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Francois Hollande is making Obama look like a fool
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By Andrea Peyser
November 16, 2015

Francois Hollande is making Obama look like a fool

It’s beyond surreal that the president of France is making the American president look like a cheese-eating amateur.

The terror attacks in Paris Friday took scores of livesand thrust the entire civilized world into paroxysms of grief and despair. Then something unexpected happened.

French President Francois Hollande stepped up to the soccer goal. And he displayed the kind of leadership one normally does not associate with the randy politician presiding over the land of vintage Champagne and brie.

No sooner had ISIS claimed responsibility for the butchery than Hollande got in front of TV cameras and told the traumatized public that the savagery was an “act of war.’’ He vowed to pound ISIS into submission.

Compare that to the American president’s initial reaction. President Obama, who once ridiculed ISIS (or “ISIL,” as he calls it) by comparing it to a junior-varsity team, was loathe to point fingers. “I don’t want to speculate at this point in terms of who was responsible for this,” he said.

On Friday morning, just hours before Paris turned into ground zero, Obama declared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that ISIS (ISIL, whatever) was not gaining ground and that the US military “has contained” it. The statement should become his epitaph.

Speaking in Turkey Sunday, he said the United States stood “in solidarity” with France — against “Daesh,” a derogatory Arabic term for ISIS-ISIL.

Where was his anger?

Obama flat out refuses to call the murderers what they are: Islamic militants. And he’s not alone.

I watched, incredulously, as all three contenders in Saturday night’s Democratic debate — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley — refused to say the slaughter was the work of “Muslim” extremists.

Clinton blamed “jihadis.” But despite prodding, she would not speak of the Islamic elephant in the room.

Sanders stood by his earlier claim that climate change, not creatures in suicide vests, presents the biggest threat to this planet because it makes poor people into terrorists by interfering with their crops or something.

At that point, I switched to the Syfy channel to get a bigger dose of reality.

In New York City, Arab activist and Mayor de Blasio crony Linda Sarsour waged a Twitter war as the carnage unfolded. The head of the Arab American Association of New York, which exists partly due to taxpayer largesse, spat out a tweet that one Post reader told me made him “physically ill.’’

“Just because people focus on the horror of the moment, doesn’t mean we forget the oppression, terrorism, murder happening elsewhere,’’ she wrote — an apparent slap at Israel.

Now is a time for mourning and payback, not denial or hatred of the blameless. It’s time to call the enemy by name.

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