Elliott Abrams in the Weekly Standard as regards this John Kerry quote, is the read of the day…
There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, 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. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.” And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate. They kill Shia. They kill Yazidis. They kill Christians. They kill Druze. They kill Ismaili. They kill anybody who isn’t them and doesn’t pledge to be that. And they carry with them the greatest public display of misogyny that I’ve ever seen, not to mention a false claim regarding Islam. It has nothing to do with Islam; it has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism—I mean, you name it.
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And that’s why when some people—I even had a member of my own family email me and say, “More bombs aren’t the solution,” they said. Well, in principle, no. In principle, if you can educate and change people and provide jobs and make a difference if that’s what they want, sure. But in this case, that’s not what’s happening. This is just raw terror to set up a caliphate to expand and expand and spread one notion of how you live and who you have to be. That is the antithesis of everything that brought our countries together—why Lafayette came to America to help us find liberty, and all of the evolutions of the struggles of France, the governments, to find the liberté, égalité, fraternité, and make it real in life every day. And all of that peacefulness was shattered in the span of an hour-plus on Friday night when people were going about their normal business. And they purposefully chose a concert, chose restaurants, chose places where people engage in social dialogue and exchange, and they object to that too.
Abrams, writing in the Weekly Standard [1] responds to this in part by saying…
The more shocking message he delivered was that the November killings in Paris are more terrible than those of January. Why? Because the earlier killings, of cartoonists and Jews, were .??.??. were what? First he said the previous attacks “had a legitimacy in terms of” and then stopped himself. Even Kerry realized that what he was about to say was indefensible: that they had a legitimacy in terms of the beliefs of the attackers, who were offended after all by nasty cartoons of Muhammad. And as to the Jews, well, perhaps the attackers were offended by the mere existence of Jews, or perhaps in Kerry’s misguided view they were deeply moved by the real or imagined plight of Palestinians.
Kerry himself has repeatedly linked Islamic terror to the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and come very close to justifying it. At Harvard last month he had this reaction to the terror spree of Palestinians stabbing Jews in and near Jerusalem: “There’s been a massive increase in settlements over the course of the last years. Now you have this violence because there’s a frustration that is growing.” Like his statement that ISIS and its terror have “nothing to do with Islam,” this one was also plainly false
Clearly, the Democrat Party has been doing this equivalency thing for a long time now. Ponder for example the idea that Hillary Clinton and a lot of other Democrats including some of the White House have been busy for how long, now, pushing the line that Benghazi was about a video and that therefore their anger was justified. So invested in this are the Democrat party in this myth that they are keeping the producer of that video…. (which precisely three people have seen)…. in jail to support the myth.
And so the question becomes, logically, why in the world are Liberal Democrats so interested in justifying what is clearly unjustifiable without the myths?
That the American people are being lied to by the Democrats is beyond question. The question remaining is what they hope to gain by it.