the strength to get through the brutal murder of their son, and for the hundreds of thousands of other victims isis, the families of those brutally slaughtered because of their faith or ethnic identity and those families who have had to flee for their lives. And while I am not a proponent of war, I also pray for the many military forces fighting to defeat isis, to destroy their so called caliphate, to end their barbarism. From +PBS NewsHour , +AlterNet / and +The Guardian .....SPECIAL NOTE, be sure to watch the video by James Foley's parents, they are exceptional people.....
With depressing frequency in this summer of diverse horrors, we hear
tales of desperate human misery, suffering and depravity – and because
we live now in an era where virtually every phone is a globally
connected camera, we are confronted with graphic evidence of tragedy.
The footage of the apparent beheading (to refer to the atrocity as an execution serves only to lend a veneer of dignity to barbarism) of the US photojournalist James Foley at the hands of a British Isis extremist has raised particularly strong feelings.
Social networks are banning users who share the footage. Newspapers are facing opprobrium for the choices they make in showing stills or parts of the video. Others, of course, will seek out the video after seeing the row, or else post it around the internet in a juvenile form of the free speech argument.
Before considering the rights and wrongs of the position, there is one fact we should face: we are presented with images of grotesque violence on a daily basis. Last month the New York Times ran on its front page the dead and broken body of a Palestinian child.
Like Foley, that child was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s friend, and in a connected world there is just as much chance his family saw the photo and its spread as Foley’s will see the latest awful images of their loved one.
That photo raised little controversy in comparison to the use of images of Foley. Photos of groups of civilian men massacred by Isis across Iraq and Syria – widely shared on social media and used by publications across the world – caused no outcry whatsoever.
It’s hard to look at that and not see a double standard: like many other courageous and talented people, Foley had chosen to travel to the region, and knew the risks that entailed. Others were killed simply fleeing their homes. In a strange and bitter irony, one of the duties of photographers such as Foley is documenting bloodshed in order to show the world.
To see an outcry for Foley’s video and not for others is to wonder whether we are disproportionately concerned over showing graphic deaths of white westerners – maybe even white journalists – and not others.
That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons for outlets to think hard when selecting what, if anything, from the footage they should show. Foley’s apparent beheading was released not at the editorial decision of a photojournalist, but as a propaganda tool by thugs. Outlets should consider whether they are furthering or challenging such aims when they use such images.
There is also simple human decency, and the difficult trade-off of not insulating comfortable western audiences from the world’s horrors, while not needlessly causing a dead person’s loved ones additional suffering by showing gratuitously violent imagery.
The Guardian’s stance on Foley is a demonstration of the fine balance of those decisions: at present, one image of Foley from the video is used, but not as a lead picture. None of his forced speech is portrayed, and the short audio elements from the video – some of his murderer’s speech – have been used against a still image.
But more relevant by far is the choice each of us makes about whether to view the many horrifying real-life murder videos that circulate the internet. Before clicking, serious self-examination is required: why do you want to see this? Do you need to see it to understand something important? Still deeper self-examination should certainly be engaged before even contemplating sharing such material.
“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,” her statement began.
It has already been shared more than 2,500 times. This is how we win: not by suppressing the worst of us, but by sharing and saluting the best – people such as Foley and his family.
http://youtu.be/mo3ZaTOby5I
Charles
Sennott, first of all, our condolences to you and your colleagues on
the loss of James Foley. What’s can you tell us about him and how he
came to be held?CHARLES SENNOTT, Co-Founder, GlobalPost: Thanks, Gwen.
You know, the best way to start to describe who is James Foley is probably to start with the way his parents talked about him today. Anyone who saw how much faith they have, how strong they are, they know where James came from. And that’s really important to understanding him.
Jim had strong faith in himself, but his parents had tremendous faith in what he did as a journalist. They understood that Jim wanted to do work that mattered. He wanted to do work that made a difference. They understood his motivations. And they were unwaveringly supportive of it.
And that really is who Jim Foley was. He was a courageous reporter who took great risks to bring the story home.
GWEN IFILL: Do we know physically where he was when this happened yesterday or whenever it happened?
CHARLES SENNOTT: We don’t.
If you have seen this video — and I hope your viewers have not seen it. It’s the most dark and horrific thing I have ever watched. It’s about four minutes’ long. It’s very clear he’s under great duress. It’s clear that the statements he’s making are forced statements.
And it’s in a sort of barren landscape that really could be Syria or it could be Iraq. It’s very, very difficult to distinguish that. And we don’t know precisely where that happened.
GWEN IFILL: Have the people who have been holding him — have been in touch asking for ransom? Apparently, there is a report that there was a threat made that they would kill him a week ago.
