Kerry: 'Lack of Integration' of Muslims in Europe Like U.S. Civil Rights Struggle in '60s

    Secretary of State John Kerry met with EU High Representative Federica Mogherini at the State Department Wednesday and afterwards addressed the press and took some questions. One question from a French reporter concerned problems with Muslim integration in Europe and the potential terrorism ramifications:

Question: [W]e heard recently from President Obama talking about the potential lack of integration of Muslim communities in Europe. He mentioned that as one of the greatest dangers that Europe faces in terms of terror threats that might come. Would you agree with those words from President Obama, and should he have used those? And Mr. Secretary [Kerry], I’d like to get your opinion on that as well if I can.

    Kerry responded by recalling his days as a college student in the 1960s during the civil rights era and the consequent sensitivity of his generation to "this question of minority and rights and integration and so forth." After explaining that although the US has made "unbelievable progress" on race-related matters, "we still have some distance to travel." Eventually, Kerry stressed that "this particular incident of violence [terror attack in Paris] wasn’t a specific targeting that grew out of that [lack of integration]"; however, he said, there is work to do where "one minority or another or another is not able to share fully in the full integration" in the country where they live.
   Here is Secretary Kerry's full response to the question:

SECRETARY KERRY: Well, let me just begin quickly on the integration issue. When I was – I entered college in 1962. And in 1963, ’4, ’5, we were deeply embroiled in this country, and we – college students in the Civil Rights Movement. And we were deeply impacted by that and have always been, I think, as a generation, much more sensitive to this question of minority and rights and integration and so forth. We’ve made unbelievable progress in our nation, unbelievable progress in the years since then. But it would be completely disingenuous not to say to you that we still have some distance to travel. We’re not finished. We’re still – you heard the President last night talk about voting rights. So what was won in 1965 still has to be fully embraced and implemented here, and other things that are linked to that. We’ve seen our own struggles in some communities and great debates about race in America in the last year. 

So it would be dishonest of me – and I’m not involved in domestic politics right now, so I’m not going to go into it in depth, except to say that therefore, I think I can say with honesty that there is a challenge in many other parts of the world. And Federica is absolutely correct; this particular incident of violence wasn’t a specific targeting that grew out of that, but we all can do work in many parts of the world that I have seen where one minority or another or another is not able to share fully in the full integration in whatever country they happen to be living. So the world has a road to travel on that, and that’s why we continue to put such a high premium here on the issue of human rights and democracy, and to continue to push, because I think we’ve learned through our own experience the difference that it can make to the strengthening of the quality of our democracy, to our society, and people benefit when we live by that high moral standard.

    High Representative Mogherini, whose response to the question came before Kerry's, said the following:

On the integration of minorities in Europe, this is a debate, I think, that within member states in Europe, in – I would say in the global community is – has been going on for decades and probably is going on for decades. I would say that there are different models, different histories, and different traditions. What we have to get right in this moment is the fact that we need to work together. You know that very well. Victims of the attack in Paris were not only called Louis or Charb or Anne; there was an Ahmed that was killed by other people that were having names of the same roots, which means that this is a common fight. I would not go on the line of saying that this is minorities against majorities, also because we have different minorities, in Europe as in the United States. We are living in complex societies, and this is our richness. Our strength is the fact that we are different, but we are united and we live together. 

And I think that this is the core point. We would be wrong if we were to look at that as an issue of minorities-majorities. This has nothing to do with that. These are violent acts that were targeting people, persons, regardless of their names, ethnic background, minorities, majorities, whatever. And there is no link, I would stress, between minorities, majorities, and violence. A terrorist act is a terrorist act, and we should not go into that kind of discussion about how we manage, or at least manage the majorities or minorities. There is no kind of roots in that.

Note: A version of this post first appeared at The Weekly Standard.

At Least the Chair Isn't Empty

    The Civil Rights page of the Obama campaign website starts out with the following statement:

President Obama believes that America is strongest when everybody has a seat at the table. 

Directly to the right of this statement is the following photo:

I guess this wasn't one of America's strongest moments.

Civil Rights Reboot - The Obama Administration's New Take

   On July 2, Rep. John Lewis wrote a blog post on Democrats.org, the website of the Democratic National Committee, marking the 48th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Lewis was personally involved in the struggle to secure full participation for blacks in the democratic process in this country.  Despite the ratification of the 15th Amendment to the Constitution nearly a century before, the right to vote was still elusive for many blacks in America.  In the decades since the Civil Rights Act was passed, great progress has been made in guaranteeing the "blessings of liberty" for all Americans of all races, culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008.

