During one of our many trips to France, my wife and I sauntered through the Arc de Triomphe, and down the Champs-Élysées.
Three weeks ago, we watched as millions of fearless French citizens and their supporters marched down these very same Parisian streets, expressing their “Liberte, Equalite and Fraternity.”
This time, romance was the farthest thing on their minds.
Arm-in-arm, they were protesting the brutal Islamic terrorist assassinations of the editors of their satirical newspaper and the killing of two french policemen, three Jewish shoppers and a Jewish shopkeeper at a kosher supermarket. They didn’t forget the wounding of the eleven others either.
Watching this peaceful, law-abiding rally unfold, I could not help but compare it to our own Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson demonstrators, who chose to express their own outrage by burning down private property, blockading our streets and bridges, shutting down and destroying local businesses and threatening the very lives of the police officers who were there to protect them.
Looking back, its hard to believe that their out-of-control rampage was a reaction to a grand jury decision and a hatred for corporate America and the police.
I doubt if these demonstrators will ever understand that Gandhi, Martin Luther King and so many others, taught us that unconscionable criminal behavior was counterproductive to the very causes they espoused.
Fifty international leaders marched with the french people that day, all putting their very own lives at risk.
French President Hollande of course was there. British Prime Minister Cameron was there. Also marching were German Prime Minister Merkel, Italian Prime Minister Renzi, Spanish Prime Minister Rajoy, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyaho. Palestine President Abbas was even there, as was Jordan’s King Abdullah and Queen Rania, the Turkish Prime Minister and the United Arab Emirate’s Foreign Minister.
Every important world leader was there, except “you know who”.
A week later, that’s right, a week later, the White House finally conceded that President Obama’s “not showing up” was “probably a mistake”.
– Tell that to the French people whose very freedoms of speech and the press were threatened!!
– Tell that lame excuse to the families who lost their loved ones in the carnage.
– Tell that to the Jews who are so afraid of another holocaust.
– Tell that to the American people, who feel that only through our standing side by side with our allies, can we hope to eradicate Islamic terrorism.
What a blunder, Mr. President! Talk is cheap!!
Why? Mr. President ? Why weren’t you there?
1 – Was it because you might have had to label the sadistic killers as the radicle Islamic terrorists that they were?
2 – Would you have described the slaughter at the office of “Charlie Hebdo” as just another example of “workplace violence”?
3 – Was the point blank killings of the two police officers understandable and justified because of some Charlie Hebdo cartoons?
4 – Maybe it was just the work of a few, isolated misguided radicals? Right, Mr. President ?
You must be smoking some of that stuff you fought so hard to legalize?
To make Obama’s international miscue even more upsetting was that the day after the march, his absence was not even mentioned in the New York Times!
What happened to that proud, historic newspaper? “All the news that’s fit to print” yea, right ! I guess they too “probably made a mistake.”
They made sure to give Obama all the publicity he wanted when he sent A.G. Holder to Ferguson.
Not mentioned either in The New York Times was that the widows of the two slain New York City police officers were not even invited to attend the State of the Union address.
Let’s get back to what the “Leader of the Free World” was actually doing while France, our oldest ally, was in turmoil.
Showing a distorted sense of timing and priorities, he was in Tennessee diligently working on another one of his government giveaways.
This time it was a “free”, two-year Community College for every “needy” student.
Only someone so fixated on their own political agenda could think of two-year colleges at a time like this.
Dr. Stephen Morris DDS
North Hills