CHARLES SENNOTT: That’s correct.
And our CEO, Phil Balboni, at GlobalPost has really tirelessly followed this every day for two years, and has amassed really quite an extensive body of facts and information through a lot of information we have gathered from law enforcement officials, from private investigators, our own private investigators, and, importantly, from colleagues on the ground.
You know, we have a lot of colleagues who really cared about Jim. And every bit of information they could glean would come to us and would be filtered. And it’s hard to sort of share in great detail without putting some of the other hostages who may still be being held and whose lives, as we know, are hanging in the balance — we can’t really share a lot of that information.
But it is safe to say that, at first, there was information he was being held by the Syrian government. That information changed shape over time. It appeared pretty quickly that he was being held by Islamic militants. That’s when fear really set in. He was held in different locations, first in Aleppo, and later in a different location.
The Guardian has reported that location. We think it’s probably better not to report it right now, so I won’t share it. But it is a known ISIS center inside of Syria.
GWEN IFILL: Rob Mahoney, how does Syria rank as a danger zone for journalists?
ROBERT MAHONEY, Deputy Director, Committee to Protect Journalists: It’s the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, has been for the last year or so.
We have noted some 70 journalists have been killed in Syria since the conflict started in 2011.
GWEN IFILL: Many of them Syrians, right?
ROBERT MAHONEY: And the one thing — yes. Most of them, actually, are local journalists.
And, also, to Jim’s story, Syria is the single worst place we have seen in our entire history as an organization for more than 30 years where hostage-taking has taken place in a conflict zone. There have been more than 80 journalists held hostage at various points throughout the last three years.
GWEN IFILL: As Charlie just suggested, it’s difficult to negotiate or to figure out a way to rescue these hostages. What are the special problems, the special delicacies for someone like you or for the U.S. government, for that matter, in trying to free people like James Foley?
ROBERT MAHONEY: Well, in many cases, the families or the news organizations that some of the journalists work for don’t want to jeopardize their safety and don’t want us to publicly talk about where they might be or even who they are.
Steven Sotloff, for example, who appeared in the video this week, we knew about him, but we didn’t publicly disclose that, because we just don’t know sometimes who we’re dealing with. There are very many groups. They’re splintered. Some were holding journalists for hostages — sorry — holding hostages for criminal ransom, and others were holding them for political purposes.
So, in — with all that uncertainty, it was very difficult to get precise information about the captors.
GWEN IFILL: Bob, is it more complicated when they’re freelance journalists not working for major news organizations?
ROBERT MAHONEY: Absolutely.
And we at the committee, you know, are very, very concerned for the freelancers. They don’t have the big institutional support of journalists that are going in for big news organizations. And the majority of the journalists now around there are people like Jim who are working for — as freelancers.
GWEN IFILL: Charles Sennott, James Foley’s father said today they had reached the point where they were considering raising money for ransom or for some sort of payment. At what stage was that at? Were you involved in that?
CHARLES SENNOTT: I wasn’t involved in that.
And one of the things that happens — and, sadly, we have been down this road before, both with Jim and with some other correspondents. And one of the things that you abide by the most is that it is really the family that will dictate what is made public. This is really their decision. We feel that’s extremely important. And we have always deferred to the Foley family.
Just to speak a little bit to the point of freelancers, GlobalPost, we deal with freelancers every day. And they’re deeply at risk. There’s real concern here about how to build a news organization that has a culture of caution and caring for the correspondents on the ground?
We at GlobalPost have worked with the Committee to Protect Journalists. We have worked with a lot of different organizations to think that through. And I think Jim’s death, this horrific news, there are a lot of sobering lessons to be learned from this. And one of them is definitely that we are responsible as news organizations for the people we send into the field.
We take that seriously, but it’s also — it’s also really important to remember that this is a deep reminder that there are journalists who are doing courageous work out there. We live in a cynical time, when there’s a lot of criticism of the media from the left and from the right.
But this is a to also remember that there are journalists like Jim Foley who are out there representing news organizations who really believe in what they’re doing and who are doing the best they can outside of the big network production companies or the big newspapers. They’re doing the best work they can to bring home the stories that matter. And I think that’s important to remember today.
GWEN IFILL: Bob Mahoney, how hard does it make it to get reporting out of places like Syria at this point?
ROBERT MAHONEY: It makes it very hard.
Who, in light of what has just happened, is going to be rushing into Syria, especially freelancers, who actually, as I say, don’t necessarily have the backing and don’t earn the money that would even make it worthwhile going in?
What we rely on and what the news organizations rely on are local Syrian journalists, some of whom are there, some of whom are outside. They’re the ones that have borne the brunt in terms of death and capture in this conflict. And they’re the ones who don’t have necessarily an international voice.
GWEN IFILL: Robert Mahoney of the Committee to Protect Journalists and Charles Sennott of GlobalPost, thank you both very much.
CHARLES SENNOTT: Thank you.
ROBERT MAHONEY: Thank you.
GWEN IFILL: Many news outlets avoided showing the image of James Foley’ execution, including us. So, how has social media adapted to change — to deal with violent terrorist imagery? Hari Sreenivasan spoke with the chair of the journalism department at Quinnipiac University. You can watch their conversation online.
"If nothing else, prayer was the glue that enabled my freedom, an inner freedom first and later the miracle of being released during a war in which the regime had no real incentive to free us. It didn’t make sense, but faith did."
- James Foley, journalist who was executed by Islamic State jihadists this week, on his captivity in Libya in 2011, as written in Marquette Magazine
THE beheading of James Foley is a heinous crime that proves isis is run by apostates, not Muslims, and the God they claim to believe in and His Prophet do not advocate or condone such actions against an individual or whole cultures. Those drawn to isis are also apostates, they are sick, perverse, twisted people, a disgrace to all humanity. I know God will deal with these people in His way if they continue murdering, persecuting, and abusing innocents. My prayers are for the Foley family, that God gives them the strength to get through the brutal murder of their son, and for the hundreds of thousands of other victims isis, the families of those brutally slaughtered because of their faith or ethnic identity and those families who have had to flee for their lives. And while I am not a proponent of war, I also pray for the many military forces fighting to defeat isis, to destroy their so called caliphate, to end their barbarism. From +PBS NewsHour , +AlterNet / and +The Guardian .....SPECIAL NOTE, be sure to watch the video by James Foley's parents, they are exceptional people.....
Obama: world is ‘appalled’ by James Foley killing
EDGARTOWN, Mass. — President Barack Obama says the United States will continue to confront Islamic State extremists despite the brutal murder of journalist James Foley.
Obama says the entire world is “appalled” by Foley’s killing. The president says he spoke Wednesday with Foley’s family and offered condolences.
Obama says the Islamic State abducts women and children, and tortures, rapes, enslaves and kills people. He said the Islamic State targets Christians and other minorities and aims to commit genocide.
Obama spoke Wednesday from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where he’s vacationing with his family, a day after the militants released a video showing the American journalist being beheaded.
The slain journalist’s parents, Diane and John Foley, spoke to reporters outside their home in Rochester, New Hampshire, in an appearance where wrenching grief over their son’s death mingled with laughter over his life.
http://youtu.be/j03S0m8cTSo
Diane Foley said her son was courageous to the end and called his death “just evil.”
“We are just very proud of Jimmy and we are praying for the strength to love like he did and keep courageous and keep fighting for all the people he was fighting for,” Diane Foley said Wednesday. “We pray for all the remaining Americans.”
Obama says the entire world is “appalled” by Foley’s killing. The president says he spoke Wednesday with Foley’s family and offered condolences.
Obama says the Islamic State abducts women and children, and tortures, rapes, enslaves and kills people. He said the Islamic State targets Christians and other minorities and aims to commit genocide.
Obama spoke Wednesday from Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts, where he’s vacationing with his family, a day after the militants released a video showing the American journalist being beheaded.
The slain journalist’s parents, Diane and John Foley, spoke to reporters outside their home in Rochester, New Hampshire, in an appearance where wrenching grief over their son’s death mingled with laughter over his life.
Diane Foley said her son was courageous to the end and called his death “just evil.”
“We are just very proud of Jimmy and we are praying for the strength to love like he did and keep courageous and keep fighting for all the people he was fighting for,” Diane Foley said Wednesday. “We pray for all the remaining Americans.”
James Foley reporting from Syria.
Photo Credit: via youtube
Photo Credit: via youtube
August 20, 2014
|
The footage of the apparent beheading (to refer to the atrocity as an execution serves only to lend a veneer of dignity to barbarism) of the US photojournalist James Foley at the hands of a British Isis extremist has raised particularly strong feelings.
Social networks are banning users who share the footage. Newspapers are facing opprobrium for the choices they make in showing stills or parts of the video. Others, of course, will seek out the video after seeing the row, or else post it around the internet in a juvenile form of the free speech argument.
Before considering the rights and wrongs of the position, there is one fact we should face: we are presented with images of grotesque violence on a daily basis. Last month the New York Times ran on its front page the dead and broken body of a Palestinian child.
Like Foley, that child was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s friend, and in a connected world there is just as much chance his family saw the photo and its spread as Foley’s will see the latest awful images of their loved one.
