The Fright-WIng™ nutballs cry when the sun rises and blame Democrats and liberals if they have halitosis. Big fucking deal.
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I get where he was going, but that doesn’t mean he should have tried going there. Oh, Sec. Kerry, you should know better. And he did - he tried correcting himself mid-sentence because he obviously realized he had made a mistake. Unfortunately, he failed to make it better. I’m sure he’s well aware of it, too.
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You hear Kerry’s words and understand them the way a normal person would understand them. Even if it was poor phrasing. However, this is an unforced error on Kerry’s part. The Faux News cycle is going to be screaming “Kerry Sympathises with Terrorists” and “Why does Obama have a terrorist sympathiser in his cabinet?” You know that’s exactly how they misconstrue words.
[EDIT] And I will add that the lamestream Liberal Media will eat every talking point up that comes out of the RW propaganda machine without any push back. It’s going to be a long time before we hear the last of this from them.
This is the sort of a comment I could imagine coming from a Secretary of State Joe Biden. So, I guess we’ve been pretty fortunate in this regard… for the time being…
“They” don’t hate us for our freedoms - but they do hate us for our booze, drugs, close dancing and other ways we have a good time. Or you might say, they hate us because we are not Muslim.
I know what Kerry was trying to say, but it was extraordinarily dumb for him to trot out that line of thinking at this time, and the fact he did it so clumsily exacerbated the problem.
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The Faux News cycle is going to be screaming “Kerry Sympathises with Terrorists” and “Why does Obama have a terrorist sympathiser in his cabinet?”
Kerry isn’t speaking to the Fox News crowd. We know they don’t do nuance, we know they have to boil everything down to a an easy to understand, even if inaccurate, sound bite. Maybe it’s good to speak truth and no try to frame it so people who will disagree with anything you say just might agree with you for once.
Bunch of commenters bashing what he said, what was wrong about what he said.
Sorry, forgot the question mark but the very first sentence is a question, care to answer it?
I’d say he was over thinking the problem but that would make it sound like it wasn’t a completely jackass stupid thing to say.
The problem with what Kerry said is the words he used: first “legitimate” and then “rationale.” When what he was trying to say was “motive.” Those words are too easily misunderstood, and even more easily manipulated.
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- France joining the air campaign against Daesh makes for a pretty direct reason (viz. Daesh-inspired attacks in Turkey and Beirut).
- Further roiling the uneasy discontent in Europe over mostly Islamic refugees fleeing North Africa and now Syria to dissuade elected European governments from further military action against Daesh, either independently or jointly thru NATO (viz. intended-to-be-found Syrian passport on dead terrorist).
- Provoking nationalist xenophobia and violence against Europe’s Muslim communitys which may radicalize more Muslim into terrorist actions.
- A campaign of “random” terrorism that seems unstoppable can topple governments, by ballot or coup. It happened in France over Algerian terrorism within memory of many living French.
Saying that planned, terrorist violence with two or more actors is “senseless”, which is the common response, when it can’t be linked to a single inciting event misses the point. It’s often not a game of specific tit-for-tat, but to avenge generalized grievances. Such terrorism may be a form of blackmail to compel future action, such as ransom money, prisoner release, etc. In this respect, the Charley Hebdo attack stands apart, although the coincident attack on the kosher deli seems to avenge general grievances against Israel by attacking Parisian Jews as surrogates.
A campaign of deliberate terrorism (extensive serial terror attacks) is rightfully called asymmetric warfare, which I believe SoS Kerry, President Obama and most other leaders know. They may call it “mindless/senseless violence” as a useful deception to preserve public order and give governments more freedom of response. This recent Paris attack is probably serial with the recent Turkey, Beirut and Russian airliner attacks, but not with Hebdo attacks in Paris, but 11 months earlier.
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You’re proving my point, which is that terrorism and those who use it to enact violence against others is often very complicated and very nuanced in the reasons those actions take place. Some individual acts (e.g. the Charlie Hebdo attacks) are simple to understand, others such as the Paris attacks don’t have an individual and direct cause/response and while the causes and actions are ALL complex, some are easier to understand than others.
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