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The reaction over Charlie Kirk’s assassination touched yet another constituency this week: the collection of world leaders gathered at the United Nations.
Two weeks after Kirk was shot and killed in Utah, several of the world leaders gathered at for the UN General Assembly this week referenced the conservative activist’s slaying — and some of the divisive outpouring of reaction to it — as evidence of deeper fissures in global society.
Decrying the “sick expression of joy for the crime committed against an innocent person,” Serbian President Alexsandar Vucic told assembled leaders on Wednesday that reaction to Kirk’s death represents “the best confirmation of that.”
Social media lit up in the days after Kirk’s Sept. 10 death with people mourning his loss — some of whom said they disagreed with Kirk’s ideological stances but supported his right to voice them — as well as those celebrating it.
It set off a national discussion about freedom of speech. Comments led to the firings of numerous people, from political analysts and opinion writers to school employees. Several conservative activists sought to identify social media users whose posts about Kirk they viewed as offensive or celebratory, targeting everyone from journalists to teachers.
On Wednesday, Vucic said reaction to the conservative activist’s assassination was demarcated “less by ideological but much more by emotional hate driven differences.”
“Such a development devastates in a deepest and clearest way the world political community much more than conflicts with clear and visible actors,” Vucic said, remarking on how such a seemingly singular event can evoke such strong reactions across the globe.
“He was savagely assassinated just because his killer did not like his ideas,” Vucic said of Kirk, suggesting that some of the reaction in the slaying’s aftermath caused yet more damage in terms of the division it sowed. “He was shot even after death by the same ones who had prepared political and media grounds for his assassination.”
Kirk was assassinated during a Sept. 10 event at Utah Valley University. US President Donald Trump and other administration leaders gathered Sunday at a memorial service, where other speakers noted the worldwide reaction to Kirk’s death, mentioning areas around the world where memorials had sprung up.
Paraguayan President Santiago Peña also mentioned Kirk in his speech Wednesday, saying in Spanish that he was “shaken, saddened, and distressed” by Kirk’s killing and arguing that the “macabre response must awaken us from our sleepy state of complacency.”
Earlier in the day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned Kirk, as well as last month’s stabbing death of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail system, as representative of “headlines about violent attacks happening all around the world.”
“Sadly, his life was short by a bullet,” Zelensky said of Kirk. “Once again, violence with a rifle in hand.”

NEW YORK: US envoy Steve Witkoff said Wednesday he expected a breakthrough related to Gaza in the coming days, saying President Donald Trump had presented a plan to regional countries.
Witkoff, a real estate friend of Trump who has become his roving ambassador, said the US president shared ideas when meeting with a group of Arab and Islamic countries Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
“We presented what we call the Trump 21-point plan for peace in the Mideast and Gaza,” Witkoff said.
“I think it addresses Israeli concerns as well as the concerns of all the neighbors in the region,” he told the Concordia summit on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
“We’re hopeful, and I might say even confident, that in the coming days we’ll be able to announce some sort of breakthrough.”
French President Emmanuel Macron, who also met with Trump on Tuesday, said he expected the plan, which Witkoff did not detail, to include elements he presented to the US president.
Macron has promoted a plan that would include the dismantling of Hamas and an international force to stabilize war-ravaged Gaza.
“The United States is now going to absorb that, so to speak,” Macron said in an interview jointly with France 24 and Radio France Internationale.
“I think that if we can align everyone — the United States, the Arabs, the Europeans — around this peace plan, we can have a result,” Macron said.
Macron also on Monday led a summit that recognized a Palestinian state, an initiative strongly opposed by Trump and Israel.
But Macron said that Trump shared opposition to Israeli annexation of the West Bank, a threat made by right-wing Israeli ministers to scuttle the prospects for a Palestinian state.
“What President Trump told me yesterday was that the Europeans and Americans have the same position,” Macron said.
Witkoff and Trump have repeatedly voiced hope for ending the devastating nearly two-year war.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio was more somber on a trip last week to Israel, which has launched a massive new offensive to seize Gaza City.