That photo raised little controversy in comparison to the use of images of Foley. Photos of groups of civilian men massacred by Isis across Iraq and Syria – widely shared on social media and used by publications across the world – caused no outcry whatsoever.
It’s hard to look at that and not see a double standard: like many other courageous and talented people, Foley had chosen to travel to the region, and knew the risks that entailed. Others were killed simply fleeing their homes. In a strange and bitter irony, one of the duties of photographers such as Foley is documenting bloodshed in order to show the world.
To see an outcry for Foley’s video and not for others is to wonder whether we are disproportionately concerned over showing graphic deaths of white westerners – maybe even white journalists – and not others.
That’s not to say there aren’t good reasons for outlets to think hard when selecting what, if anything, from the footage they should show. Foley’s apparent beheading was released not at the editorial decision of a photojournalist, but as a propaganda tool by thugs. Outlets should consider whether they are furthering or challenging such aims when they use such images.
There is also simple human decency, and the difficult trade-off of not insulating comfortable western audiences from the world’s horrors, while not needlessly causing a dead person’s loved ones additional suffering by showing gratuitously violent imagery.
The Guardian’s stance on Foley is a demonstration of the fine balance of those decisions: at present, one image of Foley from the video is used, but not as a lead picture. None of his forced speech is portrayed, and the short audio elements from the video – some of his murderer’s speech – have been used against a still image.
But more relevant by far is the choice each of us makes about whether to view the many horrifying real-life murder videos that circulate the internet. Before clicking, serious self-examination is required: why do you want to see this? Do you need to see it to understand something important? Still deeper self-examination should certainly be engaged before even contemplating sharing such material.
It’s
that self-examination, or self-censorship, that best serves ourselves.
As individuals, we’re making very different decisions to publishers and
news outlets, but we should trust our own judgment rather than rush to
ask social media companies to become the arbiters of our free expression
on a knee-jerk basis.
There is a coda to this tale, another
aspect of James Foley’s life that is also being shared far and wide
across the world. It is the short statement by his mother, released on his Facebook page.“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,” her statement began.
It has already been shared more than 2,500 times. This is how we win: not by suppressing the worst of us, but by sharing and saluting the best – people such as Foley and his family.
In remembering James Foley, sobering lessons for protecting journalists
James
Foley’s journalistic career spanned multiple countries and conflicts;
his reporting from Afghanistan and Libya appeared on the NewsHour, as
well as other news outlets. Gwen Ifill remembers Foley and discusses the
dangers reporters face with Charles Sennott, co-founder of GlobalPost,
and Robert Mahoney of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
TRANSCRIPT
GWEN IFILL: Joining me now to talk about James Foley and the threat that reporters like him face covering conflicts today is GlobalPost co-founder and journalist Charles Sennott and Robert Mahoney, deputy director of the committee to protect journalists.You know, the best way to start to describe who is James Foley is probably to start with the way his parents talked about him today. Anyone who saw how much faith they have, how strong they are, they know where James came from. And that’s really important to understanding him.
Jim had strong faith in himself, but his parents had tremendous faith in what he did as a journalist. They understood that Jim wanted to do work that mattered. He wanted to do work that made a difference. They understood his motivations. And they were unwaveringly supportive of it.
And that really is who Jim Foley was. He was a courageous reporter who took great risks to bring the story home.
GWEN IFILL: Do we know physically where he was when this happened yesterday or whenever it happened?
CHARLES SENNOTT: We don’t.
If you have seen this video — and I hope your viewers have not seen it. It’s the most dark and horrific thing I have ever watched. It’s about four minutes’ long. It’s very clear he’s under great duress. It’s clear that the statements he’s making are forced statements.
And it’s in a sort of barren landscape that really could be Syria or it could be Iraq. It’s very, very difficult to distinguish that. And we don’t know precisely where that happened.
GWEN IFILL: Have the people who have been holding him — have been in touch asking for ransom? Apparently, there is a report that there was a threat made that they would kill him a week ago.
CHARLES SENNOTT: That’s correct.
And our CEO, Phil Balboni, at GlobalPost has really tirelessly followed this every day for two years, and has amassed really quite an extensive body of facts and information through a lot of information we have gathered from law enforcement officials, from private investigators, our own private investigators, and, importantly, from colleagues on the ground.
You know, we have a lot of colleagues who really cared about Jim. And every bit of information they could glean would come to us and would be filtered. And it’s hard to sort of share in great detail without putting some of the other hostages who may still be being held and whose lives, as we know, are hanging in the balance — we can’t really share a lot of that information.
