Muslims in USA are part of ‘one American family’

In his mosque address, he said, “And so if we’re serious about freedom of religion – and I’m speaking now to my fellow Christians who remain the majority in this country – we have to understand an attack on one faith is an attack on all our faiths.

“We have to reject a politics that seeks to manipulate prejudice or bias, and targets people because of religion.”

The speech could be considered to be an epilogue to his years 2009 address delivered at Cairo University, where the US President had called for “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” In Baltimore, the president did not talk about intractable international conflicts like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, but focused instead on sour domestic realities of vandalized mosques and bullied American Muslim children:

“These children are just like mine, and the notion that they would be filled with doubt and questioning their places in this great country of ours at a time when they’ve got enough to worry about – it’s hard being a teenager already – that’s not who we are.”

President George W. Bush had visited a mosque in Washington within six days of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to reassure American Muslims, President Obama, a practicing had retrained from Christian, brushed aside requests for a visit for years in part because 43 percent of Republicans and 29 percent of Americans think he is a Muslim, according to a CNN/ORC poll last September.

But in the final year of his presidency, Obama has decided on ignoring such biased attitudes and addressing issues like race, addiction and religion, often in very personal terms.

President Mr. Obama told the crowd at the mosque that controversy over a president’s religion is not new. “By the way, Thomas Jefferson’s opponents tried to stir things up by suggesting he was a Muslim – so I was not the first, and I’m in good company.”

President Obama’s call for “a sustained effort the West and the Islamic world to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground made little progress has been made since the speech in Cairo. In his speech in mosque visit, he suggested that his hopes for a reconciliation had been dashed, but he called on all Americans to stick by the country’s founding ideals.”

Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, one of the country’s oldest and largest pro-Israel organizations, denounced Mr. Obama for visiting a mosque whose leaders, Mr. Klein said, have among other issues criticized Israeli military actions.

White House and Islamic Society of Baltimore officials did not respond to Mr. Klein’s criticism. Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that “any mosque would have been attacked similarly.”

Concerns about Muslims and Syrian refugees in the United States grew after terrorist attacks in Paris in November and after a mass shooting by a husband-and-wife team in San Bernardino, Calif., in December last year. Since then, attacks on American Muslims and mosques have spiked, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations. President Obama warned that anyone who suggested that the United States was at war with Islam not only legitimized such groups as the Islamic State but also played into their hands: “That kind of mind-set helps our enemies, it helps our enemies recruit. It makes us all less safe. Our television shows should have some Muslim characters that are unrelated to national security,” he said. “It’s not that hard to do. There was a time when there were no black people on television.”

It was good of President Obama to draw attention to “some basic facts” on Islam and the United States that he said the news media had failed to communicate. He mentioned that Islam is a religion of peace. Some of the earliest Americans were Muslim. Jefferson and other founding fathers sought to guarantee the freedom of Muslims to worship. Muslims are everywhere in American society as doctors, teachers, soldiers and sports stars.