Rather, the most offensive thing about Obama’s “extremism” summit was that the “dog and pony show” (as it was called by no less a liberal than MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell) was meant to be a substantive response to the horrific terror attacks last month in Paris at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and at a kosher supermarket before the Jewish Sabbath. Instead it was just more of the same limp prevarication from Obama, as if the surge of terror had never happened.

It is instructive to remember that Obama’s response to Sep. 11, 2001 was to cast the attacks as “a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others,” an absence that “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.” Not a mass murder motivated by a specific religious ideology. Not an act of war requiring more than “dismantling” the groups who did it.