The Good, the Bad and the Crazy

Reactions to the terrorist attacks in Paris have covered a broad gamut. In the good category I put the Muslim Mayor of Rotterdam, Ahmed Aboutaleb, who explained on Dutch television what radical Muslims who don’t want to live in a free society should do:

Heh. It’s a rare moment of candor in politics.

In the bad category, we have Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan, who disgraced himself with these bigoted ramblings:

“French citizens carry out such a massacre, and Muslims pay the price,” Erdogan said yesterday.

“That’s very meaningful … Doesn’t their intelligence organisation track those who leave prison?

“Games are being played with the Islamic world, we need to be aware of this.

“The West’s hypocrisy is obvious. As Muslims, we’ve never taken part in terrorist massacres. Behind these lie racism, hatespeech and Islamophobia,” Erdogan added.

Erdogan also denounced Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for attending a solidarity rally in France on Sunday with other world leaders after the Paris attacks. “How can a man who has killed 2,500 people in Gaza with state terrorism wave his hand in Paris, like people are waiting in excitement for him to do so? How dare he go there?” he said.

Erdogan didn’t go quite as far as the Mayor of Ankara, who claimed that Mossad was behind the Paris attacks.

For the crazy, we turn to Jimmy Carter, who not only cited, against all evidence, Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians as a principal cause of the Charlie Hebdo murders, but asserted that the effect of the terrorist attacks would be to cause lots of people to look into Islam and see how “great” it is. Seriously:

In a parting shot, Carter mocks the idea of emigrating from France to Israel, smugly suggesting that Jews are safer in France. Of course, he doesn’t mention that what threatens Jews in Israel (as in France) are adherents of the “great” Islamic faith that is beloved by “billions.”

There you have it, the good, the bad and the crazy. As I noted here, terrorist attacks can function as a sort of Rorschach test.

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