According to news reports, one of the terrorists involved in the January 7 attacks on journalists and a kosher market in France was angered years earlier by pictures of the Abu Ghraib prison atrocities.

Americans appear to have forgotten those images of U.S. soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners in 2003. Prisoners were stripped naked, forced into humiliating positions, and otherwise inhumanely treated. The resulting scandal tarnished the reputation of the United States as a defender of human rights. China noted the hypocrisy of our issuance of human rights reports, detailing abuses in virtually every country on the globe, when we, obviously, have our own problems.

Nothing excuses terrorist murders, but sins (and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib were certainly sins) tend to breed consequences spilling over into later suffering of innocents.

The talk of American exceptionalism signifies nothing if we don’t acknowledge that we have failings. Repentance for such failings is not a sign of weakness but a path toward a stronger nation.