On Wednesday, two U.S. soldiers were shot at the Frankfurt airport in Germany. The suspect, 21-year-old Kosovar Arif Uka, was detained and German authorities have suggested the shooting was motivated by Islamic extremism.
However, President Barack Obama has been reluctant to denounce the shootings as terrorist act. Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer explained on Thursday night’s “Special Report” on the Fox News Channel that it was clearly terrorism.
“Well, unfortunately the State Department spokesman had a bad day here,” Krauthammer said. “You never ask a rhetorical question if the answer is not the one you want. Was Jared Loughner a terrorist? No, he was a paranoid psychotic without a political motive. Was the guy in Germany a terrorist? All the evidence says yes he shouted by the word of many witnesses repeatedly, ‘Allahu Akbar,’ which is the jihadist cry as he shot Americans and as he was being taken away. Now he was recently radicalized, a Muslim, either born or immigrated out of Kosovo and now he’s confessed, clearly this was a jihadist attack.”
But Krauthammer was very critical of Obama for not denouncing it, saying it demonstrated that the president didn’t have a grasp of the seriousness of the attack and that his response was sending the wrong message to the world.
“And the fact, when the president came out yesterday and spoke about this, he talked about it as if it was like it was a bus accident, it was a tragedy,” he continued. “It is incomprehensible why he cannot even say out loud this could have been a jihadist attack, part of the war on terror. This was attack on military abroad, an attack on our country, an act of war by a terrorist enemy and if a president can’t speak to that, what does it say against moderate Muslims around the world against jihad and here a president that won’t speak the truth about it? It is demoralizing.”
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