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.
Read more on New York Post: http://nypost.com/2015/02/11/anti-semitic-horrors-dont-exist-in-obamas-world/