John Kerry’s Freudian slip

John Kerry said this today:

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo [and what happened in last week’s Paris attacks], and I think everybody would feel that. [In the Hebdo case] [t]here 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 was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration. It was to assault all sense of nationhood and nation-state and rule of law and decency, dignity, and just put fear into the community and say, “Here we are.”

And for what? What’s the platform? What’s the grievance? That we’re not who they are? They kill people because of who they are and they kill people because of what they believe. And it’s indiscriminate.

(Emphasis added)

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to detect a Freudian slip in Kerry’s statement that there was “perhaps even a legitimacy” to the Charlie Hebdo attack. Charles Krauthammer was a psychiatrist and he detects it. Kerry, he says, inadvertently evinced the same mentality that caused President Obama to say “the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”

How thoroughly disgusting.

Kerry’s fallback position — that there was “a rationale you could attach yourself to” for the Charlie Hebdo attack but not the ones last week — fares no better than his original phraseology. Kerry is saying that we (not the murderers whom he distinguishes as “they”) could “attach” ourselves to cartoon drawings as a rationale for murder. But who in his right mind could perform this mental stunt? Okay, who other than Kerry, Obama, and Hillary (a video “offensive” to Islam caused the Benghzai attack) Clinton.

As Charles Cooke puts it:

In essence, the American Secretary of State just announced before the world that he could grasp why the woman in the short skirt was raped but that he had been left scratching his head by the attack on the woman in the pantsuit and the overcoat. “Sure,” he said, “I get why they knocked off the hate speakers, but why would they go after progressive kids at a concert? Now things are really serious.”

Kerry would have been off-base even if he had said only that there was a rationale for the Hebdo attack but not the ones last weeks. The rationale for both is essentially the same — the radical Islamists want to undermine our freedoms and impose their ideology on us. They are at war with those who reject their religion/ideology, whether or not they draw cartoons of “the Islamic Prophet.”

Kerry acknowledges this towards the end of his rant. What’s criminally stupid is his apparent amazement at this state of affairs, which has been evident since at least 9/11. What’s intolerable is the certainty that Kerry will promptly go back into denial within days, if not hours.

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