President Barack Obama has called the terror attack on Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris last month an act of random violence, rather than a terror attack or an antisemitic attack.

Obama’s remark appears in an interview with Matt Yglesias of Vox.com. The president calls the attackers “violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.” He elides past the religion of the attackers or the victims in an attack that claimed four innocent lives.

Obama was responding to a sympathetic question by Yglesias about whether “the media sometimes overstates the level of alarm people should have about terrorism and this kind of chaos, as opposed to a longer-term problem of climate change and epidemic disease.” While stating that Americans were right to be concerned, Obama agreed that the media had overstated the problem of terror because of a general tendency towards sensational reporting: “If it bleeds, it leads, right?”

The White House came under unusually intense criticism when President Obama declined to attend a major anti-terror rally in Paris that followed the attack on the kosher supermarket and an earlier attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical newspaper. Obama’s remarks parallel those of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who infamously suggested the Benghazi terror attack may have happened when “guys outside for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans.”

The video of Obama’s remarks is here:

Yglesias did not appear to challenge the president’s remark, which was noted by Justin Green of the Washington Examiner and others on Twitter.

Senior Editor-at-Large Joel B. Pollak edits Breitbart California and is the author of the new ebook, Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party, available for Amazon Kindle.

Follow Joel on Twitter: @joelpollak