John Kerry said what?

Charles Cook quotes the Secretary in one of those revealing blurts that are so scary.

Kerry on the Paris attacks:

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 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.

Cook's paraphrase:

Even if Kerry’s assumptions were all correct, the moral problem here would be obvious. 

We hear a great deal about “blaming the victim” in our domestic debates, especially as it relates to sexual assault. 

Does this not apply to other realms? 

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.”

Of course, we have known all along how liberals felt and feel about people who publicly refuse to be intimidated by Muslim violence into accepting and obeying Muslim rules of blasphemy, as well as anyone who opposes that violence as exactly what it is, a hateful and hate-motivated effort by some Muslims to violently enforce Muslim law not only on other Muslims (it is mostly that) but also on anyone their destructive hate can reach.

But in any case it seems Cook is joining Kerry and everybody else in missing the point.

People are right to note the Charlie Hebdo attack was about violently punishing the magazine and its key personnel for violation of Islamic prohibitions on blasphemy, while the Paris attacks were not about that.

But the Western political elites are generally not telling the truth about what they were about.

France, before the Paris attacks, had already been bombing ISIS territory, killing many every day.

This was ISIS striking back at France.

It was a blow struck deliberately against French civilians in that country's very capitol, and its purpose was to force France to stop bombing ISIS just as the Madrid bombings were - successfully - aimed at getting Spain to drop out of the war against al-Qaeda.

The point was to knock France out of the war against ISIS, and that is and has been from the first moment crystal clear.

And it's also crystal clear that neither the French government nor the Americans nor any other spokesmen for or allies of those at war with ISIS in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere wanted to make the point right in the noses of the French public that they had been hit, and hit quite hard, only because their government had itself been hitting ISIS and, if they wanted ISIS to stop hitting them their best move would be to get the French government to stop hitting ISIS.

Understandably not wishing to say that, Kerry blathered.