This newspaper has too often had cause to comment on the incompetence of John Kerry, the US Secretary of State — the walking embodiment of the reverse Midas touch. Yet his comments on last Friday’s murders in Paris are, even by his own standards, shocking. Differentiating them from the Charlie Hebdo killings — and not even bothering to mention the murders in the kosher Hyper Cacher — he said: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularised 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.” Nothing better explains why US foreign policy has been so disastrous under President Obama than the knowledge that his Secretary of State thinks there was a rationale behind January’s murders — as if those involved in “this and that” were clearly so infuriating that it is understandable that the terrorists should have murdered them. Such comments would be outrageous from a street thug. From a US Secretary of State, they are simply contemptible.