On November 17, four days after the Paris attacks, the secretary of state made some unscripted remarks about them at the U.S. embassy:

There’s something different about what happened [on November 13] from Charlie Hebdo [and the kosher supermarket], and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus [in the January attacks] 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 [past] Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for.

Elliott Abrams comments:

It seems that to Kerry, when people kill journalists and Jews, that is not an attack on “everything that we do stand for,” whereas attacking a restaurant and stadium and a concert hall is. A bit odd: do we stand for good food and sports and music more than we stand for freedom of the press and freedom of religion? Kerry seems confused here, but we get the point. He is saying that it’s understandable when people murder innocents because they have a particular reason to be mad at them, but now the terrorists are attacking all of us. He contrasts, perhaps without even knowing what he was saying, last “Friday night when people were going about their normal business” with that other Friday in January, when some people were instead out preparing for Shabbat. . . .

This is bizarre in the extreme. When Jews are attacked we all know why, but when France is attacked, well, that is simply unspeakable.

Yesterday, the Iranian foreign minister flew to Geneva to meet with European diplomats. President Trump, meanwhile, indicated that cease-fire negotiations might soon begin with Iran, which would presumably involve Tehran agreeing to make concessions regarding its nuclear program, while Washington pressures Israel to halt its military activities. According to Israeli media, Iran already began putting out feelers to the U.S. earlier this week. Aviram Bellaishe considers the purpose of these overtures:

The regime’s request to return to negotiations stems from the principle of deception and delay that has guided it for decades. Iran wants to extricate itself from a situation of total destruction of its nuclear facilities. It understands that to save the nuclear program, it must stop at a point that would allow it to return to it in the shortest possible time. So long as the negotiation process leads to halting strikes on its military capabilities and preventing the destruction of the nuclear program, and enables the transfer of enriched uranium to a safe location, it can simultaneously create the two tracks in which it specializes—a false facade of negotiations alongside a hidden nuclear race.