The reactions of New York mayor Bill de Blasio, New York governor Andrew Cuomo, and President Obama are also revealing. The president and the mayor, as true progressives, strove mightily to avoid using the “terror“ word – no doubt fearing that someone might, Heaven forbid, make a Muslim connection.
The identity and background of the arrested suspect show just how off the mark their approach was. To his credit, Gov. Cuomo told it like it was right out of the box.
“A bomb exploding in New York is obviously an act of terrorism,” the governor said soon after the news broke of the Manhattan attack.
And while Mr. Cuomo initially hesitated to speculate on a foreign connection, once the identity of the suspect was made known, he was quick to say that “today’s information suggests it may be foreign related.”
(In retrospect, how could it have been otherwise? After all, it was immediately known that explosives were placed in a pressure cooker with shrapnel and that there had been an earlier bombing in New Jersey.)
But Mayor de Blasio was not having any of that, and instead refused to acknowledge what everyone knew to be the case: that terrorism was in play. He said:
Here is what we know: it was intentional, it was a violent act, it was certainly a criminal act, it was a bombing – that’s what we know…. To understand there were any specific motivations, political motivations, and connection to an organization – that’s what we don’t know.
But nobody asked him to ascribe specific motivations. Surely he had a duty to assure New Yorkers that he had some handle on the scope of the dangers they faced. And to what would he ascribe the explosions – run of the mill vandalism? Yet it wasn’t until Monday, after the identity of a prime suspect went viral, that the mayor first broached the notion that the bombings may indeed have been terrorist acts.
As for the progressive-in-chief, 72 hours after the Saturday bombings President Obama had yet to utter the word “terrorist” in reference to them – despite the Islamist allegiance of the alleged perpetrator.
Indeed, as if to underscore his refusal to accept, even now, any overarching Muslim connection, the president, who arrived in New York on Sunday for the annual UN General Assembly, declined to accord any special significance to the bombings by passing without stopping at the site of the Chelsea bombing.
At least we can say kudos to Gov. Cuomo.