In an extended interview, President Obama mentioned “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” apparently referring to the murder of four Jews in a kosher grocery store. When asked if the president really meant to imply that the victims were not chosen because they were Jews, both the White House press secretary and the State Department spokeswoman insisted there was something “random” about the attack and refused to state outright that it was motivated by anti-Semitism. Subsequently, both the State Department and the White House issued a revised statement: the murders were indeed acts of anti-Semitism. John Podhoretz tries to make sense of this bizarre equivocation over the obvious:

[Here] is the exculpatory argument: Obama stepped in it on Monday. He said something stupid and ill-advised. (After all, he had previously said the attack was an act of anti-Semitism.) And rather than walk it back, the administration’s blatherskites on Tuesday foolishly chose to step in it even more deeply by twisting themselves into pretzels on the “randomness” issue. This is what [Josh] Earnest and the White House want us to believe. . . .

But what if [the eventual retreat was] disingenuous and false?

What if the administration is now so committed to its bizarre assertion that the acts of terror in Paris and the horrifying butcheries of Islamic State have not been perpetrated in the name of Islam that it chose to dance around the anti-Semitic agency of Islamist Jew-killers—until it was caught out, that is? If this is so, the moral cretin is the man now resident in the Oval Office.

Robert Satloff has some harsh words for the U.S. government in this regard, words I take especially seriously because Satloff is someone inclined to political moderation. Why, he asks, have American diplomats failed to achieve anything in their endless rounds of talks in Doha and Cairo? Because

there is simply not enough pressure on Hamas to change course, accept a deal, and release the remaining October 7 hostages, stuck in nightmarish captivity. . . . In this environment, why should Hamas change course?

Publicly, the U.S. should bite the bullet and urge Israel to complete the main battle operations in Gaza—i.e., the Rafah operation—as swiftly and efficiently as possible. We should be assertively assisting with the humanitarian side of this.

Satloff had more to say about the hostages, especially the five American ones, in a speech he gave recently:

I am ashamed—ashamed of how we have allowed the story of the hostages to get lost in the noise of the war that followed their capture; ashamed of how we have permitted their release to be a bargaining chip in some larger political negotiation; ashamed of how we have failed to give them the respect and dignity and our wholehearted demand for Red Cross access and care and medicine that is our normal, usual demand for hostages.

If they were taken by Boko Haram, everyone would know their name. If they were taken by the Taliban, everyone would tie a yellow ribbon around a tree for them. If they were taken by Islamic State, kids would learn about them in school.

It is repugnant to see their freedom as just one item on the bargaining table with Hamas, as though they were chattel. These are Americans—and they deserve to be backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.