Reporter Shocks Biden Spox Kirby with Question About Compensation for Terror Victims: ‘Wow. I Got to Take Issue With That’

Today News Africa correspondent Simon Ateba shocked National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby with a verbal leap that drew a vehement rebuke.

At Tuesday’s White House briefing, Kirby joined White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to help field national security questions, many of which pertained to  the airstrike that killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri over the weekend.

Ateba — who infamously disrupted Jen Psaki‘s last day on the job — asked about the dead terrorist leader’s victims in Tanzania and Kenya, then incensed Kirby with an inflammatory follow-up question in which he suggested Kirby had said “that the lives of Kenyans and Tanzanians don’t really matter”:

MR. ATEBA: Mr. Kirby, al-Zawahiri killed — he killed more than 200 people in Tanzania and in Kenya in 1998. And right now, even though the U.S. compensated U.S. citizens who were victims of those bombings, the people in Kenya and Tanzania — they’ve received nothing. What message do you have for them now that you’ve killed him?

MR. KIRBY: Same — yeah, I’d say the same thing I told Mr. Doocy here: that this is not just a good day for the United States of America, it’s a good day for the world.

MR. ATEBA: Yeah, but I’m saying that the families of the victims of those bombings were not compensated by the U.S. What message do you have for them?

MR. KIRBY: I don’t have any compensation policies here to speak to. Again, Mr. Zawahiri’s death is good for everybody around the world. He was a killer. And — and it’s — it’s a good thing that he’s no longer walking the face of the Earth. It also means that we’re going to have to stay vigilant to this threat going forward.

MR. ATEBA: So are you saying that the lives of Kenyans and Tanzanians don’t really matter?

MR. KIRBY: Wow. I got to take issue with that. I did not say that. And I don’t even know where you came from on that one.

Of course, all lives matter.

MR. ATEBA: No, they’re upset. The —

MR. KIRBY: I didn’t say that — I didn’t say —

MR. ATEBA: — inaction right now.

MR. KIRBY: I didn’t say that, sir. And I really, really take exception to the — to the tone and the implication in that question. Of course, their lives matter. Every life matters, particularly a life taken so violently as by the hands of a terrorist.

If those lives didn’t matter, sir, we wouldn’t have taken the action that we took this weekend. And if those lives didn’t matter, sir, we wouldn’t be staying vigilant to the threat going forward, which we will do.

Watch above via C-SPAN.