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Are Some Terror Victims More Innocent than Others?

(Weekly Standard) Elliott Abrams - Speaking in Paris on Nov. 17, Secretary of State John Kerry said that the November killings in Paris are more terrible than those of January. "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." Sure. They were angry about cartoons that lampooned Muhammad, and about Jews. Completely understandable. 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? Religious minorities and journalists perhaps are to blame in some sense for their own troubles. At Harvard last month Kerry 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." This statement was plainly false. There has been no "massive increase in settlements," something the statistics show quite clearly. The writer is a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
2015-11-23 00:00:00
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