AMHERST — James Foley left his idyllic New Hampshire hometown to find suffering.
He found suffering during his time at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where he was encouraged to tutor inner-city youths. He found suffering in Arizona, where he taught in high-need schools. And it was in the war-torn Middle East where he shared stories of suffering until he was kidnapped and publicly beheaded by his ISIS captors.
“The more he saw disenfranchised youngsters and need, if you will, the more compelled he was to tell their stories and to be there for them,” said his mother, Diane Foley. “It just went to a whole different level when he became a journalist.”
Diane Foley was one of several speakers at a symposium hosted in James Foley’s honor this week at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “The Task of Witnessing” brought together Foley’s friends, family and colleagues who spoke about his early life, his time as a UMass master’s degree student of fiction, his war-zone journalism career and how his legacy of bearing witness can be carried forward.
In 2011, Foley was working as a war correspondent in Libya when he was kidnapped and held by Libyan forces for over a month. After his release, he safely returned to the U.S.
“He really felt that we who don’t see those things really needed journalists, photographers, videographers, to bring that home so we might care about what was happening,” Diane Foley said.
So he went back.
Foley was reporting on the violence, destruction and daily life during the Syrian civil war in 2012 when he was captured by Islamic State militants. A video released two years later showed his beheading.
“I think one of the reasons Jim went back to Syria, he was so captured by the pain and suffering of the children and families that he really couldn’t avoid being part of that,” said his father, John Foley.
The Foleys spoke Monday night to a packed audience following a screening of the Emmy-winning documentary “Jim: The James Foley Story,” along with film co-writer Heather MacDonald, a childhood friend of Foley’s.
“While we didn’t necessarily want to portray Jim as a hero, per se, we certainly wanted to show his moral strength,” MacDonald said of the HBO movie. “The strength he has in his last moments is just … I can’t really begin to comprehend it.”
The Foleys, through The James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, are advocating for what they call “a culture of safety” in war-zone information gathering. As a freelance reporter, Foley was not provided with the same resources and preparation as a staff journalist sent abroad by a media organization, Diane Foley said.
Among the foundation’s initiatives is a safety curriculum that will be offered in journalism programs throughout the country, including at UMass, and “a culture of safety” itself, which aims to bring together NGOs, media organizations and freelancers to ensure that war-zone journalists are properly equipped for the task.
But going abroad isn’t necessary to do the kind of work done by Foley, Diane Foley said.
Foley himself, for example, found extraordinary stories in the Pioneer Valley during his time at the UMass master’s program in fiction writing while working at The Care Center in Holyoke, tutoring single mothers for their GED tests, she said.
“You don’t have to go around the world and duck bullets to serve the truth,” John Foley said. “Those stories are outside. They’re everywhere.”
And for the Foleys, that’s what their son did: tell the truth. For them, “truth” is synonymous with his journalism and veracity is a simple thing that makes the world a better place. “We’re only as good a society as the truth we know,” John Foley said.
That’s a value shared by Foley’s colleagues Charles M. Sennott, Ben Brody and Beth Murphy of The GroundTruth Project. The journalists spoke on a panel Tuesday as the symposium continued.
Sennott is the founder of GroundTruth and was one of Foley’s editors at GlobalPost, an outlet for which he freelanced during his time in the Middle East. GroundTruth aims to train a new generation of on-the-ground reporters, ones who, like Foley, are able to capture the human element — ground truth, Sennott said.
“He was so committed to it that it scared us,” Sennott said.
Brody, a Southampton native and UMass alum, first covered the Middle East as an Army photographer. But being a New Englander, Brody said, he was skeptical of the war in Iraq and didn’t go out of a sense of fighting duty. “I thought it was important to bear witness to it firsthand,” he said.
Brody returned to Afghanistan as a journalist after enrolling at UMass and now works for GroundTruth.
At the event, Brody displayed some of his photographs of war. While some featured carnage, such as one of a man injured by an IED who was being shielded from the sun by his neighbors with a scarf, others showed other realities.
In a photo of troops gathered around a piece of artillery, three thick, black clouds of smoke surround the firearm’s muzzle, a stark contrast to the sandy mountains and drab military base surroundings.
The photo was not taken in the midst of conflict, Brody said. Rather, it was taken at the end of the draw down of troops in Afghanistan, and the soldiers pictured, some of whom were janitors and cooks, were firing off excess munitions into the mountains for disposal.
While many debate the success of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Murphy knows at least one positive outcome. In her documentary “What Tomorrow Brings,” Murphy followed a year in the life of the first all-girls school in a small village. Such educational equity was never allowed when the Taliban was in power, she said.
“They’d never allowed their daughters to be educated, and quite frankly, they weren’t quite sure they wanted to at that moment,” she said.
But they did allow it.
Over the course of that year, Murphy learned about the lives of the villagers, many of whom raised their families on some $7 per day. She watched as they learned the English word for “newspaper,” following their lessons all the way to graduation.
She said such in-depth reporting, the same kind that Foley did, is vital. These are stories that go further than just the facts and get to the human experience, she said.
“I hope these kinds of in-depth reports, photojournalism, documentary filmmaking, news reports, that allow for more in-depth time in the field, can lead to greater empathy and compassion in the world,” she said.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com.