A lot has been said about President Obama’s effort to downplay the threat posed by radical Islam. Now, he wants to deny the reality of anti-Semitism, too.
Speaking about terrorism in an interview with Vox’s Matt Yglesias published on Monday, Obama said, “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”
When I first read this statement, though I found it a jaw-dropping way to describe a terrorist attack on a Kosher supermarket, I didn’t post on it. It was easy enough to chalk up the statement to Obama speaking loosely and imprecisely over the course of a long interview.
But on Tuesday, it’s become clear that it wasn’t an accident by Obama — the administration is explicitly trying to avoid acknowledging what everybody knows to be true — that Jews were targeted.
First up was White House spokesman Josh Earnest, who when asked about Obama’s comment, said, “the adverb that the president chose was used to indicate that the individuals who were killed in that terrible tragic incident were killed not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be.”
He said, “These individuals were not targeted by name, is the point” and declined several times to acknowledge that it was clearly an anti-Semitic attack.
Next up was State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who was asked directly whether the incident was an attack on the Jewish community in Paris, she replied, “I don’t think we’re going to speak on behalf of French authorities.”
What’s particularly bizarre is that just a few weeks ago, the White House released a statement from Obama on Holocaust Remembrance Day, which included the following line: “The recent terrorist attacks in Paris serve as a painful reminder of our obligation to condemn and combat rising anti-Semitism in all its forms, including the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust.”
Talking about the Holocaust is safe. Talking about the rise of anti-Semitism in the modern world, however, would also involve talking honestly about the threat posed by radical Islam — which is completely forbidden. So, in trying to avoid offending terrorists, Obama has dismissed victims of anti-Semitic terrorism as “a bunch of folks” who were randomly shot.
UPDATE: And now Psaki has tweeted, “We have always been clear that the attack on the kosher grocery store was an anti-semitic attack that took the lives of innocent people.” Always? Not quite.
