From Ian:
Obama Calls Terror Attack on Paris Jews ‘Random’ Shooting
Why Obama Thinks All Muslim Terror Attacks Are 'Random'
Obama Calls Terror Attack on Paris Jews ‘Random’ Shooting
President Barack Obama has called the terror attack on Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris last month an act of random violence, rather than a terror attack or an antisemitic attack.‘If It Bleeds, It Leads’: Obama Says Media ‘Overstates’ Terror Threat
Obama’s remark appears in an interview with Matt Yglesias of Vox.com. The president calls the attackers “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” He elides past the religion of the attackers or the victims in an attack that claimed four innocent lives.
Obama was responding to a sympathetic question by Yglesias about whether “the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease.” While stating that Americans were right to be concerned, Obama agreed that the media had overstated the problem of terror because of a general tendency towards sensational reporting: “If it bleeds, it leads, right?”
The White House came under unusually intense criticism when President Obama declined to attend a major anti-terror rally in Paris that followed the attack on the kosher supermarket and an earlier attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper. Obama’s remarks parallel those of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who infamously suggested the Benghazi terror attack may have happened when “guys outside for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans.”
Why Obama Thinks All Muslim Terror Attacks Are 'Random'
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.‘There’s Nothing Random About the Threats Against Jewish Targets:’ US Jewish Leader Chides Obama Over Paris Terror Comments
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”:
Cooper, who is currently in Paris for talks with French Jewish leaders and government officials, added: “We’re talking about an explosion of antisemitism on this continent, and a convergence of antisemitic hate with terrorism. As we know, many Jews left France last year, well before the January attacks. Here in France, people in authority, especially the leaders of the country, have their eyes wide open to the nature of this problem and the seriousness of the situation. There’s nothing ‘random’ about the threats against Jewish targets, which is why the government has put 10,000 troops on the ground to protect the Jewish community.”
One tweet reacting to Obama’s interview declared, “POTUS in interview calls terrorist shootings at Paris Jewish deli random. Mr. President, antisemitism isn’t random,” a sentiment that was widely shared in similar comments.
Obama also insinuated that the threats to security and freedom emanating from the Middle East had been exaggerated over the past decade. “You know, the strategy that was crafted in Washington didn’t always match up with the actual threats that were out there,” he claimed, in yet another swipe at the previous George W. Bush Administration.

















