In the days since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the response from American politicians has ranged from pathetic to parodic. President Obama expressed regret on Monday through his press secretary that neither he nor any other high-ranking American official joined 44 world who marched alongside millions in Paris. Then on Friday, in an effort to make amends, Secretary of State John Kerry brought James Taylor to a news conference in Paris to sing “You’ve Got a Friend.”
The response from Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and likely 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, hasn’t been any better. Clinton has remained silent about the Charle Hebdo massacre since it occurred 10 days ago.
Clinton’s spokesman Nick Merrill confirmed in an email to THE WEEKLY STANDARD that the former secretary of state has not publicly commented on the attack, but Merrill declined to give any particular reason for Clinton’s silence. (She did manage to find the time Friday afternoon, however, to condemn Republicans in Congress for “[a]ttacking financial reform.”)
What seems most likely is that Clinton has remained silent in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in order to avoid scrutiny of her own failure to defend free speech in the face of Islamist violence.
Three days after the September 11, 2012 terrorist attack killed four Americans, including Ambassodor Chris Stevens, in Benghazi, Libya, Clinton attended a ceremony at Andrews Air Force Base welcoming home the remains of the slain Americans. While flanked by four four flag-draped caskets, Clinton blamed an “awful internet video that we had nothing to do with” for the “rage and violence directed at American embassies.” Clinton did not, in the course of her speech, defend the right to free speech.
What’s worse, Clinton privately told the father of one of the CIA officers killed in Benghazi: “We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.” By the end of the month, an American citizen known as Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the man who made the anti-Islam YouTube video, was indeed arrested for violating the terms of his probation. He was later sentenced to a year in jail for using an alias other than his given legal name.
The terrorist attack on Benghazi, of course, was not the result of a spontaneous protest in response to the offensive video, but the filmmaker became a convenient scapegoat for an administration arguing that al Qaeda was on the run. “A violation of probation, though, usually produces a court summons and doesn’t typically lead to more jail time unless it involves an offense that would be worth prosecuting in its own right under federal standards. Not for Nakoula,” National Review‘s Rich Lowry wrote in a column. “This wasn’t a case of nailing Al Capone on tax evasion. As Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute points out, Al Capone’s underlying offense was racketeering and gangland killings. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s underlying offense wasn’t an underlying offense. He exercised his First Amendment rights.”
A number of questions remain for Hillary Clinton: Does she dispute the claim that she said she would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted“? How did she know on September 14 that the American who made the film was going to be arrested? And does Clinton see any difference between the blasphemous Charlie Hebdo cartoons and the blasphemous anti-Islam YouTube video?
“I’d refer you to what she wrote in her book,” Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill told me in an email. When I replied that the book does not address the questions I was asking, Merrill wrote: “She addresses the attack fully and comprehensively in Hard Choices, I don’t have anything to add to that.”
