Secretary of State John Kerry believes that the terrorist attacks in Paris last week are a more demonstrable assault on Western society than the massacre of Charlie Hebdo writers that took place in January.
Kerry made the distinction while addressing U.S. embassy staff in Paris Tuesday. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” he said. “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.”
Kerry’s comments reflect the discomfort with Charlie Hebdo’s satirizing of Islam that led left-leaning writers to criticize the magazine after two men affiliated with al-Qaeda murdered most of its editorial team. But they are at odds with his remarks in the immediate aftermath of that attack.