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President Obama has raised some eyebrows by suggesting that the shooting at a Kosher supermarket in Paris last month was “random.” It was a comment the president made in making the case that the media overstates the terrorist threat and that his job fighting terrorism is akin to a big-city mayor fighting crime. Asked about the president's suggestion that the market was not targeted by the group because it was Kosher, White House spokesman Josh Earnest doubled down on Obama's characterization that the selection of target was "random." Here's my exchange with Earnest at today's White House press briefing:

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. 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...

  Daniel Drezner @dandrezner Follow Dear Obama: on this, stop saying "folks." Or "random." Yours, Dan. RT @JGreenDC: This is odd http://www.vox.com/a/barack-obama-interview-vox-conversation/obama-foreign-policy-transcript … So what would he rather the world be talking about instead? What would Obama prefer the media talk about instead of Islamic terrorism?  The more legitimate threat – climate change. “The news media ‘absolutely’ overstates the risks of terrorism because stories about things like climate change aren’t ‘sexy’ and don’t drive ratings.” Two more years.... 

Susan Rice pushed back on critics of President Obama's foreign policy Friday as she unveiled the White House’s new national security strategy. Rice, the White House's national security adviser, said in a speech at the Brookings Institution that the nation is “stronger than we have been in a very long time” despite the bitter debates raging in Washington. “Too often, what's missing here in Washington is a sense of perspective. Yes, there is a lot going on. Still, while the dangers we face may be more numerous and varied, they are not of the existential nature we confronted during World...

Harith bin Ghazi al Nadhari, a senior AQAP sharia official, was killed in a US drone strike on Jan. 31. A US drone strike in southern Yemen on Jan. 31 killed Harith bin Ghazi al Nadhari, a senior al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) sharia official. Nadhari's death was confirmed in a "martyrdom" statement issued by the group via Twitter and other web sites earlier today. Nadhari praised the attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices just days after the massacre on Jan. 9. He did not claim responsibility for the operation, but another senior AQAP official subsequently did. The...

PARIS -- An attacker with a knife hidden in his bag attacked three soldiers on an anti-terror patrol in front of a Jewish community center in southern France on Tuesday, two police officials said. Sarah Baron, a police union official in the city of Nice, said the attacker was detained after the attack near the Galeries Lafayette department store. Nice Mayor Christian Estrosi said the attacker had an identity card with the name Moussa Coulibaly. The surname, which is relatively common for families of Malian descent, is the same as that of the man who seized hostages in a kosher...

Close to 300 Muslim students armed with iron bars and sticks attacked a Christian boys' school in northern Pakistan, reportedly in retaliation to French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo's controversial drawings of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. The attack left four Christians injured. "It is very sad that Islamic radicals attack Pakistani Christians because of Charlie Hebdo. Christians condemn the blasphemous cartoons. It is a shame that even after 67 years since the birth of Pakistan, Christians have not yet been considered Pakistani citizens, but are seen as 'Western allies,'" Nasir Saeed, director of the NGO Center for Legal Aid Assistance &...

A new poll commissioned by French magazine Marianne reveals that if presidential elections happened today, Le Pen would gather the most votes and France’s unpopular incumbent President Hollande would be knocked out in the first round. It’s the first opinion poll on voting intentions this year, and the solid advantage enjoyed by Le Pen and her traditional-conservative Front National (FN) party appears to have been confirmed in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings in Paris earlier this month. Front National is the only mainstream French political movement that shows willing to tackle the problem of rising Islamism, and this...

A German carnival has dropped plans to build a "Charlie Hebdo" float with a cartoonist forcing a pencil into the barrel of a terrorist's gun, after receiving messages from locals worried about safety if the float went on show. * snip * The Charlie Hebdo-inspired float had been chosen through an Internet vote.

You say "Jeb Bush," Thomas Roberts says "the Kouachi brothers." It's got to be one of the strangest political Rorschach test results of all time. MSNBC's Roberts believes that Jeb Bush would have a "big onus" around his neck if he runs for president "because if we hear 'Bush' we're automatically going to go to people bringing up the Kouachi brothers and their photos of Abu Ghraib that radicalized them about Iraq." View the video here.

