On January 7, two brothers linked to Al Qaeda in Yemen, reportedly reacting to cartoon depictions of the prophet Muhammad, carried out a terrorist attack on the Paris offices of the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people there.
Two days later one Amedy Coulibaly, who had declared allegiance to the Islamic State, killed several patrons in a Paris kosher supermarket and threatened to kill more if the Charlie Hebdo attackers, at the time engaged in a standoff with police, were harmed. Police eventually stormed the market and killed Coulibaly.
In an interview a month later, President Obama was asked by Vox’s Matthew Yglesias if he thought the media tended to overstate the threat of Islamic terrorism, compared with issues like climate change.
The president responded:
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…. We devote enormous resources to that, and it is right and appropriate for us to be vigilant and aggressive in trying to deal with that – the same way a big city mayor’s got to cut the crime rate down if he wants that city to thrive. But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we’ve got to make sure we’re right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn’t counterproductive.
Compare this relatively low key attitude toward Islamic terrorism and the killing of Jews (“randomly shoot a bunch of folks”) with Mr. Obama’s eulogy of the nine African-American South Carolinians murdered by a white supremacist during a Bible study session at a black church, which The New York Times called “one of his presidency’s most impassioned reflections on race.”
The president spoke before nearly 6,000 mourners and millions of television viewers around the world. He spoke in what the Times characterized as “revivalist cadences” and set the tragedy, as the Times put it, “in the context of America’s long history of violence against African-Americans.”
“Maybe,” said Mr. Obama, “now we realize the way racial bias can infect us even when we don’t realize it. So that we’re guarding against not just racial slurs, but we’re also guarding against the subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview, but not Jamal. So that we search our hearts when we consider laws to make it harder for some of our fellow citizens to vote.”
The president described the attack as “an act that drew on a long history of bombs and arson and shots fired at churches, not random, but as a means of control, a way to terrorize and oppress…”
What rankles is not that an American president would be more robust in eulogizing murdered Americans than non-Americans but that he could only find it in himself to deliver a significantly less than full-throated condemnation of Islamic terror and its outrages. Especially so when the president showed us yet again what he is capable of when it comes to movingly and eloquently condemning racism against African-Americans and its place in our history.