U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry put both feet in his mouth this time.
It took the massacre of more than 130 people in Paris Friday to cause him to philosophize that the murders were different from other terror attacks which, according to him, had a “rationale,” such as the murders of 12 people at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine.
The “rationale” is that since the satirical caricatures mocking the Muslim Prophet Mohammed aroused anger among Islamists, the murders were understandable. He almost said they were “legitimate” before correcting himself and settling for “rationale.”
He told CBS News from the U.S. Embassy in Paris:
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 is difficult to believe that Kerry really understood the implications of what he said. His comments were a kind of diplomatic incitement.
His reasoning, such as it is, means there is a rationale for a person to murder a specific victim if he has a specific reason.
In the case of the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the terrorists did fire indiscriminately at people, but for Kerry, that doesn’t matter since all of them were working for the same magazine that gave the terrorists a “rationale” to be angry.
The Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists who bombed and gunned down victims Friday night also had a specific victim in mind. ISIS stated that last week’s attacks in Paris were against the “capital of prostitution and obscenity.”
If Kerry can see a “rationale” to murder a magazine’s employees because of caricatures mocking Mohammed, it stands to reason he should see a rationale for murdering people because they live in the “capital of prostitution and obscenity.”
Kerry has spent a good deal of his time as Secretary of State rationalizing Islamic terror, especially the murder of Israelis “because of the settlements.”
He thinks that if the settlements would disappear, Palestinian Authority terror would disappear, just like it was supposed to fade away after the PA’s first – and last – democratic elections 11 years ago, and just like Hamas terror was going to evaporate when Israel expelled all Jews from Gaza and withdrew all Israeli soldiers.
Kerry thinks that if the Charlie Hebdo magazine had not mocked Mohammed, none of the magazine’s workers would have been murdered.
And if Western civilization would evaporate, there would be no more Islamic terror.