Democracy strugles at the Washington Post

They had it right the first time.

The Washington Post changed the headline on its Al-Baghdadi obituary from “Islamic State’s terrorist-in-Chief” to “austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State.” pic.twitter.com/cs243EVz7W

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) October 27, 2019 

They gave it another try...

There's a power struggle at the @washingtonpost
for control of the #alBaghdadi obituary. pic.twitter.com/Bb3fR0qrM3

— Lem (@Lemang01) October 27, 2019 

Final analysis...

How papers like The Washington Post run into trouble with headline-writing is overly sophisticated editors overthinking what their urban-bourgeois readers expect: “It would be just too crude and vulgar to call Baghdadi a terror mastermind! What would @CJR say!”

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) October 27, 2019

You killed Jerry!

.@chriskenny, @TimBlairBlog and @RitaPanahi on Bono's suggestion we fight terrorism with laughter. #viewpoint https://t.co/5YsNm9Gqxm

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) April 15, 2016

Taranto: "Kerry rationalizes the assassination of journalists"

Why the Bicyclists?

“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, OK, 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.”

Those words were spoken yesterday by Secretary of State John Kerry. The reference to “legitimacy” calls to mind the remark that ended the political career of Todd Akin. But although Kerry’s statement was every bit as stupid as Akin’s, it was far more evil. Not only does he rationalize the mass murder of journalists; that rationalization is a fallback from his initial, impulsive though impolitic position that those murders had “legitimacy.”

The most charitable way to sum up Kerry’s view is that he believes discrimination is a mitigating factor when it comes to terrorist attacks—that murder isn’t as bad when the victim is someone who has publicly espoused views the killer finds abhorrent. The word for a murder carried out with this sort of extreme prejudice is assassination, and it is ordinarily considered even worse than murdering at random.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo, no less than the attacks last week, were intended “to terrorize people.” But the Charlie Hebdo attacks were also intended to terrorize people into silence. It was an attack on free speech as well as on freedom and Western civilization more generally. Kerry’s rationalizing of it is arguably the most un-American thing he has ever said in public—and that’s saying a lot, given that he made a name for himself slandering American military servicemen.