THE WASHINGTON POST: Barack Obama condemns ‘horrific’ Charlie Kirk shooting, urges country to unite

Former US president Barack Obama mourned conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Tuesday, urging the nation not to resort to political violence to resolve its differences.

Speaking at an annual event hosted by the nonprofit Jefferson Educational Society in Erie, Pennsylvania, Mr Obama said the shooting of Charlie Kirk last week as well as the June attacks on Minnesota lawmakers - including the killings of Democrat state representative Melissa Hortman and her husband - were “horrific and a tragedy.”

“There are no ifs, ands or buts about it. The central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resort to violence,” he said, in a wide-ranging interview that also touched on themes including Israel’s war in Gaza, and the politicisation of government institutions.

The 44th president said he disagreed with many of Kirk’s views, including on the subjects of race and immigration.

“I didn’t know Charlie Kirk. I was generally aware of some of his ideas. I think those ideas were wrong, but that doesn’t negate the fact that what happened was a tragedy and that I mourn for him and his family,” he said.

Kirk had frequently generated outcry with provocative statements, calling the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act “a huge mistake” and suggesting that beneficiaries of affirmative action did not “have the brain processing power” to be taken seriously and “had to go steal a white person’s slot.”

Mr Obama also admonished President Donald Trump’s administration and others in positions of authority for trying to fault “an enemy” for Kirk’s shooting “even before we had determined who the perpetrator of this evil act was.”

“We’re going to suggest that somehow that enemy was at fault, and we are then going to use that as a rationale for trying to silence discussion around who we are as a country and what direction we should go. And that’s a mistake as well,” he said.

Even as the search for a suspect and motive unfolded in the hours after Kirk’s killing, President Donald Trump blamed “the radical left” for political violence, referring to several recent attacks against Republicans or law enforcement. He did not mention some other high-profile incidents, such as the killing in June of the Hortmans.

Mr Obama praised the response of Republican Utah Governor Spencer Cox to the shooting, as well as “his history of how he engages with people who are political adversaries.”

In a news conference hours after Kirk’s killing on September 10, Mr Cox, who has long argued for kinder politics, appealed to the nation to unite under its founding ideals and turn away from political violence.

Mr Obama also highlighted President George W Bush’s remarks in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, in which he vowed to hunt down the attackers but also denounced Islamophobia. “He explicitly went out of his way to say, ‘we are not at war against Islam,’ and systematically and repeatedly talked about how we can’t use this as a way to divide and target fellow Americans,” Obama said.

“And so, when I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents vermin, enemies, who need to be ‘targeted,’ that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and something that we’re going to have to grapple with, all of us,” Obama said.

“We have to recognise that on both sides, undoubtedly, there are people who are extremists,” he added. “But I will say that those extreme views were not in my White House. I wasn’t embracing them. … When we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we’ve got a problem.”

In an emailed statement, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the former president was behind America’s modern political divisions. “Obama used every opportunity to sow division and pit Americans against each other,” she said. “His division has inspired generations of Democrats to slander their opponents. … If he cares about unity in America, he would tell his own party to stop their destructive behaviour.”

Mr Obama also touched on the war in Gaza, saying that the conflict was partly caused by dehumanising attitudes from both those who carried out Hamas’s October 7 attacks in 2023, and those who called for food and medicine to be withheld from civilians in Gaza. “I want to be clear - I’m not drawing equivalences. … What I’m saying is that when we don’t see people as people, bad things happen.”

The former president also said that many political norms are no longer being followed under the current administration, pointing to the National Guard being deployed to work with immigration enforcement in Washington as an example.

“Many of the guardrails and norms that I thought I had to abide by as president of the United States, that George Bush thought he had to abide by as president of the United States - … suddenly those no longer apply,” Obama said. “And that makes this a dangerous moment.”