ROGER SIMON: #JEWISHLIVESMATTER:

Thought experiment: What if a white racist with a submachine gun broke into a convenience store in South Central Los Angeles, grabbed seven or eight African Americans who were shopping (maybe there was one Korean) as hostages for the release of some other white racists and then, when attacked, started spewing the N-word while shooting up the place, killing three or four of the African Americans and wounding three or four others, one or two critically.

How would President Obama react?

Do you think he would say there was something racial about the obscene incident? Damn right he would — and he should. In fact, he would do it forcefully and immediately. After all, when Trayvon Martin died in far more ambiguous circumstances, he was quick to jump in, identifying with the 17 year old who would resemble, Obama said, his own son if he had one.

Now consider what our president said about the events at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris on January 9 in a new interview with Vox.com: “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.”

“[V]icious zealots… randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli”? That’s the way the way the president of the United States describes a dedicated jihadist murdering four Jews in a kosher market in one of the oldest and largest Jewish neighborhoods in Paris, the day after other jihadists shot up the Charlie Hebdo offices, killing even more people? No Jews, no jihadist, just more “random” violence, as if Ahmedy Coulibaly, the man who murdered the four Jews and had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, just stumbled into a kosher deli by accident with a submachine gun while on the way to Cafe de Flore for a cognac.

Well, this is entirely consistent with Obama’s worldview. As Roger notes: “Barack Obama — despite a claque of Jewish advisers (Axelrod, Lew, Emanuel, etc. I wonder how they felt when they heard this latest round) — appears to have a very complicated, almost bizarre reaction to Jews. Maybe it’s a weird competition between oppressed groups — blacks and Jews — or more of his not-so-masked appreciation of (and defensiveness about) all things Islamic.”