    But Rep. Lewis does not spend much of his post celebrating the success of the Civil Rights movement.  The second paragraph contains some nods to progress, but both are quickly followed by "buts" tempering the successes.  The remainder of the post focuses on the "systematic effort to restrict access to the polls" that Lewis and the Democrats warn is spreading across the land.  The tone of the piece is that the Civil Rights struggle is far from over and the fight must continue.

    Downplaying progress is often a talking point of the Democrats when discussing any efforts to reform or strengthen voting laws.  It was just a little over a year ago that Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said that Republicans "want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws."  Also in 2011, Lewis himself called voter ID laws a "poll tax."  Even when the Obama campaign launched their GottaVote.org website that Lewis references in his blog post, there was initially a statement that implied that blacks did not have the right to vote as late as 1915.  The statement was corrected within a day, but lingered for over two weeks on the Spanish language version of the site (I chronicled this in a series here, here, here, and here.)  To hear the Democrats tell it, the hard won victories of the Civil Rights movement are on the razor's edge.

    Given the tenuous nature of those Civil Rights victories,  you would expect that the White House would have mounted a concerted effort to make sure that gains were secured and the "many barriers [that] remain for the basic civil right of casting a ballot" that Lewis wrote about were broken down.  However, the section of the White House website dedicated to Civil Rights reveals a different priority.

    Fully eight of the eleven items on the Civil Rights "Progress" list deal with LGBT-related issues such as gay marriage, don't ask-don't tell repeal, and federal benefits for same-sex partners.  (One of the eight was the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which is named after a gay man and a black man who each were victims of terrible crimes.)  Of the remaining three items on the list, one is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, meant to restore "basic protections against pay discrimination for women and other workers," and another is the signing of settlements of six lawsuits, five brought by Native American tribes and one by black farmers.

    Further down on the page is a single statement addressing voting rights:

The President is committed to expanding funding for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to ensure that voting rights are protected and Americans do not suffer from increased discrimination during a time of economic distress. 

To say that traditional concerns of the Civil Rights movement have received nominal attention from this administration would be an understatement.  And yet John Lewis and other Democrats have continued to line up behind the president anyway.  Which, come to think of it, could explain why their concerns have received scant attention.  Why spend time and energy securing the support of voters who are already firmly in your corner?  Or is it that the "concerns" over traditional civil rights are overblown and the label is being broadly applied to secure the support of other constituent groups that are not quite as reliably Democratic?

    In any case, it is difficult to see how this president can claim much credit for carrying the torch on civil rights.  And indeed, as a town meeting in August 2011 with Rep. Maxine Waters, the frustration began to boil over:

“We don’t put pressure on the president,” said Waters. “Let me tell you why. We don’t put pressure on the president because ya’ll love the president. You love the president. You’re very proud…to have a black man [in the White House] …First time in the history of the United States of America. If we go after the president too hard, you’re going after us.”
“When you tell us it’s alright and you unleash us and you tell us you’re ready for us to have this conversation, we’re ready to have the conversation. The Congressional Black Caucus loves the president too. We’re supportive of the president but we’re getting tired ya’ll…we’re getting tired. And so, what we want to do is…we want to give the president every opportunity to show what he can do and what he’s prepared to lead on. We want to give him every opportunity…but our people are hurting. The unemployment is unconscionable. We don’t know what the strategy is. We don’t know why on this trip that he’s in the United States now, he’s not in any black community…we don’t know that.”

    So what has happened since August 2011 that could change Waters outlook and that of the Congressional Black Caucus?  When the latest unemployment numbers were released, unemployment among blacks was up to 14.4%.  But Waters and the CBC have no intention of abandoning Obama, no matter what he does or doesn't do on "civil rights."  Their political fortunes are too closely connected.  But could the Obama administration's co-opting of the civil rights mantle for LGBT issues finally break the Democrats' hold on the black electorate?  The election in November should be a good indication if such a sea change is occuring.

    Oh... and the eleventh "civil rights" item of "progress" claimed by the White House, the one that Valerie Jarrett recently touted to the National Association of Black Journalists?

The President signed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduces the disparity in the amounts of powder cocaine and crack cocaine required for the imposition of mandatory minimum sentences and eliminates the mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine.

Lighter sentences for drug offenders masquerading as "civil rights" for blacks.  Is that why Martin Luther King and John Lewis marched in Selma?  Was that the dream?