John Podhoretz

John Podhoretz

Opinion

Anti-Semitic horrors don’t exist in Obama’s world

At Tuesday’s press briefing, White House mouthpiece Josh Earnest said something disgusting — I don’t know how else to describe it — about the massacre at the Hyper Casher kosher supermarket in Paris one month ago.

“The individuals who were killed in that terrible, tragic incident,” Earnest droned, “were killed not because of who they were but because of where they randomly happened to be.”

Take it from someone who keeps kosher: Nobody “randomly” happens to be in a kosher supermarket, not even in Manhattan.

But you didn’t need to take it from someone who keeps kosher, did you? You already know that the clientele of a kosher supermarket is almost entirely made up of Jews. You know this because you’re not an idiot.

Yes, if you want to find Jews, a kosher supermarket is the place to be on a Friday morning, as people are preparing for the Sabbath.

Since Earnest is the press secretary of the most important person in the world, I assume he isn’t an illiterate dope. Which means he knows this too.

So what he did was speak a vile lie, and a deeply dishonorable one.

It’s dishonorable because his remarks suggest these murders were meaningless acts of nihilism, when they in fact were terrifyingly meaningful acts of anti-Semitic murder on European soil 70 years after the Holocaust — acts that are causing many if not most of the 600,000 Jews in France to think seriously about emigrating.

Alas, it appears that Earnest’s vile lie can’t be excused away as an expression of his own moral cretinousness.

For only a few minutes later, about half a mile away from him in Washington, Earnest’s fellow administration mouthpiece Jen Psaki took to the podium at the State Department’s press briefing and with similar moral cretinousness dismissed the purpose and goal of the Jew-killers at Hyper Casher.

“I believe if I remember the victims specifically,” said Psaki, “they were not all victims of one background or one nationality.”

Asked point-blank by AP’s Matt Lee whether the Obama administration believes “this was an anti-Jewish or an attack on a Jewish community in Paris,” Psaki responded, “I don’t think we’re going to speak on behalf of French authorities.”

After a firestorm of criticism on Twitter, Earnest and Psaki both tried to pretend they hadn’t said what they said. “Terror attack at Paris Kosher market was motivated by anti-Semitism,” tweeted Earnest.

For her part, Psaki said, “We have always been clear that the attack on the kosher grocery store was an anti-Semitic attack that took the lives of innocent people.”

Well, no, you weren’t always clear, now, were you?

What madness was this? What madness is this?

The most comforting explanation is that the administration chose to circle the wagons around President Obama after his flabbergasting remarks on Monday — when he spoke of “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

As we’ve established, it wasn’t “a bunch of folks” but four Jews who were shot — and not, by the way, eating corned beef on rye at Katz’s while Sally faked an orgasm but as they shopped for ingredients for their Sabbath meals.

Which means it wasn’t done “randomly” but purposefully and in a directed fashion. It didn’t matter who they were individually, true. What mattered was this: JEW. JEW. JEW. JEW.

That isn’t random, bub.

So this 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 Earnest and the White House want us to believe. In a late-afternoon tweet, Earnest said, “Our view has not changed . . . POTUS didn’t intend to suggest otherwise.”

But what if this is 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 ISIS 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.