Speaking in Paris on November 17, Secretary of State John Kerry made what are already infamous comments about the fight against terrorists and terrorism. He spoke to the staff and families of the U.S. embassy in Paris, and his remarks deserve quoting at some length—because they display a deep misunderstanding of what we are up against and how it must be fought. In State Department lingo his remarks would be called “deeply troubling.” In normal English usage, they are astonishing and unforgivable. Here are two paragraphs.
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.
Secretary Kerry was apparently speaking off the cuff, so he was not reciting some speechwriter’s words; he was voicing his own thoughts. These thoughts are in many ways incoherent, which is both a cause and an effect of an administration policy that is incoherent. A day later, after criticism of what he had said, Kerry read a statement to a Washington audience holding, “There are no grounds of history, religion, ideology, grievance, psychology, politics, economic disadvantage, or personal ambition that will ever justify the murder of children, the kidnapping and the rape of teenage girls, or the slaughter of unarmed civilians. . . . [T]his kind of atrocity can really never be rationalized; these kinds of actions can never be excused; and they have to be opposed with every fiber of our being. They have to be stopped.” This is nice, but reflects careful bureaucratic consideration of how to reverse an error—in this case, the error of speaking his mind. What Kerry said in Paris deserves more attention because it tells us what he thinks rather than what his communications staff believes he must say.
Before getting to the major problem with what Kerry said, note that he repeated the ludicrous line that what ISIS is doing “has nothing to do with Islam.” We are dealing with a group that calls itself the Islamic State and recruits Sunnis from Muslim communities across the world. The group then imposes its version of sharia on territory it conquers. Its every statement and its entire raison d’être are permeated with its view of what true Islam requires. So Kerry’s statement that this “has nothing to do with Islam” is devoid of meaning. Presumably he is trying to say that their version is not “real” Islam, but of course he has absolutely no authority, as an American politician and a Christian, to make such a judgment. Those who have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS are obviously motivated in whole or in part by their understanding of their religion, Islam. Unless Kerry understands that all this terror does have something to do with Islam, the policies he advocates and implements are doomed from the start.
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. There has been no “massive increase in settlements,” something the statistics show quite clearly and that Kerry might be expected to know. But the facts were not in his head. Instead, there was a theory of the case in there: Palestinians commit terror because Israelis build settlements.
In the Paris case, there’s a theory inside his head as well, and it isn’t so very distant from what he said at Harvard. The Paris attacks of January had a “rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.” Sure. They were angry about cartoons that criticized or lampooned Muhammad, and about Jews. Completely understandable, it seems. But not these new attacks: This was different. “It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration.”
It seems that to Kerry, when people kill journalists and Jews, that is not an attack on “everything that we do stand for,” whereas attacking a restaurant and stadium and a concert hall is. A bit odd: Do we stand for good food and sports and music more than we stand for freedom of the press and freedom of religion? Kerry seems confused here, but we get the point. He is saying that it’s understandable when people murder innocents because they have a particular reason to be mad at them, but now the terrorists are attacking all of us. He contrasts, perhaps without even knowing what he was saying, last “Friday night when people were going about their normal business” with that other Friday night in January, when some people were instead out preparing for Shabbat.
Few of us are cartoonists and few of us shop in kosher delis, but any of us at all might be a target now. So now to Kerry this is an attack on everything we do stand for, which apparently may not include protecting religious minorities and journalists, who perhaps are to blame in some sense for their own troubles. Somehow it is far worse in his mind to attack “all sense of nationhood and nation-state.” This is bizarre in the extreme. When Jews are attacked we all know why, but when France is attacked, well, that is simply unspeakable.
In October 1980, there was another terrorist attack on Paris. The synagogue on the Rue Copernic was bombed while it was packed with Jewish worshipers. Four people were killed and 46 wounded. Prime Minister Raymond Barre said on television the next day, “This odious bombing wanted to strike Jews who were going to the synagogue and it hit innocent French people who crossed Rue Copernic.”
Kerry is regarded as an enlightened man and without bigotry or prejudice of any kind, which makes his remarks all the more interesting. If his language was incoherent at times, his thoughts were not, and they are remarkably close to those of Barre and to his distinction between Jews and “innocent” Frenchmen. The November 13 attacks, Kerry appears to be thinking, are more terrible than the January attacks because those shootings hit Jews and cartoonists, but these hit, as Barre would have put it, “innocent French people”—people like you and me going to dinner or a concert. This is a statement not of solidarity with targeted victim groups but of distancing from them, and as such it is an immoral and disgusting position. Kerry’s Harvard statement blaming (nonexistent) Israeli settlement expansion for Palestinian stabbing attacks is equally offensive. That this is the thinking of the American secretary of state during a period of rising terrorism, especially against Jews, is almost unbelievable.
