Yesterday, 1.6 million people, including more than forty heads-of-state or their representatives, took part in a grand rally in Paris, France. They did this to show unity in the face of seventeen murders having a religious, and political, motive. Remarkably, Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, and Mahmoud Abbas, his counterpart in the “Palestinian Authority,” both attended. But who did not attend? Neither Barack Obama nor anyone else in his administration bothered to attend. List them all as missing in action.

Missing in action – and hearing about it

Barack Obama had no particular White House business. The White House never said what he was doing. (Some have speculated Obama took the day off to watch football games. CNAV can find no outlet to confirm this independently.)

Past Presidents have sometimes sent stand-ins for this kind of event. Why, then, did Obama not send Vice-President Biden? Attorney General Eric Holder was in Paris to meet with their Interior Minister. (The French National Police fall under that ministry.) Why, then, did he not stay to attend the rally? No one higher than an ambassador attended for the Americans.

Obama’s missing in action stance infuriated the New York Daily News. According to them,  the White House said security for Obama or Biden would have been “too distracting” from the event. Even the Daily News found that lame. After all, ranking officials from more than forty other countries, each with their own security teams, attended. Those teams no doubt coordinated with one another, the French National Police, the Gendarmes, and the Sureté National (their counterpart of the American FBI). The U.S. Secret Service could have done the same.

Jake Tapper from CNN expressed “disappointment” with the White House for turning up missing in action. He pointed out the sharp contrast with those who did attend:

It’s not a small thing for the King of Jordan, who … is a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, it’s not a small thing for him to be walking in the same line as the Prime Minister of Israel, protesting the terrorist acts committed against A) four Jews in a … kosher supermarket, and B) 12 people, most of whom were journalists for a publication that regularly mocks religions, including Islam. That is not a small thing.

Not to mention, of course, a French police officer, the seventeenth casualty.

Alan Dershowitz said Obama “blundered” by not showing up nor sending a high-enough-ranking stand-in. Guy Benson at Townhall.com pointed out this insight about ambassadors:

A largely unknown woman, who lives in Paris, and who earned her position by raising millions for Barack Obama’s political career, was there.  So there’s that. Obama administration brass also snubbed the rally in Washington, DC, organized by the French embassy.  The president spent the day at home, with nothing on his public schedule.

Presidents do tend to nominate political donors as ambassadors. (With some exceptions. Jimmy Carter nominated Kingman Brewster, the then President of Yale, as his Ambassador to Great Britain. Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas Pickering as Ambassador to Israel – and Mr. Pickering proved his worth when two Israeli boys made the antiquities find of the decade, a two-thousand-year-old wooden fishing boat, in Lake Kennerit. So America occasionally sends exceptionally good ambassadors – but not all the time.)

More to the point: after the September 11 incident, then-Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France flew to America to stand by then-President George W. Bush. Why, then, couldn’t Obama have done the same, or sent his Vice-President, or at least a Cabinet member? Why not his Attorney General, who already had meetings to attend in Paris?

Missing in action – maybe because…

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The White House obviously made lame excuses for American officials turning up missing in action. But this one cannot ignore. Had Obama invested any emotional energy in fighting international terrorism, he would have attended, even if he had to put off his State of the Union address. But he did not.

Obama has never once acknowledged the obvious: the Kouachi Brothers and their accomplice did what they did to serve the cause of Islam (or at least, the cause as they see it). Michael Haverluck at OneNewsNow.com puts it this way:

The Obama administration has taken America out of the war Islam has waged to gain world dominance — much like anti-war movement in the United States before World War II that wanted to leave Nazi Germany alone, insisting that Hitler was not a direct enemy of America.

Or like anti-war movements in the Sixties that wanted to leave North Viet Nam free to conquer the South (as they did), insisting that communism, far from being an enemy of American freedom, represented perfection, and an ideal.

Hasn’t Obama repeatedly waxed poetic about the sound of the muezzin calling Muslims to prayer? How, then, can you expect him to join battle with those who fight in that cause?

But suppose the Kouachi Brothers acted improperly, even by Muslim standards? (The Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments suggested precisely that.) Why, then, didn’t Obama go or send someone to Paris to say so? Instead he turns up missing in action.

Maybe because Obama sympathizes with the ideal the Kouachi Brothers said they served: a New Baghdad Caliphate.

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