But it is safe to say that, at first, there was information he was being held by the Syrian government. That information changed shape over time. It appeared pretty quickly that he was being held by Islamic militants. That’s when fear really set in. He was held in different locations, first in Aleppo, and later in a different location.
The Guardian has reported that location. We think it’s probably better not to report it right now, so I won’t share it. But it is a known ISIS center inside of Syria.
GWEN IFILL: Rob Mahoney, how does Syria rank as a danger zone for journalists?
ROBERT MAHONEY, Deputy Director, Committee to Protect Journalists: It’s the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist, has been for the last year or so.
We have noted some 70 journalists have been killed in Syria since the conflict started in 2011.
GWEN IFILL: Many of them Syrians, right?
ROBERT MAHONEY: And the one thing — yes. Most of them, actually, are local journalists.
And, also, to Jim’s story, Syria is the single worst place we have seen in our entire history as an organization for more than 30 years where hostage-taking has taken place in a conflict zone. There have been more than 80 journalists held hostage at various points throughout the last three years.
GWEN IFILL: As Charlie just suggested, it’s difficult to negotiate or to figure out a way to rescue these hostages. What are the special problems, the special delicacies for someone like you or for the U.S. government, for that matter, in trying to free people like James Foley?
ROBERT MAHONEY: Well, in many cases, the families or the news organizations that some of the journalists work for don’t want to jeopardize their safety and don’t want us to publicly talk about where they might be or even who they are.
Steven Sotloff, for example, who appeared in the video this week, we knew about him, but we didn’t publicly disclose that, because we just don’t know sometimes who we’re dealing with. There are very many groups. They’re splintered. Some were holding journalists for hostages — sorry — holding hostages for criminal ransom, and others were holding them for political purposes.
So, in — with all that uncertainty, it was very difficult to get precise information about the captors.
GWEN IFILL: Bob, is it more complicated when they’re freelance journalists not working for major news organizations?
ROBERT MAHONEY: Absolutely.
And we at the committee, you know, are very, very concerned for the freelancers. They don’t have the big institutional support of journalists that are going in for big news organizations. And the majority of the journalists now around there are people like Jim who are working for — as freelancers.
GWEN IFILL: Charles Sennott, James Foley’s father said today they had reached the point where they were considering raising money for ransom or for some sort of payment. At what stage was that at? Were you involved in that?
CHARLES SENNOTT: I wasn’t involved in that.
And one of the things that happens — and, sadly, we have been down this road before, both with Jim and with some other correspondents. And one of the things that you abide by the most is that it is really the family that will dictate what is made public. This is really their decision. We feel that’s extremely important. And we have always deferred to the Foley family.
Just to speak a little bit to the point of freelancers, GlobalPost, we deal with freelancers every day. And they’re deeply at risk. There’s real concern here about how to build a news organization that has a culture of caution and caring for the correspondents on the ground?
We at GlobalPost have worked with the Committee to Protect Journalists. We have worked with a lot of different organizations to think that through. And I think Jim’s death, this horrific news, there are a lot of sobering lessons to be learned from this. And one of them is definitely that we are responsible as news organizations for the people we send into the field.
We take that seriously, but it’s also — it’s also really important to remember that this is a deep reminder that there are journalists who are doing courageous work out there. We live in a cynical time, when there’s a lot of criticism of the media from the left and from the right.
But this is a to also remember that there are journalists like Jim Foley who are out there representing news organizations who really believe in what they’re doing and who are doing the best they can outside of the big network production companies or the big newspapers. They’re doing the best work they can to bring home the stories that matter. And I think that’s important to remember today.
GWEN IFILL: Bob Mahoney, how hard does it make it to get reporting out of places like Syria at this point?
ROBERT MAHONEY: It makes it very hard.
Who, in light of what has just happened, is going to be rushing into Syria, especially freelancers, who actually, as I say, don’t necessarily have the backing and don’t earn the money that would even make it worthwhile going in?
What we rely on and what the news organizations rely on are local Syrian journalists, some of whom are there, some of whom are outside. They’re the ones that have borne the brunt in terms of death and capture in this conflict. And they’re the ones who don’t have necessarily an international voice.
GWEN IFILL: Robert Mahoney of the Committee to Protect Journalists and Charles Sennott of GlobalPost, thank you both very much.
CHARLES SENNOTT: Thank you.
ROBERT MAHONEY: Thank you.
GWEN IFILL: Many news outlets avoided showing the image of James Foley’ execution, including us. So, how has social media adapted to change — to deal with violent terrorist imagery? Hari Sreenivasan spoke with the chair of the journalism department at Quinnipiac University. You can watch their conversation online.
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