An artwork depicting high-heeled shoes on Islamic prayer mats has been removed from an exhibition after a Muslim group warned of possible violence in the wake of the Paris attacks. The French-Algerian artist, Zoulikha Bouabdellah, withdrew the work from an exhibition in a northern Paris suburb with a large Muslim population after an Islamic group told local authorities it could provoke “uncontrollable, irresponsible incidents”. It is considered disrespectful to step on Muslim prayer maps with shoes.

Victory! Something is changing. Some positive effects of the Charlie Hebdo atrocities are felt in Italy, with crackdown on the cult of Islam. First Massimo Bitonci, the mayor of the city of Padua, in the region of Venice (Veneto), Northern Italy, simply and clearly said: "No more mosques in Padua. The city council will not grant any more public space for the building of mosques and Islamic places of worship." Padua's councillor Marina Buffoni sent the city's police to Muslim meeting places, to confiscate posters and images of women in burka. She said: "These posters showed women completely covered...

It’s been formally acknowledged that U.S. NATO ‘ally’ Turkey is providing safe haven to leaders of Hamas, a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) so designated by the U.S. State Department. By its very definition, an FTO should be considered declared enemy of the U.S. Despite this, Turkey doesn’t appear to be paying any price. Another player in all this is the small nation of Qatar. It is desperately trying to play both sides of a political fence as leaders of Hamas – to include the terrorist organization’s political leader Khaled Meshaal – has been forcibly relocated to Turkey. The reason these...

Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.) was on “The Kelly File” tonight following his testimony about terrorism at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. […] “Radical Islam has increased four-fold in five years,” Keane told Megyn Kelly. […] “This administration has been paralyzed by the fear of adverse consequences in the Middle East driven by the realities of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Keane told Kelly. …

For a long time, I have believed that the gun culture of the United States is dangerous and frankly stupid. So many people are killed by firearms going off accidentally or because they fall into the hands of children or madmen. Their easy availability is not just because they are a transportable and smugglable commodity, but also because there is a myth in American culture that claims that only by possessing guns were the American rebels able to defeat the British and gain independence. Even if that were so, and it is not, what might have been true 300 years...

The recent terrorist attacks in Paris once again pose a question that seldom gets discussed. To whom are these attacks aimed? Is it Christians? Jews? Non-Muslims in general? Could it be Western democracies or Western society as a whole? As media pundits shed their crocodile tears and two-faced politicians dramatize their insincere outrage, every Islamic terrorist since 9-11 knows very well who their targets are. It is the Left. These terrorists may be monsters, but they’re not stupid. They know that their carnage and destruction must make an impression on those most likely to assist their cause: anti-war pacifists, progressives,...

Hollande, Merkel Speak Up for Europe’s Muslims Charlie Hebdo Attacks in Paris Have Fueled Debate Over Radical Islam By WILLIAM HOROBIN in Paris and ANDREA THOMAS in Berlin French and German leaders sought Thursday to reassure Muslims about their place in European society, cementing calls for unity after a series of attacks last week in France by Islamic extremists. Speaking at the Institute of the Arab World in Paris, President François Hollande said that Islam is compatible with democracy and Muslims are the main victims of Islamist militants. “Muslims are the first victims of fanaticism,...

The French authorities killed three murderous savages yesterday. That was the only good news on a day in which a third hostage siege began in Montpellier. The bad news started at the top, with President Hollande's statement after the Charlie Hebdo slaughter and the Kosher grocery siege: Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion. Yeah, right. I would use my standard line on these occasions - "Allahu Akbar" is Arabic for "Nothing to see here" - but it's not quite as funny when the streets are full of cowards, phonies and opportunists waving candles...

Official PA daily: Israel was behind the terror attacks in France because Israel "was the only one to benefit from them" Israeli Intelligence Service Mossad planned the attacks because Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu wanted - to encourage Jewish immigration from Europe - to take "revenge on European governments... because of their positions on the Palestinian cause" Poll: 84.4% of Palestinians think "Israel behind the murder of French [citizens]"   Nan Jacques Zilberdik    Following the terror attacks against the Charlie Hebdo magazine and a Jewish store in which Muslim terrorists killed 17 people in France earlier this month, columnists writing...