Over the weekend, President Obama participated in an interview with Vox.com, the website for those he termed “the brainiac-nerd types.” Sadly, those brainiac-nerds couldn’t come up with the intestinal fortitude to press Obama on this bizarre and disturbing comment about the murder of four Jews in Paris by radical Muslims immediately following the Charlie Hebdo massacre:
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.
Randomly shoot “a bunch of folks” in a deli in Paris? No mention of anti-Semitism from the president here. By this measure, Nazis randomly broke the windows of a bunch of folks in delis in Germany right around 1938.
But that’s the point: Were Obama to face up to the real problem of anti-Semitism globally, he would have to stop isolating Israel, given that global isolation of Israel is a manifestation of the same anti-Semitism that ended with the murders of Jews in a Paris deli. Were Obama to lump together the Jews and the victims of Charlie Hebdo, he could no longer plausibly claim that Israeli settlement policy spurs Islamic murder — as it turns out, the victims of Charlie Hebdo and those in the kosher supermarket had nothing to do with Israeli settlements. They have to do, instead, with radical Islam.
Instead, Obama prefers to see the murders as random, unforeseeable events.
Obama’s casual dismissal of anti-Semitic murder isn’t out of character. Obama often dismisses Islamic evil with a wave of the hand, a bothersome but random circumstance. Less than two weeks after the murder of four Americans, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, in Benghazi, Libya, Obama described the terrorist attacks leading to their deaths as “bumps in the road”:
I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road because — you know, in a lot of these places — the one organizing principle — has been Islam. The one part of society that hasn’t been controlled completely by the government. There are strains of extremism, and anti-Americanism, and anti-Western sentiment. And you know can be tapped into by demagogues. There will probably be some times where we bump up against some of these countries and have strong disagreements, but I do think that over the long term, we are more likely to get a Middle East and North Africa that is more peaceful, more prosperous and more aligned with our interests.
A month after that, Obama said that the attacks were “not optimal.” His administration had also claimed that the attacks weren’t attacks at all, but merely random violence inspired by a YouTube video.
Fort Hood: a random act of workplace violence. The Oklahoma beheading of a woman by his Muslim coworker: random. A hatchet attack by a radical Muslim on two NYPD officers: a lone wolf. The Boston Marathon bombing: more lone wolves.
Random, all random.
Because if these attacks aren’t random — if they have something to do with the system of thought guiding them — Obama might have to reconsider his worldview. If radical Islam underlies the attacks on Jews in Israel as well as the attacks on Jews in Paris, Obama can’t throw the Jews off of Western civilization’s lifeboat. If the same ideology undergirds Charlie Hebdo and the honor killing of Noor Almaleki in Phoenix, the murder and beheading of Aasiya Hassan and the terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Obama might have to face up to reality.
He won’t. And so Americans will be told, again and again, that attacks on innocents by radical Muslims have no rhyme or reason.
Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the new book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). He is also Editor-in-Chief of TruthRevolt.org. Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.