"Oh, what a joyful day this is!

"We have just learned that James is coming home. He has been released unharmed, with his companions Harmeet and Norman.

"We would like to thank everyone for their support and prayers. At this time, we would also like to express our deepest sympathy to the family of Tom Fox.

"Please let us rejoice in this family moment as we prepare for the days to come."

“Our hearts are filled with joy today as we heard that Harmeet Singh Sooden, Jim Loney and Norman Kember have been safely released in Baghdad. Christian Peacemaker Teams rejoices with their families and friends at the expectation of their return to their loved ones and community.

"Together we have endured uncertainty, hope, fear, grief and now joy during the four months since they were abducted in Baghdad.

“We rejoice in the return of Harmeet Sooden. He has been willing to put his life on the line to promote justice in Iraq and Palestine as a young man newly committed to active peacemaking.

“We rejoice in the return of Jim Loney. He has cared for the marginalized and oppressed since childhood, and his gentle, passionate spirit has been an inspiration to people near and far.

“We rejoice in the return of Norman Kember. He is a faithful man, an elder and mentor to many in his 50 years of peacemaking, a man prepared to pay the cost.

“We remember with tears Tom Fox, whose body was found in Baghdad on March 9, 2006, after three months of captivity with his fellow peacemakers. We had longed for the day when all four men would be released together.

"Our gladness today is made bittersweet by the fact that Tom is not alive to join in the celebration. However, we are confident that his spirit is very much present in each reunion.

“Harmeet, Jim and Norman and Tom were in Iraq to learn of the struggles facing the people in that country. They went, motivated by a passion for justice and peace to live out a nonviolent alternative in a nation wracked by armed conflict.

"They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their Iraqi and international co-workers.

"We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end.

“Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families.

"In the spirit of the prophetic nonviolence that motivated Jim, Norman, Harmeet and Tom to go to Iraq, we refuse to yield to a spirit of vengeance.

“We give thanks for the compassionate God who granted our friends courage and who sustained their spirits over the past months.

"We pray for strength and courage for ourselves so that, together, we can continue the nonviolent struggle for justice and peace.

“Throughout these difficult months, we have been heartened by messages of concern for our four colleagues from all over the world. We have been especially moved by the gracious outpouring of support from Muslim brothers and sisters in the Middle East, Europe, and North America.

"That support continues to come to us day after day.

“We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq.

“During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?

“With Tom’s death, we felt the grief of losing a beloved friend. Today, we rejoice in the release of our friends Harmeet, Jim and Norman. We continue to pray for a swift and joyful homecoming for the many Iraqis and internationals who long to be reunited with their families.

"We renew our commitment to work for an end to the war and the occupation of Iraq as a way to continue the witness of Tom Fox. We trust in God’s compassionate love to show us the way.

“Living through the many emotions of this day, we remain committed to the words of Jim Loney, who wrote:

"With God’s abiding kindness, we will love even our enemies.
With the love of Christ, we will resist all evil.
With God’s unending faithfulness, we will work to build the beloved community."

Consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes … are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them fast asleep. Other ages such as the present one are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.

...Whichever side he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of the partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him into the stage at which religion becomes merely part of the "cause" and his [faith] is valued chiefly for the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or of Pacifism. … Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades mean more to him than prayer and and sacraments and charity, he is ours--and the more "religious" on those terms the more securely ours.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me.'

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval, but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not, as a rule, condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries.

...Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough. After the fall of France, the French pacifists, faced by a real choice which their English colleagues have not had to make, mostly went over to the Nazis, and in England there appears to have been some small overlap of membership between the Peace Pledge Union and the Blackshirts. Pacifist writers have written in praise of Carlyle, one of the intellectual fathers of Fascism. All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty. The mistake was made of pinning this emotion to Hitler, but it could easily be retransfered.

"Ideas," the political philosopher Richard Weaver observed in his signature phrase, "have consequences," even bad ideas, even silly ideas, even ideas that could only come from the mind of a privileged Western intellectual too infatuated with his own importance to notice fundamental political realities. This is not to suggest that Harold Pinter (say) is responsible for Mullah Omar; it is to suggest that he helps create a climate of opinion where Mullah Omars have a better chance of thriving.

Pinterism (if I may thus eponymize this brand of intellectualizing self-hatred) is not a new phenomenon. George Orwell noted something similar in his anatomy of the pacifism that was rampant in English intellectual circles before and during World War II. The "unadmitted motive" of pacifism, Orwell wrote, was "hatred of Western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism." Harold Pinter is no John Walker Lindh. You won’t find him joining up with the Taliban. But you will find him in sympathy with his spiritual colleague-in-rhetoric Susan Sontag, who explained that the assualt of September 11 was "not a 'cowardly' attack on 'civilization' or 'liberty' or 'humanity' or 'the free world' but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions… . [W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of [September 11's] slaughter, they were not cowards." Does she say, then, that they were murderous fanatics? Hardly. Sontag (like Pinter) is at once too ambivalent and too admiring for that: too ambivalent about the "world’s self-proclaimed superpower" (or "rogue state," as Pinter put it) and too admiring of the insurrectionists. In this context, it is worth remembering Orwell's observation about the "processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the successes and power of Nazism."

...Pacifism was built around phrases that sounded pleasant (peace, love, non-violence) but that were essentially deceptive because they were unrealistic—that is, untrue to the nature of reality, to the way the world actually works (as distinct from the way we might wish that it did). "To abjure violence,” Orwell noted, “it is necessary to have no experience of it." Looking back on the Spanish civil war in 1942, Orwell criticized "the sentimental belief that it all comes right in the end and the thing you most fear never really happens."

Nourished for hundreds of years on a literature in which Right invariably triumphs in the last chapter, we believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism … is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does?

...The journalist Henry Fairlie made a cognate point in 1975 in his essay "Anti-Americanism at Home and Abroad."

"The energy of the American presence in the world," Fairlie wrote, "is both welcomed and feared, both a cause of hope and a source of anxiety, because with its idea it keeps unsettling the established forms of the past. Not merely old but ancient customs are surrendering to a presence that is not imposed and yet seems irresistible, to an idea that appears to be more powerful than the slogans of any revolution.

...But explanations, however accurate, however deep, can take us only so far. They always bring with them a tendency to dismiss the thing being explained—"tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner." It is wise to take account of illuminating explanations. But it is a mistake—a mistake to which well-meaning liberals are especially prone—to believe that by understanding why a vicious character came to be that way we thereby purchase immunity from the effects of viciousness.