In remarks Tuesday to U.S. Embassy staff in Paris, Secretary of State John Kerry said something wildly off base while offering words of encouragement.
“There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo,” Kerry said, “and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for.”
Never mind Kerry’s unfortunate use of “legitimacy.” He obviously didn’t mean the attacks on Charlie Hebdo were legitimate. But he was wrong on his other points, too.
The attacks Friday did have a grievance — French military action in Syria — that was no less “particularized” than the grudge against the cartoonists. So what? Both attacks were ruthless assaults on “everything we do stand for” and an attempt to terrorize the wider population.
Indeed, the earlier attack was to silence and intimidate critics of radical Islam. It was an assault on free speech, which is as basic to “what we do stand for” as it gets.
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