Leadership Quote by Allyson Schwartz

Terrorism, in Schwartz's framing, is less a geopolitical puzzle than a moral intrusion: it barges into ordinary life and treats a tourist hotel, a commuter train, a café, a city skyline as interchangeable stages. The sentence is built to do two jobs at once. First, it universalizes vulnerability by stitching together Jordan with Indonesia, Egypt, Spain, and the United States, collapsing the usual hierarchy of whose tragedies count as "foreign" and whose feel like national trauma. The roll call functions like a map that refuses borders, pushing listeners toward a shared civic identity: not American, Jordanian, or Spanish, but civilian.

The subtext is political in the most practical sense. By insisting terrorism "does not discriminate", Schwartz pre-empts the reflex to racialize the threat or treat it as the product of a single region or faith. That matters in a post-9/11 public sphere where grief often curdled into profiling, immigration panic, and a simplistic "us vs. them". Her language also smuggles in a coalition pitch: if the victims are everywhere, then the response should be collective, legitimizing international cooperation and bipartisan security measures.

Then comes the rhetorical pivot: terrorists "indiscriminately target" people "seeking to live a peaceful, loving and free life". It's a soft triad with hard intent. "Peaceful" and "loving" domesticate the victims, making them familiar; "free" slips in an American political keyword that ties global suffering to democratic self-image. The line doesn't describe terrorists so much as it defines the audience: decent people, plural, under unjust attack. The power is in that moral sorting, which invites solidarity while narrowing the space for cynical equivocation about who "started it."