A clear path from Islam to terror
Apparently John Kerry is not entirely troubled by the fact that 12 people were killed during the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January 2015. At the U.S. Embassy in Paris, he stated: “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, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that.”
According to the New York Times, witnesses reported that the Charlie Hebdo killers shouted, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad.” Perhaps this was the rationale to which Kerry attached himself.
However, he condemned the most recent Paris attacks because “It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people,” and he was emphatic that “It has nothing to do with Islam.”
It seems Secretary Kerry has forgotten that the Mumbai, India, attackers were Muslims, the Madrid train bombers were Muslims, the Bali nightclub bombers were Muslims, the London subway bombers were Muslims, and the Nairobi, Kenya, shopping mall killers were Muslims. Perhaps terror really does have something to do with Islam.
Julia Lutch | Davis
Do not dismiss the threat that refugees may pose
The current Syrian refugee crisis poses ethical dilemmas about balancing our humanitarian desires with a justifiable concern for public safety. Unfortunately, your editorial “ISIS is our enemy, not the refugees fleeing them” and Douglas Bloomfield’s “Scapegoating Syrian refugees an awfully familiar tune” (Nov. 20) are dismissive of the public safety side of the moral equation.
There seems to be the belief that the distinction between victims and aggressors in Syria is easy to draw. However, we must recognize that the militant Islamist ideology is increasingly common among the Muslim populations of the region and that identifying its adherents is no simple task. Bloomfield did note that one of the Paris terrorists seems to have been a Syrian refugee and then dismissed the implications of this fact. The recent shouts of “Allahu Akbar” during a moment of silence for the Paris victims at a soccer match in Istanbul should give us pause. The references to our own circumstances during the Holocaust, however understandable, only obscure this critical point and make reasonable judgment more difficult.
Your “…the vetting process is extremely rigorous. Americans should not only feel assured by this thorough process, they should be eager to see us get on with it” doesn’t square with the recent congressional testimony of FBI Director James Comey. After pointing out the severe limitations of our databases on Syria, he concluded, “I can’t sit here and offer anybody an absolute assurance that there’s no risk associated with this.”
In an age of expanding terrorism with a strike in the United States their most coveted goal, caution is in order. The first responsibility of any government is the protection of its citizens. The editorial and the op-ed would have been far more credible if they had taken our national security and public safety interests more seriously.
Steve Astrachan | Pleasant Hill
Pointing fingers at the victims
Imagine the uproar if anyone in the EU dared suggest that Parisians themselves were responsible for Islamic State’s rampage. Or if Malians were behind the attack on Mali.
Yet there’s no outrage as Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas blames Israel for the Palestinians who stab, shoot and drive into crowds of civilians in order to kill Jews. And there’s no uproar, either, when Sweden’s foreign minister also suggests that Israel is responsible not only for the Palestinian attacks on Israelis but also for Islamic State’s attacks in France.
It seems journalists and governments refuse to see the direct connection between Palestinian terrorists in the Jewish state and Islamic State terrorists in Europe or Africa.
June Brott | Walnut Creek
Coexistence elusive, even in the Bay Area
One sentence in Sue Fishkoff’s column “Reciting each other’s prayers — it’s a start” (Nov. 13) goes to the root of the dead-ended Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “The crowd was overwhelmingly Jewish, and I was hard-pressed to find any of the Muslims Antepli claimed were sitting among us.” It was supposed to be a Jewish-Muslim event led by Donniel Hartman and Imam Abdullah Antepli, both from the Jerusalem-based Hartman Institute.
If Muslims in the tolerant and diverse San Mateo community cannot bring themselves to sit next to Jews and discuss Middle East coexistence, what can be expected from the Arabs inside and outside of Israel who are endlessly fed vile anti-Semitic propaganda?
Vladimir Kaplan | San Mate