Ken Berwitz
Don\’t expect too many blogs like this one.
I am writing to defend Secretary Of State John Kerry, for the comment he made comparing January\’s terrorist attacks on the staff of French magazine Charlie Hebdo among other targets, and last week\’s terrorist attacks at the Bataclan theater – also among other targets.
Here is what Mr. Kerry said:
“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, OK, 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”.
Evidently, a good many people took this as John Kerry in some way justifying the attack on Charlie Hebdo\’s offices: i.e. saying that, unlike last week\’s attack, it had a level of legitimacy.
That is not true at all.
What Mr. Kerry said – however clumsily (I\’m sure he\’d like to go back in time and reword it) – was that the terrorists who hit Charlie Hebdo and the Kosher market were going after particular people for what they – not he, but they – considered a legitimate reason, whereas the terrorists who hit the Bataclan theater and the restaurant had no particular animus toward either, they were just picking out places where there were lots of people to kill.
I\’m not sure Kerry\’s analysis is accurate – i.e. the Bataclan, until just recently, was owned by Jews and, in the past, there had been protests against some of its pro-Israel events. But I\’m just about completely sure Kerry\’s intent, was only to differentiate on the grounds that one was a specific target and the other was a random one, not to say that one attack was justified and the other was not.
Anyway, on this one I give Mr. Kerry a free pass.
Savor the flavor, John – I doubt it will happen very often.
