Latest news with #DianeFoley
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Diane Foley, mother of slain journalist James Foley, urges Marquette grads to live with 'moral courage'
Even in death, Diane Foley told Marquette University graduates, her late son challenges her on how to live. "No matter what we choose to do, each of us has the choice every day to speak out instead of being silent, to hope instead of giving up, to show mercy instead of resentment," she said at Marquette's 144th undergraduate commencement ceremony on May 10, held at Fiserv Forum. Her son, slain journalist James Foley, was a 1996 graduate of Marquette University and a combat journalist who was kidnapped in 2012 while covering the Syrian Civil War. Moral courage is how her son inspired her, and it is what the Marquette graduates can strive towards. "Moral courage lives deep within us," Diane Foley said. James Foley was publicly murdered by ISIS for being an American journalist in Syria in 2014. His beheading was filmed and disseminated on social media. "Imagine that," said Thomas Durkin, program director for the James W. Foley Foundation and research coordinator for the Marquette University Center for Peacemaking, who introduced Diane Foley at the commencement ceremony. "A parent's worst nightmare shared for all the world to see," he said. After her son's kidnapping, Diane Foley said she fueled her anger at the government for repeatedly stating that Jim was the highest priority but not negotiating for his release. But she soon started asking herself what Jim would have wanted. "Jim was challenging me," she said. She told graduates that she realized Jim "would have stepped up for others." Just three weeks after her son's death, her family started the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to advocate for American hostages and wrongful detainees held abroad. "I had a deep desire to somehow keep Jim's goodness and moral courage alive," she said. Because of the foundation, 160 American hostages and wrongfully detained individuals have been reunited with their families, she said. "Each of those hostages who've returned home is its own miracle," she said. "Every single person matters." Diane Foley described her son as having a "deep curiosity about our world, its history and other cultures." It was evident when he would take a book to read during Red Sox games, she said. James Foley graduated from Marquette University in 1996 with degrees in Spanish and history and joined Teach for America, teaching teenagers in Phoenix. While studying creative writing at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, he volunteered at the local care center, helping unwed mothers get their high school credentials while helping them share their stories. He also studied journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago while teaching English at the Cook County Jail. "Jim was also an ordinary person with hopes and dreams like you and I. Until tested," she said. "When tested, our ordinary son became truly extraordinary." And you, too, she advised the graduates, "can become extraordinary." She challenged the graduates to "find your purpose" as the students can bring hope to the world, she said. "What gives you joy and purpose?" Foley challenged the Marquette University graduates. "What matters to you?" Cathy Kozlowicz can be reached at 262-361-9132 or Follow her on X at @kozlowicz_cathy. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Diane Foley, mother of James Foley, speaks at 2025 Marquette commencement
The Guardian
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Colum McCann: ‘I like having my back against the wall'
The award-winning Irish author Colum McCann was born in Dublin in 1965 and worked as a journalist before moving to the US and turning his hand to books. His novels include Let the Great World Spin, which won the 2011 International Dublin literary award, and 2020's Apeirogon, which took a kaleidoscopic view of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Last year he co-wrote the memoir American Mother with Diane Foley, whose son, US journalist James Foley, was murdered by Islamic State in Syria in 2014. In his latest novel, Twist (published on 6 March), an Irish journalist on a cable repair ship off the west coast of Africa is confronted by questions of environmental destruction, information overload and colonialism. McCann lives in New York with his wife Allison and their three children. Undersea communications cables are underexplored in fiction. What prompted you to write about them? In the early part of the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about the notion of repair, because things were shattering around us fairly frequently. Somewhere I fell upon the story of the Léon Thévenin, a cable repair ship out of South Africa. Like everybody else, I thought that [digital] information went up from our phones and hit these satellites and came back down. I was really taken by the notion that it all happens in the bottom of the deep black sea. Bizarrely, since I started writing it, undersea cables are now being cut left, right and centre – the Houthis in the Red Sea, the Russians and Chinese in the Baltic. We're going to be talking about it a lot more in the years to come. It's amazing how vulnerable these cables are to attack – all our ultra-modern communications being funnelled through these flimsy tubes draped across the Close to shore you can send down a remotely operated vehicle to fix a break, but beyond that, you're going back to the 19th century. You're throwing a rope down with a grappling hook on the end and hoping for the best. The narrator makes several references to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. What's the resonance there for you?On very obvious levels, [Twist] is a man on a quest on a boat. The cable break occurs after the Congo River floods and flushes all of its refuse out to sea. It's interesting that the cables we've laid down follow almost exactly the old colonial shipping routes. So all of those little echoes began to kick in. You tackle big subjects… do you think novels can make a difference?I