Is U.S. President Barack Obama not attending the French Anti-Terror Unity March / Parade his own way of showing respect to the victims of the tragedy?
By: Ringo Bones
Statistically, the more than 1-million people attending the
French Ant-Terror Unity Parade / March back in Sunday, January 11, 2015 is a
historic event mainly because more people attended the event in comparison to
the total who greeted the Allies during the Liberation of Paris back in 1944,
not to mention the 40 heads-of-state showing their unity against radical
Islamism. Many criticize the President Obama and the U.S. government not
sending a high-level official (higher than U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder?)
during the French Anti-Terror Unity Parade / March as a “missed opportunity”
for the Obama administration. But is this just a way that President Obama
sympathize with the oft ignored demographic of this tragic event – as in the
moderate Muslims who are also for all intents and purposes victimized by the
murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and the Kosher supermarket shoppers by radical Islamists?
Given that he spent a significant portion of his childhood
in Muslim societies – i.e. in Indonesia, President Obama has a “unique
perspective” on how to interact with the Muslim world that is sadly lacking in
a majority of Western statesmen and captains-of-industry. President Obama could
be, in a way, meeting halfway moderate Muslims with a conservative leaning
outlook who are deeply offended by cheap, hackneyed renderings of the Prophet
Mohammad. Even though the Paris-based political satire magazine Charlie Hebdo
remains largely unknown outside of France, never mind the rest of the
Francophone world, the radical Islamists who murdered those cartoonists may
just have been doing their cause a disservice by inadvertently raising the
satirical Parisian cartoonists to “martyrdom”.
