Keffiyeh

When Hillary Clinton left Barack Obama's Team of 2s after his first term, she was replaced by John Kerry, a man who exemplifies the true meaning of a 2. Hillary left foreign policy wreckage in her wake (little things like Libya, Russia, China and Iran) but pivoted immediately to her run for the presidency. Kerry, a man who validates the Peter Principle, took over.

Bret Stevens comments on Kerry's reaction to recent terrorist attacks:

In November, after Islamic State’s massacres in Paris, John Kerry offered some unscripted thoughts on how the atrocity differed from others. “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” he said, referring to the January 2015 attack on the satirical French newspaper. He continued:

“There was a sort of particularized focus [to the Hebdo attack] 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 [in Paris] was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.”

Mr. Kerry’s remarks again betrayed the administration’s cluelessness about ISIS, which aims to annihilate anything it doesn’t consider . . . Islamic. Understanding its takfiri version of Islam, with its sweeping declarations of apostasy, is essential to understanding how it thinks and operates.

But no less telling was Mr. Kerry’s view that not all terrorism is fundamentally alike; that some acts of terror have a rationale “you could attach yourself to.” The comment is striking not for being unusual but for being ordinary, another formulation of the conventional wisdom that terrorism, like war, is politics by other means. From such a view it’s a short step to treating some acts of terror as legitimate, or nearly so.

In a sense, that's what the Left does when it suggests that Islam is somehow an "oppressed" people, that attacks against the West are understandable because the West is the oppressor, that the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, Israel, is an oppressor and therefore attacks against it by murderous Islamic terrorists are understandable, maybe even justified.

Stevens writes about this:

Which brings me to the case of Hallel Yaffe Ariel, a 13-year-old Israeli girl who on Thursday was stabbed to death in her sleep by a 19-year-old intruder named Mohammad Tra’ayra. It’s difficult to imagine any act as evil or as cowardly as murdering a child in her sleep. But Hallel lived with her family in the West Bank Israeli town of Kiryat Arba, making her a settler, while Tra’ayra, who was shot dead on the scene, came from a nearby Palestinian village.

What happened to Hallel has happened to countless settlers: five members of the Fogel family, butchered in their beds in 2011; the three teenage boys who were kidnapped and murdered by Hamas in 2014; the rabbi who was shot and killed on Friday on a West Bank road while driving with his wife and two children. Yet their deaths are supposed to be different from those of other terrorism victims, since they were all “occupiers” whose political crimes rendered them complicit in their own tragedy. That’s how much of global public opinion has long treated terrorism when the target is Israel. It has a rationale. It’s understandable, if not justifiable. It’s Israel’s problem, Israel’s fault, and has no bearing on the rest of us.

It's difficult not to experience some level of schadenfreude when Islamic terrorist attacks are directed at Islamist-sympathetic countries. The Islamist monster created and supported by the likes of Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Saudi royals has now turned on them and begun to murder within their borders. I'm certain these Muslim leaders had no worries when Hallal Ariel was murdered in her sleep. They may have a different attitude when bombs begin exploding in their major cities and among their citizenry.

The Islamist monster targeted the West first in places like New York, San Bernadino, Orlando, Paris, London, and Brussels, then "apostate" Muslims in places like Iraq and Syria, then its own enablers and creators in places like Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Once can only wonder when the monster will turn on its titular protectors on the Left. Wearing a keffiyeh, a black and white checked scarfs, in "solidarity" with the oppressed palestinians is a demented method for virtue signalling among some members of the Left. That is, until the the keffiyeh is tied around their necks and used as a murder weapon. The Left thinks that can't happen, that "solidarity" will protect them.. Just ask Ergodan or the Saudi Royals about that.