US Secretary of State John Kerry rationalized the Charlie Hebdo and HyperCacher shooting attacks on a Paris magazine and Jewish supermarket, claiming that there was a “legitimacy […] not a legitimacy, but a rationale” behind the bloodshed. 

“There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry stated in the US Embassy in Paris, CBS News reported late Tuesday. Kerry refers to last week’s brutal killing spree in Paris, in which Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists killed 129 people. 

“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, ‘Okay, they’re really angry because of this and that.’ This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate.”

In January, three jihadists gunned down 16 people in the satirical magazine’s offices and at the Jewish supermarket in two days – targeting the former for publishing cartoons deemed “offensive against Islam” and the latter for being Jewish.

The White House took weeks to admit that the HyperCacher attack was anti-Semitic, with US President Barack Obama claiming the victims were “shot randomly.”