The World Marches Sans Obama 

 

Obama is usually wherever two or more are gathered. This weekend was the exception. Forty world leaders marched at the head of a million Parisians against radical Islamic terror on Sunday. Our country conspicuously had no representative. Not Obama, not Kerry, not Biden. (Isn't this type of event the reason God made vice presidents?) 

 

Democratic strategist Douglas Schoen wrote, "I have been disappointed many times by President Obama during his six years in office, but perhaps never more so than this weekend." When Kerry was asked why America was a no-show, he accused critics of "quibbling." But the New York Daily News got it right on its front page: "You Let The World Down." 

 

Disgust in Europe and the U.S. was so pronounced that White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, in a rare mea culpa, acknowledged this afternoon that the administration had made a mistake. 

 

 

Was The March Serious? 

 

With or without Obama, what should we think about the outpouring of humanity in the City of Light? Commentators compared it to the demonstrations that erupted after Paris was liberated by allied troops during World War II. 

 

But those demonstrations marked the end of a great conflict. It is far more likely that France and the West are still at the beginning of a great clash, and that the worst is still ahead. 

 

The theme of the march was "We are not afraid." But clearly Europeans are afraid of the Islamists in their midst, and France's knees particularly have buckled in recent years. How else can one explain whole areas of Paris being surrendered as Muslim "no-go zones" where French laws no longer apply and French gendarmes cannot enter? 

 

Even now France's political mainstream, along with the rest of Europe and England, seem more worried about offending their ill-conceived multiculturalism experiment, which has imported countless anti-Semitic, anti-western radicals into the heart of the continent, than they are about anti-Semitism and violence. 

 

Jew hatred grows day-by-day in direct proportion to the increase in Muslim immigration from North Africa and the Middle East. Today approximately 4,700 soldiers and police officers have been deployed to protect 700 Jewish schools and synagogues. Meanwhile, the four Jews murdered at the Paris kosher market are being buried in Israel. 

 

I'm sure the march was a comfort, at a time of great trauma, to those who participated in it. But the event risks becoming only another exercise in empty sentiment, much like the ubiquitous "Bring Back Our Girls" campaign that swept the world after the African Islamist group Boko Haram kidnapped several hundred Nigerian girls. 

 

Much to the shock of our elites, even Michelle Obama's selfie and "trending on twitter" did not bring the girls back to their parents. By the way, it appears that while the world's eyes were watching the carnage in the streets of Paris, Boko Haram may have massacred thousands of Nigerians in its on-going effort to establish a new caliphate.

 

Mere sentiment is powerless to defend us without the will to identify the enemy, name the enemy and crush the enemy. 

 

 

The Hypocrisy Award Goes To. . . 

 

Much was made of the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas at the Paris march. Commentators suggested it was a hopeful sign of possible reconciliation. No, it was not. 

 

Netanyahu had every right to march. He has been warning Europe and America for years that militant Islamism presents a threat to us all. His nation is literally surrounded by jihadists like those responsible for the Paris carnage. The tunnels built out of Gaza into Israel were intended to launch attacks that would have made the Paris shootings look insignificant. 

 

But Europe and France increasingly demand that Israel appease those throughout the Middle East who yearn for another Holocaust. The more Israel fights the enemy Europe is so reluctant to fight, the more European hatred of Israel grows. 

 

The real hypocrisy was the presence of Mahmoud Abbas at the march. He constantly incites terror against Israeli civilians. His Palestinian Authority names streets after the same kind of murderers that struck in Paris. 

 

Abbas' participation in the march against terror was obscene. And it was a sign that France's socialist government still can't or won't connect the dots. 

 

 

More Threats 

 

As the Western world wrestles with its response to last week's jihadist attacks in Paris, we know more attacks are coming. I noted Friday that the head of MI5, Britain's intelligence agency, warned that Al Qaeda was planning mass casualty attacks against Western targets. 

 

Yesterday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN, "I think there are sleeper cells not only in France but certainly in other countries and, yes, in our own."

 

So it should come as no surprise that ISIS issued a new call for attacks on police and military personnel over the weekend. 

 

Here's an easy thing for the president to do: Obama, Eric Holder, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson should stop all police-bashing and should call for a moratorium on the demonstrations that continue to be marked by anti-police rhetoric. They are contributing to a hostile atmosphere at a time in which the police are increasingly targeted by Islamists and other radicals.