don't think it's within [a novel's] scope to change this stuff. But what it does is put a little crack in the wall, and then other people make the crack bigger, and then sometimes the wall comes tumbling down. I don't call on novelists to necessarily be activists or to write about the big issues of the day. But for me personally, yeah, I think I do have to. The Israel and Palestine situation in Apeirogon was a big subject to take on. And, of course, there's a danger in doing so, but the hope is that, in some small way, you disrupt conventional thinking. Novelists are not as important as we were 50 years ago. I find that you have to work out of a reckless inner need more than ever. It dilates my nostrils a little bit and I like that. I like having my back against the told the story of Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, two real-life Israeli and Palestinian friends who work together for peace. Are you still in touch with them?I talk to Rami and Bassam at least once a week, and I filter a lot of how I feel about [the current] situation through them, because I'm sitting here in New York, not in the West Bank or Jerusalem. They will say that they are heartbroken and very angry and very, very scared. I was talking to Bassam's son Arab recently, and he was stopped at a checkpoint and a gun was put to his head. There are things happening in the West Bank that Bassam tells me about that send absolute shivers down my spine. I too am heartbroken and angry and confused. There are times I think about writing a second Apeirogon book. But imagine going into that right now. You're really entering into something that's very, very raw and complex. But maybe that's the place where I should go. You taught creative writing for a long time, and you've published a book of writing advice. If you were to boil it all down to one key point, what would it be?I love this phrase by the novelist Aleksandar Hemon: 'It's all shit until it isn't.' Which is really interesting, because it's all about sitting down and working at the coalface and doing it again and again. It's the refusal to give up, the refusal to let the story beat you. Every single book that I've ever written, I have given up. It's almost like a necessary part of the process – you've got to cause yourself grief in order to understand what it is that it actually means to you. Read any good books recently?I just read Frankenstein for the first time and it blew me away. It's a perfect metaphor for where we are now, the monster that we are creating and the guilt that's involved. I'm reading a book called One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by the Egyptian-Canadian writer Omar El Akkad about the current situation in Israel and Palestine: it's very good, very necessary, and it pulls absolutely no punches whatsoever. I've also been reading Louise Kennedy's The End of the World is a Cul de Sac, and I really liked The Convoy by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, about her escape from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. I see you have a photograph of Edna O'Brien on your shelf. She once told the New York Times that if she could choose anyone to write her life story, she'd choose that was so nice. I travelled a lot with her. In fact she gave me my very first reading back in London in the early 90s when my first book was coming out. It was a bit of a disaster – I read for far too long – but she became a friend. Her influence has entered the air in many ways. It'll be interesting to see how young writers, especially young women writers of Ireland, will take up her mantle in the next few years. What do you need in order to write?A perfect day would be getting up at 4am and, without checking the soccer results or my email, getting straight down to it. I'd stop to walk the dog and do a few chores, then go back to work until about midday. In the afternoon I'd do some editing, and then maybe have a glass of wine at about 4pm, meet a few pals. Then late in the evening I'd get a bit more editing done. That would be a perfect day for me. Is that how it usually happens?No, of course not [laughs]. Twist by Colum McCann is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99) on 6 March. 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CBC
23-02-2025
- Politics
- CBC
The Sunday Magazine for February 23, 2025
This week on The Sunday Magazine with Piya Chattopadhyay: The third anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war approaches during a dramatic reset in U.S. -Russia relations In his new book Retired Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, the former director for European affairs on the National Security Council and a key witness in the first impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump examines how U.S. foreign policy has historically catered to Russian interests – and how this approach has led to the current moment in the conflict. Is your attention span really shrinking in the digital age? Distraction has been called the defining 'cognitive crisis' of the day. But Marion Thain, the founder of the UK's Centre for Attention Studies says humanity has a long history of worrying about attention spans. Don't beat yourself for struggling to read a novel in the TikTok era, she says. But do pay attention to what you pay attention to. Pope Francis - a Papacy like no other Catholics the world over, are reflecting on the life and papacy of Pope Francis, who is critically ill in hospital. Among them - Michael Higgins, papal commentator and author of 'The Jesuit Disruptor: a Personal Portrait of Pope Francis'. He tells us why this papacy differed from others and what Pope Francis meant, when he described the church as a field hospital. Mother of murdered journalist reveals what she learned by meeting his ISIS killer When Diane Foley meets the ISIS man who kept her son in 21 months of brutal captivity before beheading him, her family opposes the meeting. Diane Foley and bestselling author Colum McCann speak with Chattopadhyay about the life and death of James Foley and the importance of listening to people you hate and who hate you.
