U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he will now travel to Paris after the U.S. government was shamed for not joining a rally yesterday for victims of the French terror attacks…

As to criticism about the lack of a senior U.S. official at Sunday’s March, Kerry said: ‘I really think that this is sort of quibbling a little bit in the sense that our Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland was there and marched, our ambassador was there and marched, many people from the embassy were there and marched…

But another high-ranking administration official, Attorney General Eric Holder, was in Paris at the time for a terrorism summit, and he didn’t attend the march, either.

It it not known why Holder didn’t join other world leaders on the streets of Paris. The Department of Justice did not return DailyMail.com’s request for comment on the matter.

The United States, which considers itself to be the most important nation in the world, was not represented in this march — arguably one of the most important public demonstrations in Europe in the last generation — except by U.S. Ambassador Jane Hartley, who may have been a few rows back. I didn’t see her. Even Russia sent Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

I say this as an American — not as a journalist, not as a representative of CNN — but as an American: I was ashamed…

There was higher-level Obama administration representation on this season’s episodes of “The Good Wife” on CBS…

Why? I hope it’s not American arrogance, a belief that everyone should express shock when something bad happens to us but that our presence at an international rally is worth less than a ticket to the Green Bay game when the victims speak in accents we don’t understand.

“We were scared.”

That’s essentially how the White House is explaining why the highest US official marching alongside grieving French and an assemblage of world leaders was the US ambassador to Paris, Jane Hartley. They didn’t feel they had the protection in place to let President Barack Obama march around Paris…

I want my leaders to do leader-like things. So, imagine what would have happened if Obama had gone to Paris, aside from just creating always-welcomed trans-Atlantic goodwill. Now imagine that Obama is one of those four dignitaries standing between Netanyahu and Abbas. And just think if, at the end of Sunday’s demonstration, as the front of the line marched into the Place de la Nation, Obama would have been able to take Bibi and Abbas aside, and in front of a manic media scrum that would zoom in on the moment, he’d put their hands in his and say, “Tomorrow we build on this moment, where we are in solidarity in knowing that we are all the same, and we want the same thing: Peace. We’ve seen what the stakes are. We destroy ourselves. Or we save ourselves. Tomorrow we get to work solving the crisis in the Middle East. You guys down?”…

If it is about fear, maybe some in France are angry, upset, gloating or perhaps thinking what I am: The US no longer has the moral ground to ever again use the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.” They might also sniff, “and as for the cheese that you Americans might pair with a surrender, bof, it will probably be French.”

The uproar over whether President Obama or another top administration official should have attended the massive unity rally in Paris has obscured an important point about the White House’s reaction to the latest terror attacks in Europe. The administration no-shows were not a failure of optics, or a diplomatic misstep, but were instead the logical result of the president’s years-long effort to downgrade the threat of terrorism and move on to other things…

The White House reaction to the attacks in France, going back to the first reports of shots fired at Charlie Hebdo, has been noticeably subdued. Obama had scheduled last week as a time to roll out some upcoming State of the Union proposals in trips to Michigan, Arizona and Tennessee. When world events intruded, the president stubbornly stuck to his schedule, mentioning France only briefly before introducing his plan for free tuition at community colleges…

Even as the march wound its way through Paris, the White House sent out yet another sign of its unseriousness. On Sunday morning, the press office announced the president will host a “Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” on Feb. 18. The plan is to bring together “social service providers, including education administrators, mental health professionals, and religious leaders, with law enforcement agencies to address violent extremism as part of the broader mandate of community safety and crime prevention.”

As the world watched images of black-clad, AK-47-wielding terrorists killing Parisians, Obama proposed to meet the threat with social service providers.

Here are the reasons the president of the United States, or at very least the vice president, should have gone yesterday to the Paris march and walked shoulder to shoulder with the leaders of the world:

To show through his presence that the American people fully understand the import of what happened in the Charlie Hebdo murders, which is that Islamist extremists took the lives of free men and women who represented American and Western political freedoms, including freedom of speech;…

To formally acknowledge the deep sympathy we feel that France, our oldest ally, suffered in the Charlie Hebdo murders a psychic shock akin to what America felt and suffered on 9/11/01. The day after our tragedy, the great French newspaper Le Monde ran an unforgettable cover with an editorial of affection and love titled Nous sommes tous Américains: “We are all Americans.” That was an echo of what our American doughboys, who went to France in 1917 to save it, famously said as they landed: “Lafayette, we are here.” Gen. Lafayette had been our first foreign friend and fought alongside Washington when we needed friends, in 1776. Is it sentimental to note this? Great nations run in part on sentiment…

The absence of the American president shows, too, what America would never in the past have conceded or acknowledged, and it was there in the photos of the order of the march. There in the center of the world leaders was Angela Merkel, leader of the West. I wrote a piece suggesting she had become that last spring. I was disturbed and saddened—actually I was mortified as I watched the entire march on TV in New York—to see that fact played out on every screen in the world.

Sunday, President Obama morally abdicated his place as the leader of the free world.

His decision to stay home instead of standing side by side with French President Hollande as millions marched in Paris in solidarity with the slain journalists of Charlie Hebdo in opposition to radical Islam – an enemy fiercer than we have seen in decades – sent a clear message to the world: Obama just doesn’t care…

To this end, it is not surprising that President Obama is the only Western leader who has refused to call this attack Islamic terrorism, even though President Hollande has declared that France is it at war with radical Islam. And to not even send Vice President Joe Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry in his place shows a level of disrespect that makes me ashamed of our nation.

We are at war with radical Islam. And President Obama needs to say it.

Recently, the President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a Muslim, gave a remarkable speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in which he challenged peaceful Muslims to confront what is happening to their religion—to stand up those who would twist faith into a mandate to murder.

This is where we can find our strength—by coordinating closely with our allies who are fighting this common threat. We can reject attempts to draw a moral equivalence between our friends and those who support or condone the terrorists. Instead, we should condemn and shun state sponsors of terrorism. We should encourage Muslim nations like Egypt and Saudi Arabia to join us and aspire to freedom in their own societies.

And, we should make it clear to the radical Islamic terrorists that the United States is not going to simply “move on” from Paris in the hopes that they will leave us alone, but rather that we are going to call them out by name as we stand strong and lead the fight against them.

Many of our allies gathered together in Paris yesterday in an admirable display of determination. Our President should have been there, because we must never hesitate to stand with our allies. We should never hesitate to speak the truth. In Paris or anywhere else in the world.

Here’s my thought process: Had there been an attack on U.S. soil while Obama marched in Paris, I would have wondered whether the president and his team had taken their eyes off the ball. Wouldn’t that be the natural reaction? The conservative Outrage Machine would have demanded impeachment proceedings…

Personally, I’ve got no problem with the U.S. ambassador representing my country in Paris. If it was my call to make, I would have put Biden on a plane.

But did Obama let the world down? Take a breath. After all this country has done for Europe in the last century, let’s not confuse a mistake with something more meaningful.

Via the Free Beacon.

Via Mediaite.