Is the President Unwilling to Acknowledge Anti-Semitism?

In an extended interview, President Obama mentioned “a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris,” apparently referring to the murder of four Jews in a kosher grocery store. When asked if the president really meant to imply that the victims were not chosen because they were Jews, both the White House press secretary and the State Department spokeswoman insisted there was something “random” about the attack and refused to state outright that it was motivated by anti-Semitism. Subsequently, both the State Department and the White House issued a revised statement: the murders were indeed acts of anti-Semitism. John Podhoretz tries to make sense of this bizarre equivocation over the obvious: