Obama believes US can avoid a war with Islam

Washington

PUNDITS in Washington are still trying to deconstruct US President Barack Obama's somewhat low-key response to the recent terrorist acts in Europe and his continuing resistance to label the attacks in Paris and in Copenhagen (where a Danish film director and a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue were shot dead recently) or for that matter, the recent beheading of a dozen Egyptian-Christians in Libya, as elements in a global campaign that is driven by individuals and groups that are committed to the cause of Islam. All of this has nothing to do with Islam, the US President contends.

President Obama's decision not to go to France alongside other world leaders during their unity rally after the horrendous terrorist attacks there - and not to even send someone with a higher profile than the American ambassador to the event - also raised quite a few highbrows in Washington and in Europe. So did his labelling of the Jewish individuals who were brutally killed by the terrorists in Paris as "a bunch of folks" who were randomly shot by "zealots", as though the terrorists were not Muslims who had targeted a group of Jews.