Do Jewish Lives Matter?

When it comes to Islamist terrorism, President Obama has adopted a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil strategy.

If you don’t call it Islamist terrorism, our president seems to believe, then it’s not Islamist terrorism.

Obama has the same approach to anti-Semitism. By refusing to call it by its name he is saying that if he does not acknowledge its existence it does not exist.

Every sentient human being knows that the terrorist attack on the kosher supermarket in Paris last month was an Islamist act of anti-Semitism, but our president refuses to call it anti-Semitism.

While the government of French president Francois Hollande has recognized the problem and has provided greater security for all Jewish sites in France, Barack Obama remains true to his mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

When the Paris attack first happened, Jonathan Tobin reminds us, Obama stood alone in refusing to call it an act of anti-Semitism.

Yesterday, in an interview with Vox, Obama offered some additional commentary:

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.

No one with a functioning mind could possibly believe that the attack on the kosher market was a random act of terror committed against a “bunch of folks.”

Using a glib, down-home phrase like “bunch of folks” diminishes the victims.

You have to wonder whether, for this president, Jewish lives matter.

If someone black had been targeted because of his race Obama would have denounced an act of racist hatred, without hesitation.

One notes that our supercilious president did concede that the concerns of the American people are legitimate. He is not saying that these concerns are legitimate, because for someone of his superior intellectual acumen they are not quite as threatening.

Tobin explains:

But it is also significant that once again the president chooses to treat a deliberate targeting of a Jewish business filled with Jewish customers as something that is random rather than an overt act of anti-Semitism. Doing so once might be excused as an oversight. The second time makes it a pattern that can’t be ignored.

This is a peculiar talking point especially since the increase of anti-Semitism in Europe with violent incidents going up every year is something that even the Obama State Department has dubbed a “rising tide” of hate.