Investor's Business Daily makes an important point  about Barack Obama's failure to stand up and be counted on an issue of obvious concern:

The nation's first serious black candidate for president should be outraged that al-Qaida would try to exploit African-Americans for the terror cause. Oddly, he's not.

Osama bin Laden's deputy last week made a sinister pitch to blacks in the U.S., and Barack Obama shrugged.

The Democratic senator was out on the hustings at the time the videotaped screed was released. He could have worked in a denunciation around his well-publicized gaffe about "10,000" tornado victims, but he didn't. And in the process, he blew a golden chance to look tough on terrorism, and rally both blacks and whites around the flag.

Al-Qaida's Ayman al-Zawahri earlier this month courted blacks by frequently invoking Malcolm X, aka Al-Hajj Malik al-Shabazz, a past leader of the Nation of Islam.

On the hustings: Why the silence when al-Qaida's second-in-command urged African-Americans to join the holy war?