Mug him again!

Tom Fox, the Christian "peace activist" murdered by the same Iraqi terrorists he was supporting, was celebrated yesterday by comrades, whose motto was "To those who held Tom we declare: God has forgiven you."

It was the message of Christian Peacemaker Teams, the Toronto- and Chicago-based peace group that Fox served in Iraq after he quit his job running a grocery store in Springfield. The Rev. Carol Rose, the organization's co-director, told more than 200 of Fox's friends and colleagues that the banner was hung in Baghdad after his body was discovered last month.

"What is forgiveness?" she asked at the service at Foundry United Methodist Church in Northwest Washington. And then she answered: "Forgiveness is refusing to be bound by the evil that has been done to us or to anyone else. Forgiveness does not mean it was okay to kill Tom . . . but it means I won't hold those who did that wrong in a position of wrongdoing."

We saw last month that when the other morons were rescued by American and British forces, they resented their rescuers and refused to give them credit at first, until after they were publicly berated for saying they had been "released," rather than "freed." But the idea that they also won't blame the murderers for Fox's death is really turning morality on its head.

I'm reminded, as I always am, of something else. Ed Koch, while he was Mayor of New York, wrote a few books. In one of them -- I think it was "Mayor" -- Koch told a story about a city judge who was soft on criminals. Koch was giving a speech to a group of the elderly in which he mentioned this judge, and he noted that the judge had been mugged. But the judge came into court the next day and told the courtroom that although he had been mugged, he was not going to let it affect his treatment of criminal defendants in any way. At this point in Koch's speech, an old lady in the back yelled out, "Then mug him again!"