A statement by US President Barack Obama describing the attack of a kosher supermarket in Paris on January 9 that killed four people has sparked outrage.
In an interview on foreign policy with journalist Matt Yglesias from the Vox magazine, Obama spoke of the attack by an Islamist terrorist as a “random” assault on “a bunch of folks in a deli”.
Responding a question on terrorism, Obama said precisely: ‘’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.’’
The deli in question was the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris’s Porte de Vincennes which was attacked by French-born Muslim radical Amedy Coulibaly, who killed four Jewish shoppers and held 15 individuals hostage for several hours before being killed by a police force that stormed the building.
Coulibaly told French media at the time that he had targeted shoppers at a kosher market “because they were Jewish.”
On Tuesday, reporters at the daily White House briefing raised questions about Obama’s decision not to label the shooting as ‘’random’’ and not as an anti-Semitic incident.
“This was not a random shooting of a ‘‘bunch of folks,’’ Jon Karl from ABC news said. “Does the president have any doubt that those terrorists attacked that deli because there would be Jews in that deli?”
“It is clear” what the motivation of the terrorists were, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.
“The adverb that the president chose was used to indicate that the individuals who were killed in that terrible, tragic incident were killed, not because of who they were, but because of where they randomly happened to be,” he said.
Karl asked again whether religion played into the location of the shooting.
“This individuals were not targeted by name. This is the point,” Earnest replied, adding, “there were people other than Jews who were in that deli.”
I answered the question once. No,” Earnest replied when asked by Karl whether the president believed had any doubt that the deli was attacked because it was a kosher establishment.
In a subsequent State Department press briefing, spokeswoman Jen Psaki, asked about the exchange between Earnest and Karl, said that the victims did not come from one background or nationality.
Asked if the deli attack targeted the Jewish community, Psaki said: “I don’t think we’re going to speak on behalf of French authorities and what they believe was the situation at play here.”
Both the White House and French President Francois Hollande condemned the attacks as anti-Semitic at the time.
Calling the attack a “violent assault on the Jewish community,” White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said on January 13 that it “was the latest in a series of troubling incidents in Europe and around the world that reflect a rising tide of anti-Semitism.”
Clarifying her remarks, Psaki later tweeted Tuesday, “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.?”
But Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles was quoted as saying: ‘’President Obama absolutely misspoke – if he wants to check the facts, he should talk to his special envoy on anti-Semitism at the State Department.’’
“We’re talking about an explosion of anti-Semitism in Europe and a convergence of anti-Semitic hate with terrorism. As we know, many Jews left France last year, well before the January attacks. France’s leaders have their eyes wide open to the nature of this problem and the seriousness of the situation. There’s nothing ‘random’ about the threats against Jewish targets, which is why the government has put 10,000 troops on the ground to protect the Jewish community,’’ he said.
According to recently released figures, half of all racist attacks in France take Jews as their target, even though they number less than 1% of the population.
There are between 500,000 and 600,000 Jews in France, the world's third-largest Jewish community after the US and Israel.