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It would be easy — and comforting — to dismiss as a slip of the tongue President Obama’s statement this week that the kosher supermarket murders in Paris last month were committed by “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris”. He did, after all, unambiguously refer to them as antisemitic in the immediate aftermath. But the further, apparently co-ordinated, statements from his press secretary and the State Department on Tuesday make that difficult.
Josh Earnest “clarified” the president’s comment by informing us that the victims “were killed not because of who they were but because of where they randomly happened to be.” The killer, in other words, had no idea there would be Jews in a kosher shop (even if he did say at the time, “I targeted them because they were Jewish”).
The state department’s spokeswoman even, bizarrely, denied that all the victims were Jewish.
But the uncomfortable truth seems to be that this is all of a piece with the Obama administration’s catastrophic Middle East policy and its repeated assertions that Isis’s actions have nothing to do with radical Islam. If religion is not a factor behind Isis’s Middle East terror, then it cannot — in the Obama view — be a factor in European terror. Which must mean that Jews were not targeted for being Jews. The contortions that are necessary to hold this view are mind-boggling. Disturbingly, they are the contortions of the President of the United States.
